Although the act of dehumanizing an outgroup is a pervasive and potent intergroup process that drives discrimination and conflict, no formal research has examined the consequences of being dehumanized by an outgroup-that is, "metadehumanization." Across 10 studies (N = 3,440) involving several real-world conflicts spanning 3 continents, we provide the first empirical evidence that metadehumaniz...

When innocents are intentionally harmed, people are motivated to see that offenders get their "just deserts". The severity of the punishment they seek is driven by the perceived magnitude of the harm and moral outrage. The present research extended this model of retributive justice by incorporating the role of offender dehumanization. In three experiments relying on survey methodology in Austra...

Although many theoretical approaches have emerged to explain prejudices expressed by children, none incorporate outgroup dehumanization, a key predictor of prejudice among adults. According to the Interspecies Model of Prejudice, beliefs in the human-animal divide facilitate outgroup prejudice through fostering animalistic dehumanization (Costello & Hodson, 2010). In the present investigation, ...

Dehumanizing attitudes and behaviors frequently occur in organizational settings and are often viewed as an acceptable, and even necessary, strategy for pursuing personal and organizational goals. Here I examine a number of commonly held beliefs about dehumanization and argue that there is relatively little support for them in light of the evidence emerging from social psychological and neurosc...

We review and integrate existing literature on perceptions of humanness and dehumanization. Synthesizing three independent lines of research (Haslam’s two senses of humanness, mind perception theory, the stereotype content model), we provide a taxonomy of different phenomena (e.g., animalistic and mechanistic dehumanization, objectification, demonization, etc.) that all fall under the broad cat...

In ‘A Hypothetical Neurological Association between Dehumanization and Human RightsAbuse’,1 GailMurrowandRichardMurrowposit a biological explanationof how hate speech can spur violence, not only among individuals but, even, on a societal scale. They elaborate historical examples, cite to neuronal studies on patterns of responses in observation of pain and suffering to explain the dehumanization...

Power gives people the ability to control themselves and their environment, and this control is considered a fundamental human need. We investigated whether experiencing powerlessness induces the experience of self-dehumanization using three methods: priming, role-playing, and cueing. People in a position of low power viewed themselves (Experiments 1-3) as less human relative to people in a pos...

Interpersonally controlling approaches are often used to keep individuals in line, ostensibly in order to create a safer, more civilized society. Ironically, emerging research findings indicate that when people feel controlled, they often respond by behaving in a less civilized, more antisocial manner (Gagné, 2003; Knee, Neighbors, & Vietor, 2001; Mask, Blanchard, Amiot, & Deshaies, 2005; McHos...

Meta-dehumanization contributes to a vicious cycle of hostility. This study extends the literature by investigating antecedents and outcomes meta-dehumanization in context Muslim–non-Muslim relations. Specifically, control over terrorism (COT) threat were tested as predictors among non-Muslim British nationals (N = 313). The results revealed that lower perceptions COT predicted increased threat...