magazine issue 4 2009 / Issue 9

Human, or Less than Human?

• written by Peter Koval, Joonha Park & Nick Haslam
• edited by Randi Shedlosky-Shoemaker

Humanness in Group Perception

The relevance of this simple model to social perception, and in particular how some people can be seen as less human than others, should be obvious. Humanness may be a particularly important concept in the perception of groups. Research by Leyens and colleagues (Leyens et al., 2003) shows that people often perceive members of outgroups (“them”) as less human than members of their ingroup (“us”). They demonstrate this bias by showing that people are reluctant to attribute uniquely human emotions (e.g., nostalgia, embarrassment, admiration) to outgroup members compared to ingroup members, but attribute emotions that we share with other animals (e.g., happiness, fear, anger) to ingroup and outgroup equally. This subtle tendency to see other groups as less human – which is called “infrahumanization” – is distinct from the tendency to prefer our ingroup or derogate outgroups (i.e., ingroup favoritism or ethnocentrism; see van Zomeren, 2008 )), and it even occurs when there is no conflict between groups. It clearly rests on humanness in the Human Uniqueness sense, and implies that outgroup members are seen as more animal-like than ingroup members.

Perceiving other groups as less human than our own can also be demonstrated using the Human Nature sense of humanness, and attributes other than emotions. For example, in unpublished studies conducted by Paul Bain , participants attributed more Human Nature personality traits or values to their national ingroup (Australians) than to a variety of outgroups (British, Indonesians, Japanese, Singaporeans). In other studies from our laboratory, white Australians saw themselves as having more Human Nature traits than Asian Australians, and psychology students rated their ingroup higher on Human Nature traits than medical students. Even when ingroup and outgroup are represented in the simplest and most content-free stimuli – by words such as "we" and "us" versus "they" and "them" – participants associated Human Nature traits with the ingroup more strongly than with the outgroup. This association between the ingroup and humanness appears to be largely unconscious, and it can be demonstrated using computer-based experimental tasks that assess people’s rapid and automatic responses to groups.

Infrahumanization-like findings involving the Human Uniqueness sense of humanness can also be observed with personality traits. We have found that white Australians attribute more Human Uniqueness traits to themselves than to indigenous people, and Asian Australians attribute more Human Uniqueness traits to themselves than to white Australians. These findings imply that Human Nature and Human Uniqueness are both meaningful dimensions along which group members subtly deny the humanness of other groups. Some outgroups are seen as lacking emotion and warmth and implicitly likened to objects or robots , and others are seen as lacking rationality and refinement and implicitly likened to animals.

Not all group perception is based on ingroup-outgroup dynamics. Some stereotypes of social groups are widely shared within a community, and the content of these stereotypes also varies on our dimensions of humanness. For example, we have found that both male and female participants attribute more Human Nature traits to women than to men. Similarly, the Loughnan and Haslam (2007) study mentioned earlier showed that stereotypes of some social groups (e.g., businesspeople, police) portray them as lacking Human Nature and thus associate them with robots, whereas stereotypes of other groups (e.g., artists, children) portray them as lacking Human Uniqueness and associate them with animals.

These sorts of commonplace denials of humanness are now well-documented by social psychologists. Many of them are quite subtle, unconscious, and unaccompanied by group-hatred. There is clearly some distance between these phenomena and the sorts of extreme group perceptions that are usually described as "dehumanizing". However, we would argue that these more extreme phenomena – pejorative use of animal labels, objectification, actions that treat people as if they lack moral worth – have their roots in the kinds of everyday denials of humanness that we are studying. We suspect that these everyday denials can become overt and destructive under conditions of group conflict. The form that these overt expressions take can be illuminated by our model. Groups that tend to be seen as lacking Human Uniqueness attributes may come to be seen as animals under conditions of intergroup friction, and groups that are seen as lacking Human Nature attributes are at risk of being seen as unfeeling objects or mere cogs in a soulless machine. In any event, it should be a sobering thought that mild forms of humanness denial are pervasive in our everyday perception of groups.

Humanness in Person Perception

As we have seen, people seem to perceive some groups as more human than others. There is also a growing body of research showing that people see themselves as more human than other individuals. This tendency may be one of a number of "self-serving biases" that allow us to see ourselves in a positive light and protect our self-esteem (Leary, 2007). For example, people tend to rate themselves as "above average" on desirable attributes, claim responsibility for their successes but not their failures, and see their futures as more golden than their peers’. People even see themselves as less susceptible to self-serving biases than other people.