Dehumanization increases instrumental violence, but not moral violence.

ABSTRACT: Across five experiments, we show that dehumanization-the act of perceiving victims as not completely human-increases instrumental, but not moral, violence. 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. In vignette experiments, using dehumanizing compared with humanizing language increased participants' willingness to harm strangers for money, but not participants' willingness to harm stran

SUBMITTER: Rai TS 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5559031 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature