Built to Humanize, Trained to Look Away

"Dehumanization can be the everyday failure to imagine what another person is thinking or feeling, rooted in the same shortcuts that help us navigate a complex world (Haslam, 2006). Once a person has been reduced to a single label, the rest of who they are can disappear from view."

"Functional neuroimaging shows that when people view photographs of non-stigmatized social groups, the medial prefrontal cortex (a hub for thinking about others' minds) reliably activates. But when participants viewed photographs of individuals from highly stigmatized groups, that activation was reduced, and regions associated with disgust were engaged instead (Harris & Fiske, 2006)."

"In other words, a category label can blunt the brain process that ordinarily registers another person as a fellow human with thoughts, feelings, and a perspective. Reducing someone to a label like "criminal" or "addict" can make them, neurologically speaking, harder to see."

"If dehumanization is partly a cognitive lapse, rather than just an act of malice, then humanization is something we can practice and design environments to encourage. Stories and parasocial contact through media can humanize people we may never meet in person."

Dehumanization can occur as an everyday failure to imagine another person’s thoughts and feelings, not only as overt denial of humanness. Category labels can short-circuit mentalizing processes in the brain, reducing activation in regions linked to thinking about others’ minds and shifting attention toward disgust-related responses. The brain’s default mode supports social understanding, with mentalizing becoming active during rest. Norms, hierarchies, and institutions can create environments that make dehumanization easier by encouraging cognitive shortcuts and reducing perspective-taking. Humanization can be practiced and supported through design choices that promote imagining others as complex minds. Stories and parasocial contact through media can also humanize people who may never be met in person.

Read at Psychology Today