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Dehumanized Perception: A Psychological Means to Facilitate Atrocities, Torture, and Genocide?
| Content Provider | PubMed Central |
|---|---|
| Author | Harris, Lasana T. Fiske, Susan T. |
| 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. |
| Related Links | http://dx.doi.org/10.1027/2151-2604/a000065 |
| Ending Page | 181 |
| Page Count | 7 |
| Starting Page | 175 |
| File Format | |
| ISSN | 21908370 |
| e-ISSN | 21512604 |
| Journal | Zeitschrift fur Psychologie |
| Issue Number | 3 |
| Volume Number | 219 |
| Language | English |
| Publisher Date | 2011-01-01 |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Subject Keyword | Research in Higher Education |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
| Subject | Arts and Humanities Psychology |
