Recent ethnographic and historical analyses, and classical works on the evolution of cooperation and the sociology of crime, indicate that descriptively, many perpetrators feel their violence is righteous and that their victims deserve what is coming to them. The basic premise on which the dehumanization hypothesis depends-that violence is restrained by moral inhibitions against harming fellow human beings-is in flux.
MAKE VISUALS GREAT AGAIN 2.65 UNINSTALL FREE
In this framework, dehumanization causes perpetrators to perceive victims as nonhuman and, therefore, not entitled to moral obligation or sympathy, thus enabling perpetrators to act out their violent impulses free of inhibition and without remorse ( 11– 15). Although these theories differ in focus, collectively they assume that violence is restrained in part by a sense of moral obligation and sympathy toward fellow human beings, whom we feel are entitled to rights and protections that prohibit violence against them. The dehumanization hypothesis developed amid theories arguing that violence is motivated primarily by instrumental gain or impulsive reactions, and that a greater appreciation of our shared humanity would lead to more peaceful relations ( 8– 10). Known as dehumanization, this process is thought to have allowed colonists to exterminate indigenous peoples as if they were insects and whites to own blacks as if they were property ( 5– 7). The failure to recognize other people as fellow human beings is considered to be a fundamental enabler of violence across cultures and throughout history ( 1– 4). In contrast, dehumanization does not contribute to moral violence because morally motivated perpetrators wish to harm complete human beings who are capable of deserving blame, experiencing suffering, and understanding its meaning. Our findings indicate that dehumanization enables violence that perpetrators see as unethical, but instrumentally beneficial. Finally, participants humanized strangers who were low in humanity if they imagined harming them for immoral behavior, but not money, suggesting that morally motivated perpetrators may humanize victims to justify violence against them. Participants also spontaneously dehumanized strangers when they imagined harming them for money, but not when they imagined harming them for their immoral behavior. In vignette experiments, using dehumanizing compared with humanizing language increased participants’ willingness to harm strangers for money, but not participants’ willingness to harm strangers for their immoral behavior. In attitude surveys, ascribing reduced capacities for cognitive, experiential, and emotional states to victims predicted support for practices where victims are harmed to achieve instrumental goals, including sweatshop labor, animal experimentation, and drone strikes that result in civilian casualties, but not practices where harm is perceived as morally righteous, including capital punishment, killing in war, and drone strikes that kill terrorists.
Across five experiments, we show that dehumanization-the act of perceiving victims as not completely human-increases instrumental, but not moral, violence.