Organization or Publication
APA Dictionary of Psychology
[A]ny process or practice that is thought to reduce human beings to the level of mechanisms or nonhuman animals, especially by denying them autonomy, individuality, and a sense of dignity.
Link / DOI / ISBN: https://dictionary.apa.org/dehumanization
Source Type: Reference
Tags: Educational | Scholarly
Country: USA
Year: 2018
Current Directions in Psychological Science
I [use] a three-part working definition: dehumanization is (a) the cognitive state of failing to perceive another human as fully human, (b) an act that expresses that cognitive state or otherwise entails the assertion that another human is not fully human, or (c) the experience of being subjected to an act that expresses a lack of perception of one’s humanity and/or denies human experience or human rights, or combinations thereof.
I use the phrase “fully human” to mean entitled to all rights recognized as human rights, equally in possession of internal life and point of view, and welcomed as one’s full self. This working definition acknowledges the cognitive process of the person doing the dehumanization, the acts that express it, and the experience of being the target of it. (p. 115)
Individual Author(s): Bender, Emily M.
Source Title: “Resisting Dehumanization in the Age of ‘AI'”
DOI / ISBN / Link: doi.org/10.1177/09637214231217286
Source Type: Journal article
Country: USA
Year: 2024
Tags: Scholarly
Find it at UCLA: https://search.library.ucla.edu/permalink/01UCS_LAL/192ecse/cdi_proquest_journals_3015087549
European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS)
Dehumanization is the act of denying humanness to other human beings. A practical definition refers to it as the viewing and treatment of other persons as if they lack mental capacities that we enjoy as human beings. Here, every act or thought that treats a person as less than human is an act of dehumanization. Throughout history, dehumanization has been an essential ingredient in the perpetration of intergroup violence and atrocities.
In political science and jurisprudence, the act of dehumanization is the inferential alienation of human rights or denaturalization of natural rights, a definition contingent upon presiding international law rather than social norms limited by human geography. In this context, specialty within species need not apply to constitute global citizenship or its inalienable rights; these both are inherit by human genome. It is theorized to take on two forms: animalistic dehumanization, which is employed on a largely intergroup basis, and mechanistic dehumanization, which is employed on a largely interpersonal basis.
DOI / ISBN / Link: https://www.populismstudies.org/Vocabulary/dehumanization/
Source Type: Reference
Country: European Union
Tags: Scholarly | Educational | Nonprofit
International Committee of the Red Cross
While there is no single understanding [of dehumanization], I suggest a practical definition suited to the situations of conflict and violence where the ICRC works: perceiving or acting as if someone is less than human, thereby causing or being more likely to inflict harm.
- Dehumanization violates one or more elements of humanity (above), in line with three useful concepts from the literature:
- Denying that someone else belong to the same human group as oneself;
- Ignoring and/or undermining that person’s unique identity;
- Violating her legitimate interests.
Individual Author(s): Deffenbaugh, Natalie
Source Title: “De-dehumanization: practicing humanity”
DOI / ISBN / Link: https://blogs.icrc.org/law-and-policy/2024/06/27/de-dehumanization-practicing-humanity/
Source Type: Blog post
Year: 2024
Tags: Educational | Advocacy | Nonprofit
Political Behavior
Dehumanization research recognizes that notions of “humanness” are central to social cognition and intergroup behavior. Humanness is not granted universally but applied and denied selectively across people and groups (Haslam et al. 2012). This focus on perceptions of humanity distinguishes scholarship on dehumanization from scholarship on prejudice, which does not directly capture perceptions of humanity, but instead focuses on factors like group-based stereotypes, antipathy, and resentment (e.g., Huddy and Feldman 2009). Groups can be disliked or stereotyped without being denied their fundamental humanity, meaning that while dehumanization and prejudice can co-occur, they are separate concepts (Bain et al. 2009; Haslam and Stratemeyer 2016). fMRI studies support the distinctiveness of dehumanization from other forms of prejudice, showing that it has distinctive neutral correlates relative to other negative group-based assessments (Bruneau et al. 2018).
While the political science literature often engages with prejudice in intergroup settings, there has been very little work on dehumanization in the American political context, particularly as it pertains to conflict between the political parties. Much of the literature on party conflict has focused on whether the electorate has grown more polarized over time, either in terms of their issue positions or their affect toward the opposing party. While evidence of issue-based political polarization is mixed (Abramowitz 2010; Levendusky 2009), evidence for affective polarization is unambiguous; over the past 40 years, partisans in the electorate have grown to evaluate their own party more favorably and the opposition party increasingly negatively….
Affective polarization is associated with strong displays of favoritism toward members of one’s own party in experimental resource allocation tasks, as well as negative stereotyping and low interpersonal tolerance for one’s political opponents… While expressive models of partisanship have significantly improved our understanding of polarization processes in the electorate and cemented a central role for social distance as a key symptom of party conflict, it has yet to engage with the literature on dehumanization in a meaningful fashion. Research on dehumanization suggests we look at social distance as well as moral distance in order to understand party conflict—particularly the more extreme or pernicious manifestations of party conflict.
Individual Author(s): Cassese, Erin C.
Source Title: “Partisan Dehumanization in American Politics”
DOI / ISBN / Link: doi.org/10.1007/s11109-019-09545-w
Source Type: Journal article
Country: USA
Year: 2021
Tags: Scholarly
Find it at UCLA: https://search.library.ucla.edu/permalink/01UCS_LAL/192ecse/cdi_proquest_journals_2491441513
The Routledge Handbook of Dehumanization
The term ‘dehumanization’ emerges in English around the turn of the 19th century. The Oxford English Dictionary quotes with respect to first usage from the 1818 diary of Thomas Moore (published 1853)….
The set of phenomena denoted by the term ‘dehumanization’, as it is used in practice and as it is studied in the Handbook, has certainly been addressed much earlier than the 19th century, and actually it has been since Greek antiquity. It has been addressed in particular by those who defended a shared humanity and humanness – that is, by the critics of those cases of dehumanization that showed up in social reality…. The contexts, in which avant-la-lettre reflections on dehumanization occurred, certainly varied and did so not only in time but also in topical orientation. They were part of discussions on diversity, assimilation, exclusion, purity and danger, education, religious belief, sexuality, misogyny, hatred, wars, savagery, barbarism, cannibalism, slavery, racism, ethnocentrism, egocentrism, evolutionary thinking, anatomy, perfectibility and civility, progress, the exotic, missionary or colonial activities, public events, and so on…. [T]here were times when dehumanization was not in need of justification. Aristotle… lived at a time when a shift toward a critical discourse about dehumanization surfaced, and with it there rose the need to justify it in face of the critique. Aristotle’s defense of natural slavery…, is thus already a reaction to critical stances regarding the attitudes and treatment of slaves. Thus, the beginning of the intricate dialectic of humanization, dehumanization, and rehumanization, which the Handbook addresses, is also the beginning of what historians call the ‘invention of humanity’—the historically increasing awareness and belief that there is a shared humanity and humanness… This invention is ongoing, with oscillating boundaries of humanity and humanness ever since. Kontler… shows how contingent the standard of belonging to humanity was in the different debates about the human during the early Enlightenment: if expedient (in order to exclude certain people), the standard simply got adapted. And today? The boundaries of the human are still negotiated, and convenient adaptation of standards still occurs, even though the details in the strategies and the ontologies might have changed. Beliefs in ‘true religion,’ … are for some still the basis of an active category that allows the differentiation between ‘real’ humans and erroneous ones; for others, this strategy is replaced by the imagined community of a ‘nation,’ or a ‘race,’ etc. Us-versus-them thinking has never vanished fully, even though its contours changed.
Nonetheless, the invention of humanity led to a universalist frame and, eventually, to a truly global era, with an ever-increasing global interdependence of people and states, an interdependence so deep that some simply took it for granted—till its current weight and vulnerability became fully exposed as part of the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic. (p. 2)
Individual Author(s): Kronfelder, Maria
DOI / ISBN / Link: ISBN 978-0429960970
Source Type: Book Chapter
Country: USA
Year: 2021
Tags: Scholarly
Find it at UCLA: https://search.library.ucla.edu/permalink/01UCS_LAL/192ecse/cdi_askewsholts_vlebooks_9780429960987
St. Louis Holocaust Museum
[Dehumanization is] the process of stripping a person or group of their humanity involves perceiving or treating individuals as lesser than human, often by denying them qualities such as individuality, dignity, or empathy.
Individual Author(s): Turner, Helen
Source Title: “3 Ways to Confront Dehumanizing Language”
DOI / ISBN / Link: https://stlholocaustmuseum.org/3-ways-to-confront-dehumanizing-language/
Source Type: Web article
Country: USA
Year: 2023
Tags: Educational | Nonprofit
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Dehumanization is widely thought to occur when someone is treated or regarded as less than human. However, there is an ongoing debate about how to develop this basic characterization. Proponents of the harms-based approach focus on the idea that to dehumanize someone is to treat them in a way that harms their humanity; whereas proponents of the psychological approach focus on the idea that to dehumanize someone is to think of them as less than human. Other theorists adopt a pluralistic view that combines elements of both approaches.
DOI / ISBN / Link: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/dehumanization/
Source Type: Reference
Country: USA
Year: 2025
Tags: Scholarly | Educational
World Psychiatry
Dehumanization is a fearsome word, calling to mind the gravest atrocities of the past and present. People seen as less than human have suffered and suffer violence, deprivation, exclusion and dispossession, and that suffering has been and is routinely ignored or minimized. However, although dehumanization is usually understood as an extreme phenomenon confined to wars, genocides and conquests, it falls on a spectrum. Two decades of social psychological research have shown that it has significant repercussions in everyday life.
The burgeoning literature on dehumanization offers three key insights. First, dehumanization ranges from blatant and verbalized to subtle and unconscious: people can be explicitly likened to animals, but also implicitly denied fundamental human qualities such as rationality, self‐control and complex emotions. Second, dehumanization takes varied forms, from seeing others as bestial or robotic, to rejecting their individuality or agency, to failing to spontaneously grant them minds. Third, although dehumanization often accompanies negative views of others, it is psychologically and even neurally distinct from prejudice. Seeing people as less than fully human is not the same as disliking them. We can dehumanize those about whom we are indifferent, not only those we hate. Indeed, studies of close relationships show that we can subtly dehumanize those we love.
The vast literature on stigma reveals how people with mental illness are often viewed negatively by the general public, pictured as dangerous, blameworthy and shameful, with adverse implications for equity, well‐being and recovery. It has recently become clear that, in addition to these negative perceptions, they are often also denied humanity. People are seen as less human when they receive mental rather than physical illness labels, and people with mental illnesses – especially schizophrenia and addictions – are even more blatantly dehumanized than some vilified ethnic or religious minorities. (p. 173)
Individual Author(s): Haslam, Nick
Source Title: “Dehumanization and mental health”
DOI / ISBN / Link: doi: 10.1002/wps.21186
Source Type: Journal Article
Country: Australia
Year: 2024
Tags: Scholarly
Find it at UCLA: https://search.library.ucla.edu/permalink/01UCS_LAL/192ecse/cdi_unpaywall_primary_10_1002_wps_21186