Dehumanisation: animalistic and mechanistic (Haslam)
Seeing others as less than fully human, in two forms. Animalistic dehumanisation denies uniquely human traits such as refinement, civility, rationality and moral sense, casting people as crude or childlike; mechanistic dehumanisation denies human nature such as warmth, emotion and depth, casting people as objects or machines.
What drives it
It removes the brakes and saves the effort of empathy: it's easier to cut, exploit or ignore people who don't fully feel. The mechanistic form is the everyday one in organisations, and it runs on indifference rather than hatred.
How it shows
Work
Mechanistic: 'resources', 'headcount', 'FTEs', 'the users', 'tickets'; customers as numbers on a dashboard; layoffs as 'reducing the cost base'; 'they'll adjust'. Animalistic: contempt for 'the shop floor', customers who are 'idiots', clients who 'can't read'. Leyens's infrahumanisation is subtler: the in-group gets complex emotions (pride, grief, hope) and the out-group only basic ones (anger, fear), so 'engineering was hurt' but 'sales just got angry'. Power increases it. Staff who feel treated as tools by the organisation report more burnout and intention to leave.
Relationships
The in-laws or an ex's new partner described as crude or animal; a partner's grief dismissed as drama. A whole group (men, women, a nationality) described as unfeeling or simple. It also turns inward: people who are excluded or ostracised start to feel less human themselves, numb and mechanical.
Self
Your language goes collective and functional: 'them', 'the users'. You feel nothing hearing that a group was harmed, or reach for 'they're used to it'. You credit your side with nuanced feelings and the other side with crude ones.
What tells it apart
Contempt: Contempt is an emotion aimed at someone judged beneath you; animalistic dehumanisation often carries it, but mechanistic dehumanisation is cold indifference with no contempt at all.
In-group bias: In-group bias favours your group; dehumanisation denies the other group full human capacities. Ask whether they'd say the out-group feels embarrassment or grief: bias still grants it, dehumanisation doesn't.
Objectification: seven ways of treating a person as a thing (Nussbaum): Objectification is usually one person treating another as a thing; dehumanisation usually targets a category and shows in how people talk about 'them' collectively.
A test
Listen to how the person describes the affected group when a decision hurts them: names or functions, and complex feelings (embarrassment, hope, grief) or only basic ones.
Questions to carry
- When a decision hurts people, how are they described: by name and with feelings, or by function?
- Which group of people do I think of as a cost or a nuisance, and when did that start?
How strong the research is
strong
Where it comes from
Nick Haslam, 'Dehumanization: an integrative review', Personality and Social Psychology Review, 2006; Jacques-Philippe Leyens and colleagues on infrahumanisation, 2000
Sources
- Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity (Totalité et infini) (1961)
- Nick Haslam, Dehumanization: An Integrative Review (2006)