We’re all familiar with the unpleasant consequences of dehumanization (torture and genocide come to mind). Dehumanization is actually surprising given the natural built in mechanisms human beings have for empathy. Harvey Whitehouse at Cognition and Culture highlights some of the new conclusions about what kinds of thinking produce it:
Some researchers have begun to investigate non-empathetic ways of reasoning about other agents. For instance, speciation (the tendency to classify our fellow humans as if they were natural kinds with essentialized heritable qualities) may be necessary for various types of reflective ideas about human types, such as racial categorizing or attribution of charisma or religious specialization (witches, shamans etc. who are thought to be inherently different from other people). Or to take another example, teleological reasoning(the tendency to view our fellow humans as instruments with specialized functions, just like tools and weapons) seems to be entailed in certain types of strategic decision-making (e.g. the idea that foot soldiers can serve as cannon fodder in a strategic advance or that civilians can serve as a human shield).
He then goes on to speculate about the possible historical and environmental causes of speciation and teleological reasoning:
Role specialization. If the division of labour is weak, and everybody undertakes more or less the same repertoire of tasks and roles, we might predict that speciation of person categories (at least within the community) will be correspondingly limited or absent but, with a strengthening of the division of labour, roles and offices can eclipse individuality, leading to increasing speciation of social categories.
Domestication of animals. The hunting of animals often entails extensive speculation on the mental states of individuated quarry whereas the farming of livestock can encourage a more generic view of the way species as a whole think and behave. In human prehistory the shift from dependence on wild meat to the management and breeding of a range of animal species may have been revolutionary in cognitive as well as economic terms. At an extreme, the more mechanized farming methods of modern times appear to make empathetic reasoning entirely irrelevant in animal management: animals become more like a crop to be harvested than a type of agent.
Scope and effectiveness of conflict-resolution mechanisms. In resolving interpersonal conflict people must draw on empathizing capacities. But such efforts can break down, for instance on the grounds that an adversary cannot be reasoned with. When efforts to empathize fail, an adversary may be de-humanized. Such patterns can emerge when negotiations between warring groups reach an impasse, when estranged lovers divorce, when work colleagues shun each other, when kin groups feud, etc.
Urbanization. Whereas in rural settings it might seem that everybody knows everybody else, in urban environments encounters with strangers are routine. Since it is practically impossible to acquire rich biographical data on every person encountered we are obliged to fall back on simple categorical heuristics for dealing with strangers.
Commoditization. Whereas gifts establish empathetic obligations between exchange partners, commodity transactions may be portrayed as ‘strictly business’ such that once a transaction is completed the parties ideally have no further obligations. Commoditization may foster a de-humanizing view of others, as generic incumbents of roles (clients, investors, customers) rather than as individuals with personal histories.
It’s interesting, to say the least, that the above factors are mostly associated with a shift towards modernity.
Tags: dehumanization, genocide, torture
