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). Read the rest of this entry »
