Dehumanized Perception
A Psychological Means to Facilitate Atrocities, Torture, and Genocide?
Abstract
Dehumanized perception, a failure to spontaneously consider the mind of another person, may be a psychological mechanism facilitating inhumane acts like torture. Social cognition – considering someone’s mind – recognizes the other as a human being subject to moral treatment. Social neuroscience has reliably shown that participants normally activate a social-cognition neural network to pictures and thoughts of other people; our previous work shows that parts of this network uniquely fail to engage for traditionally dehumanized targets (homeless persons or drug addicts; see Harris & Fiske, 2009, for review). This suggests participants may not consider these dehumanized groups’ minds. Study 1 demonstrates that participants do fail to spontaneously think about the contents of these targets’ minds when imagining a day in their life, and rate them differently on a number of human-perception dimensions. Study 2 shows that these human-perception dimension ratings correlate with activation in brain regions beyond the social-cognition network, including areas implicated in disgust, attention, and cognitive control. These results suggest that disengaging social cognition affects a number of other brain processes and hints at some of the complex psychological mechanisms potentially involved in atrocities against humanity.
References
1954). The nature of prejudice. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
(2006). Meeting of minds: The medial frontal cortex and social cognition. Nature Reviews, Neuroscience, 7, 268–277.
(1989). Delegitimization: The extreme case of stereotyping and prejudice. In , Stereotyping and prejudice: Changing conceptions. New York, NY: Springer.
(2001). Conflict monitoring and cognitive control. Psychological Review, 108, 624–652.
(2003). Disgust discussed. Annual Review of Neurology, 53, 427–428.
(2010). On the wrong side of the trolley track: Neural correlates of relative social valuation. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 5, 404–413.
(2009). How you feel-now: The anterior insula and human empathy awareness. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 10, 59–70.
(2007). Universal dimensions of social perception: Warmth and competence. Trends in Cognitive Science, 11, 77–83.
(2002). A model of (often mixed) stereotype content: Competence and warmth respectively follow from perceived status and competition. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 82, 878–902.
(2004). Policy Forum: Why ordinary people torture enemy prisoners. Science, 306, 1482–1483.
(2001). The biological basis of social interaction. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 10, 151–155.
(2008). Not yet human: Implicit knowledge, historical dehumanization, and contemporary consequences. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 94, 292–306.
(2007). Dimensions of mind perception. Science, 315, 619.
(2006). Dehumanizing the lowest of the low: Neuroimaging responses to extreme outgroups. Psychological Science, 17, 847–853.
(2007). Social groups that elicit disgust are differentially processed in mPFC. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 2, 45–51.
(2009). Social neuroscience evidence for dehumanised perception. European Review of Social Psychology, 20, 192–231.
(2007). Regions of MPFC differentially tuned to affective and social stimuli. Cognitive and Affective Behavioral Neuroscience, 7, 309–316.
(2006). Dehumanization: An integrative review. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 10, 252–264.
(2004). Cortical regions for judgments of emotions and personality traits from point-light walkers. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 16, 1143–1158.
(1944). An experimental study of apparent behavior. American Journal of Psychology, 57, 243–259.
(2008). Missing links in social cognition: The continuum from nonhuman agents to dehumanized humans. Social Cognition, 26, 125–128.
(2003). Emotional prejudice, essentialism, and nationalism. European Journal of Social Psychology, 33, 703–718.
(2001). Psychological essentialism and the differential attribution of uniquely human emotions to ingroups and outgroups. European Journal of Social Psychology, 31, 395–411.
(1990). Moral exclusion and injustice: An introduction. Journal of Social Issues, 46, 1–20.
(2009). Social cognition and the brain: A meta-analysis. Human Brain Mapping, 30, 829–858.
(1988). The cognitive functions of linguistic categories in describing persons: Social cognition and language. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 54, 558–568.
(2007). The neurobiology of punishment. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 8, 300–311.
(1989). The roots of evil: The origins of genocide and other group violence. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
(in press ). The thrill of being violent as an antidote to posttraumatic stress disorder in Rwandese genocide perpetrators. European Journal of Psychotraumatology.2011). When combat prevents PTSD symptoms – results from a survey with former child soldiers in Northern Uganda. Manuscript submitted for publication.
(