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Dehumanizing another because they dehumanized you.

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The Implicit Association Test (IAT) has recently come under fire. One of the main criticisms has been that the IAT for race does not seem to correlate with discriminatory behavior. This criticism stings, as the behavioral link has been one of the main reasons for excitement about the test. It appeared that we had a tool that could fairly easily uncover biases people didn't know they had, but which had real and serious consequences for their interactions with others. Alas, the evidence suggests otherwise.

Yet the 2016 election and recent actions by the Trump administration make it difficult to deny that there are many Americans who feel very strongly that certain groups, especially Mexican and Muslim immigrants, do not belong here. At times, this sentiment has been expressed in dehumanizing ways. And research in social psychology suggests that this is no mere coincidence.

It appears that dehumanization is correlated with support for the priorities of the Trump administration. When someone considers Muslims to be less human, they are more likely to support policies such as a ban on Muslim immigration to the United States. Moreover, those who are more likely to consider certain groups of people less human are more likely to support Republican candidates, such as Trump.

Researchers tested for dehumanization using two measures. First, they presented subjects with an "Ascent of Man" image and asked for a rating from 0 (far left image) to 100 (far right image) for different groups (e.g., Mexican immigrants, Muslim immigrants). Then they asked how well various terms (e.g., "savage, aggressive" or "refined and cultured") described members of these particular groups on a scale of 1 (not at all) to 7 (very much so).

Not only did they find that dehumanization of immigrant groups correlates with support for Trump's policies, but they also found that being dehumanized results in "meta-dehumanization." Mexican and Muslim residents of the United States who felt dehumanized by Trump and his supporters were likely to dehumanize those who dehumanized them. In addition, they were likely to support hostile responses (e.g., spitting in the President's face). This suggests that dehumanization leads to a vicious cycle, one that puts society on a path to greater hostility.

This research is especially timely. Two of the major criticisms of (both versions of) Trump's travel ban are that it is discriminatory and that it will not make America safer. The claims about discrimination often appeal to Trump's own statements during the campaign and transition. The research discussed here suggests that these statements may have helped him to win the presidency. But it also suggests that the rhetoric surrounding the travel ban will not make America safer. To the contrary, it is likely to further propel us into a feedback loop of dehumanization and mutual hostility.

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The Implicit Association Test (IAT) has recently come under fire. One of the main criticisms has been that the IAT for race does not seem to correlate with discriminatory behavior. This criticism stings, as the behavioral link has been one of the main reasons for excitement about the test.

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Dehumanization spikes because of current event

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Dehumanization spikes because of current event

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People who think other groups are less evolved are more likely to support retaliation against them.

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The first tool being used to numb people to themselves is our ever advancing technology. It isn't that technology is all negative. As someone who has survived cancer surgery, I can attest to the benefits of technology. And I didn't need to go through such surgery to appreciate technology. But, as with anything else, there is a point of diminishing returns when increasing our use of technology returns more negatives than positives. This is true especially when it comes to communication.

I really do appreciate cell phones. They give the wife and I a certain amount of freedom when we go to the mall. We only need to call each other to know where and when to meet. And I loved cell phones when the kids just got their drivers licenses. But with cell phones came texting. And with texting comes a less personal way of communicating. Texting dilutes the affect we express and receive when conversing with others. This makes our conversations less personal, less human. We don't have to be fully there with the people we are texting and we are certainly not fully there with the people we are with at the time. With texting, we exercise an absence while being present. And yet, we only need to ask young people how many times do they prefer to reach out and touch someone through texting than through talking in person to see its growing effects.

But not only does texting filter out our personal reactions, it limits the depth of sharing and the contents of our communications. In texting, communication tends to be brief and abbreviated. So not only does texting filter out our emotions, it sifts out depth and reduces the amount of content we can communicate and then handle.

And if the cell phone was not enough, there is whatever device we use to connect to the web. Yes, there are advantages to the web. We can reach out and touch more people from around the globe. But the web is similar to cell phones in that it too acts as a strainer that limits the feelings that can be expressed and decreases the amount of content that can be considered. In addition, people can hide behind avatars when meeting others. This can make the web, especially the social networking places, the world's biggest disguise party where we, nor the people we meet, have to see what we prefer not to. So we meet new people and become attracted and attached to the costumes being worn rather than the real people wearing them.

Sherry Turkle, from MIT, has already written about much of what I described above in her book Alone Together. In the book, she describes not just what we are doing to ourselves now but how we are conditioning others for the future. And if our social life was the only part that was being revolutionized by the overuse of technology, we could live with that. But it isn't. Education is now beginning to rely more and more on the virtual presence of instructors than being up close and in person. Educational institutions are currently pursuing a greater reliance on communications technology to teach. We now have universities that revolve around students learning from professors who can only provide an electronic presence. These institutions reason that students no longer need teachers who are fully present to learn. In other words, students need less and less the humanity from their instructors. Students don't need teacher reaction to students' feedback and teachers' mistakes. On the other hand, these educational institutions also reckon that teachers need no reactions from their students to get their points across. As was said by one police officer from the TV series Dragnet, "just the facts" is all that is needed in education. In short, there is an ever diminishing personal communication and relationships between those who teach and those attempting to learn.

Certainly there is more in technology that is changing us than our communication technology. Turkle emphasizes in her book the point that not only do we make our own tools, they, in turn, shape us. And if we wanted to anticipate how our previously mentioned communication tools could change us, just think of the following. The technology we use cannot sense when we are frustrated or angry when it fails or frustrates us. In addition, like all electronic tools, we expect our machines to blindly follow orders. If we are shaped by these communication tools, will we become less and less aware of how those around us feel and will life consist of nothing more than mindlessly following orders?

But our use of technology is not the only culprit here, there is another. And one such perpetrator is business. Let's face it, business is highly impersonal, especially when we seek to maximize profits and maximizing profits is the ethic of the day. For when profit is king, people are pawns. And being pawns means that we are the most disposable piece in the game. And the more expendable people are, the more our humanity becomes moot.

In today's world, all that matters is the accumulation of the wealth that those in the in group can garner. And as Chris Hedges so aptly said about the wealthiest, the only word they know is "more." For those for whom this is true, all others become invisible.

In the movie, Analyze This, Billy Crystal plays a therapist to a mob boss. When he was suspected of having become an informant, the mob boss's assistant points a gun at him to shoot him while trying to soothe Crystal's character by saying, "it isn't personal." Crystal's character gave the wrong response. He said that it could not get more personal. It was the wrong response because when business dictates ethics, the personal no longer matters. People's needs are easily discarded. People who cost more than others are regarded as an inflamed appendix. People who have lost their jobs because their existence could no longer be financially justified can attest to how dehumanizing and painful their experiences have been. But their feelings no longer matter. In addition, austerity cuts that maintains tax cuts for the rich spreads this heartache to those in the community.

Those in business have a ready reply to charges of being inhuman. They say that for the good of others in the company, they must be quick to let go those who do not contribute to the maximizing of profits. Otherwise, the company becomes at risk and shareholders lose what they deserve because of the laws of gravity, as they apply in the business world. But what such apologists forget is that the economic system we worship is one of choice. We don't have to continue to rely on an economic system that so heavily leans on competition. That is we don't have to unless the desire for more has precedence over the humanity of others. And yet, not only are we worshipping our competitive economic system, we are allowing our business environment built on competition to metastasize into other spheres. And again, education is seeing more than its fair share of a business mentality being forced on it. So whereas in the past, we depended on a certain degree of inefficiency in education because of how much we learn from our mistakes, we can no longer afford to be so wasteful.

Though we could list a few more coconspirators in this crime of dehumanizing society, we will stop with the next one, authoritarianism. We all know how many Nazis tried to defend themselves in court against charges of war crimes. Many claimed that they were merely following orders. And those orders not only enabled many Nazis to practice immeasurably gross crimes against humanity, orders shielded them from the threat of feeling what their victims felt. Orders were their defense and following orders caused their conviction of war crimes.

But the problem with using the Nazis to illustrate our point is that we don't see ourselves as being on their level of evil and most of us would be correct here. So the authoritarianism we practice, though not preferable, can't possibly be dehumanizing. And that reasoning would hold if the Nazi atrocities provided a minimal standard of evil or if the negative effects of authoritarianism were restricted to evil rulers only.

What authoritarianism does is to numb us to the pain others feel when we follow orders because we zero in on our duties. In addition, it takes away our freedom. It threatens all who would question and criticize and thus pushes us to become automatons that, not who, wait for the next set of instructions.

Since the 9-11 atrocities, we have seen a spike in authoritarianism in this country from the federal government on down. We allowed the President to tell us that we were attacked for our freedoms despite the death and destruction our policies have caused in the Middle East. That the President was scapegoating our freedoms for the attacks indicated that he was looking for more power, more authority. For if the President acknowledged that our abuse of power in the Middle East was what motivated the 9-11 hijackers, then asking for more power and authority would be an impossible sell.

The marks that governmental authoritarianism leaves on society is the vast reduction, and even elimination, of accountability our officials have by either their citizens or the world. At the same time, our government will hold all others more accountable and even has assumed the right to attack anyone anyplace at anytime. When it does attack, as it did with Iraq, it cites violation of either international law or the will of the international community as the justification for using force. However, if the world even attempts to hold America accountable, our government nullifies it by claiming that such attempts violates our sovereignty.

At home, the progression that has occurred starting with the Patriot Act through the 2012 NDAA is frightening. That is because abuse of power that has been exercised overseas is now being authorized for use at home. The government can now wantonly arrest whomever they want at will so long as they claim that those they arrest are terrorists. The checks and balances that would have prevented such an overreach have been nullified by new laws and procedures.

Why do we the people accept this more powerful and authoritarian government? Why don't more people speak out than already do? The reason is simple. Our government has immunized itself from accountability by injecting fear into the population. As a result, we tend to see our government's growing abuse of power as necessary to protect us from foreign enemies. In the meantime, many current arrests and other harassments performed by our government remind us of the world that existed in the movie Minority Report. And less we question our government for this rise in authoritarianism, we should note that many of our institutions, including our educational institutions and our churches, are doing their fair share to indoctrinate people into accepting our new nation's order. We might add to this that there is a growing tend for those who are charged with enforcing the laws to be brutal and act as if they have no accountability when engaging with dissidents. And the public's perceived need for more protection quiets their consciences for their lack of solidarity with those who have suffered police brutality.

Our world is becoming a more scary place and it is not because of a growing threat from the monsters under our beds or in our closets. Rather, it is becoming more frightening because of those whom we have trusted to guide us and because we have a greater acceptance of and trust in machines, whether technological or institutional, than we have in being human. And it looks as if we have no will to change.

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We are in the process of dulling people's sense of what it means to be human. We are losing touch with our feelings and losing our freedom because our uncritical acceptance of technology, the rules of business, and authoritarianism. And we will hurt our future if we don't change.

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American prisons tend to dehumanize most prisoners?

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INSIDE LOOKING OUT. American prisons tend to dehumanize most prisoners. Rehabilitation, as a systemwide policy, is hit-or-miss. The latest crisis fa...

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``I love you.″ The words are at the same time defiant and sustaining, even a little courageous. In the din of the early morning hour, Leamond Pier

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Comparisons between Dehumanization in Jails and Prisons 

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Comparisons between Dehumanization in Jails and Prisons 

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Dehumanization in social status and religion.

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Dehumanization in social status and religion.

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AP Images

New research finds that seeing certain racial groups as less human isn't a thing of the past.

With each new story that surfaces about violence against black men, women, and children, the idea of post-racial America is buried a bit deeper. In one recent gut-wrenching video, police officers in San Francisco surround a homeless man with a prosthetic leg. At one point, four of them pin him down despite his cries of protest.

Here's what Chaédria LaBouvier, a journalist who filmed this incident, wrote on Medium:

These incidents are so quotidian, so mundane, that they do not merit a mention in even passing on the local news. Which is to say, this is everyday harassment. Which is to say, that we've normalized and habitualized the kind of policing in San Francisco and the rest of America that brutalizes the most vulnerable people, which strips them of their human dignity, the agency to their bodies - to walk with crutches when physically disabled, to have this body unviolated - when in actuality, they are whom the police are especially supposed to be protecting.

LaBouvier's point that vulnerable groups are often stripped of their humanity is supported by a new paper published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. The study finds that some groups in America are considered less human than others, and that people who regard these groups as such are not shy to express their sentiments or behave in accordance with them.

"In addition to the more subtle forms of prejudice and dehumanization that are out there, that are also important, some groups are still facing these more blatant forms, and they seem to be pretty insidious," says Nour Sami Kteily, assistant professor of management and organizations at Northwestern University and one of the study authors.

The concept of dehumanization-considering another person less human than you, and therefore, less deserving of humane treatment-is an ancient one. It's been used to explain and justify aggressive actions of one group towards another throughout history. In Nazi Germany, propaganda posters and movies represented Jews as rats. Many who opposed abolition of slavery compared African Americans to apes.

For the last few decades, researchers have veered towards measuring more subtle, indirect forms of dehumanization-assuming most people would no longer openly reveal that they believe someone else to be less than human. In 2006, psychologist Susan Fiske examined how people's brains reacted to images of addicts and homeless people. She found strong neural signs of disgust, supporting the theory that "extreme out-groups may be perceived as less than human, or dehumanized."

For the new study, Kteily and his colleagues wanted to question the assumption that dehumanization only occurs as silent, subtle perceptions. They designed a measure for blatant dehumanization called "ascent dehumanization," based on the famous depiction of humans evolving from primitive to advanced beings, over time. Although they conducted seven studies on data samples from three countries, we're going to stick to what they found in America.

Here are the highlights:

Less privileged groups are dehumanized more than others

In one study, the researchers surveyed a mostly white, liberal-leaning sample of Americans to find out which groups of respondents (if any) blatantly dehumanized other U.S. racial groups. The questions were designed in a way that the respondents were likely to be conscious that they were attributing less humanity to certain groups. The respondents were shown the "ascent of man" silhouettes (below) and asked to point to where they saw various ethnic groups on that scale from lower animals to highly evolved humans:

The respondents rated European groups and Japanese as "similarly evolved" as themselves. But Chinese, South Koreans, and Mexican immigrants were rated as being at a lower rung of humanity. Arabs and Muslims were perceived as being the least evolved compared with Americans. (The researchers didn't measure dehumanization against African Americans in this part of the study series, but other parts confirmed that they were one of the dehumanized groups.)

Here's how the paper describes its findings:

These results suggest that the Ascent dehumanization measure may be especially useful for assessing blatant dehumanization toward low status or derogated targets, who may be perceived as relatively primitive or unsophisticated.

Dehumanization can help predict attitudes and behaviors

In successive studies, researchers found that dehumanization was strongly associated with s ocial dominance orientation -the belief that that some groups should maintain superiority over others. They also found that dehumanization was a strong predictor of certain behavioral outcomes.

Dehumanization of Arabs, for example, was linked to more tolerance for military violence in Arab nations. For African Americans, dehumanization predicted that respondents would have less sympathy when encountered with incidents of injustice and wrongful incarceration. For Hispanic Americans, it meant less support for immigration.

Here's how the researchers summarize this section of the study:

The effects of blatant dehumanization on responses to media portrayals in the African American condition, aversive racism in the Hispanic American condition, and outgroup donation in the Chinese condition remained significant even after controlling for prejudice toward these groups.

(The researchers controlled for prejudice to show that it wasn't just a strong dislike for these racial groups that was responsible for these behavioral outcomes-it was, as far as they can tell, dehumanization.)

Dehumanization increases with increased threat perception

In another study, the researchers examined how dehumanization changes over time. They compared survey data before and after the Boston Marathon bombings in April 2013. Dehumanization of Arabs spiked in the immediate aftermath of the terrorist attack, and then started subsiding in a couple of months.

"When people feel like their group is coming under attack from another group ... it may increase the blatant levels of dehumanization," Kteily says.

It's frightening to think about how fears and perceptions of threat can be manipulated to justify ill-treatment and violence against certain people. Nearly 14 years after 9/11, anti-Muslim violence is still common. And the recent stream of dehumanizing rhetoric against immigrants has already also had violent ramifications.

"[Politicians] are playing to an audience," Kteily says. "They recognize that the perception, or this type of rhetoric, has supporters." Adding fuel to the fire is likely to exacerbate the existing perceptions o these groups, and worsen the potential ramifications, he says.

In the future, it would be interesting to see how the so-called "lower-status" groups-the ones that the study finds are targets of dehumanization-perceive those that are regarded as being higher up in the social hierarchy, Kteily says. For now, it's important to acknowledge that dehumanization is more common than previously thought. "[The study] highlights a deep issue here that needs to be addressed from the point of social harmony," he says.

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This Study of Dehumanization Shows What Little Progress Humanity Has Made

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New research finds that seeing certain racial groups as less human isn't a thing of the past. With each new story that surfaces about violence against black men, women, and children, the idea of post-racial America is buried a bit deeper. In one recent gut-wrenching video, police officers in San Francisco surround a homeless man with a prosthetic leg.

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Hitler's dehumanization for Jews

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The Holocaust didn't occur suddenly or spontaneously-it required a conscious process. If we study the process, we might prevent future genocides.

Even before they took power in 1933, Hitler and the Nazi government set about implementing a series of four specific steps designed to result in the complete and total dehumanization of Europe's Jewish population:
1. Prejudice The Nazi government actually fostered and promoted prejudice. According to the dictionary definition, prejudice is comprised of "unreasonable feelings, opinions, or attitudes, especially of a hostile nature, regarding an ethnic, racial, social or religious group." Anti-Semitism has been around since the earliest days of the Hebrews, but it reached epic proportions with the Nazis, especially when they passed the Nuremberg Laws in 1935-which attempted to prevent relationships between Aryans and Jews, "Gypsies, Negroes, and their bastard offspring," and made so-called "race defilement" a crime.
All prejudice, completely antithetical to the Baha'i teachings, creates hatred:

... we must lay aside all prejudice-whether it be religious, racial, political or patriotic; we must become the cause of the unification of the human race. - Abdu'l-Baha, The Promulgation of Universal Peace, p. 163.

2. Scapegoating
The Nazis scapegoated the Jews, blaming them for every societal problem in German society. They published an enormous quantity of propaganda that blamed the Jews for the wrongdoings, mistakes, or faults that plagued "civilization;" and declared Jews and others untermenschen , or sub-human.

These Nazi scapegoating tactics carried prejudice to the next step-from bigotry and bias to blaming. The Baha'i teachings warn us against blaming, faultfinding and backbiting:

A believer will not blame any soul among the strangers, how much less against the friends. Faultfinding and backbiting are the characteristics of the weak minds and not the friends. Self-exaltation is the attribute of the stranger and not of the Beloved. - Abdu'l-Baha, in Star of the West - 1, p. 452.

But this was not the way of the Third Reich. Posters plastered in public juxtaposed handsome Aryans next to portrayals of Jews with sneering, seemingly evil countenances. One showed a Jew as a horned-devil about to devour an innocent man. Another placed a picture of a rat on top of a Star of David. Viewing these prejudicial, scapegoating tactics day in and day out affected the psyches and built a sense of fear and loathing of Jewish people, leading to an official policy of discrimination and exclusion.
3. Discrimination
In the case of the Jews, the Nazi's prejudice against them made them easy to scapegoat. This naturally led to discriminatory laws by the government, and caused violent acts against them that individuals could perpetrate with impunity.

Jews were required to wear a yellow Star of David sewn onto their outerwear like a badge of shame so others could see and avoid them. Or they could, if so moved, hurl epithets towards them and even physically assault them with the awareness they could do so without consequence.

The Baha'i teachings condemn discriminatory behavior:

... If any discrimination is at all to be tolerated it should be a discrimination not against but rather in favour of the minority, be it racial or otherwise. Unlike the nations and peoples of the earth be they of the East or of the West, democratic or authoritarian, communist or capitalist, whether belonging to the Old World or the new, who either ignore, trample upon or extirpate, the racial, religious or political minorities within the sphere of their jurisdiction, every organized community enlisted under the banner of Baha'u'llah should feel it to be its first and inescapable obligation to nurture, encourage, and safeguard every minority belonging to any Faith, race, class or nation within it. - Shoghi Effendi, The Advent of Divine Justice, pp. 28-29.

Doesn't it make sense that this should be so in the wider world?
4. Persecution Persecution of minorities isn't new. The persecution of the Christians by the Romans is one example, and another glaring case in point is the current situation of the Baha'is in Iran. But the system created and utilized by the Nazis against the Jews was likely the most organized and efficient one in history.
Jews were forced from their homes, their valuables confiscated, crowded into ghettoes, homes, businesses and temples lost during Kristallnacht, a two-day pogrom (November 9 and 10, 1938) commonly called the "Night of Broken Glass:"

Hundreds of synagogues all over the German Reich were attacked, vandalized, looted, and destroyed. Many were set ablaze. Firemen were instructed to let the synagogues burn but to prevent the flames from spreading to nearby structures. The shop windows of thousands of Jewish-owned stores were smashed and the wares within looted. Jewish cemeteries were desecrated. Many Jews were attacked by mobs of Storm Troopers ... At least 91 Jews died in the pogrom. - The Holocaust Encyclopedia

The opinions and views expressed in this article are those of the author only and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of BahaiTeachings.org or any institution of the Baha'i Faith.

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Hitler's 4-Step Process for Dehumanizing the Jews

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The Holocaust didn't occur suddenly or spontaneously-it required a conscious process. If we study the process, we might prevent future genocides. Even before they took power in 1933, Hitler and the Nazi government set about implementing a series of four specific steps designed to result in the complete and total dehumanization of Europe's Jewish population: 1.

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Definition: the process of depriving a person or group of positive human qualities.

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PressTV

Former US Army specialist Josh Steiber

A former US Army specialist, who was part of the same unit that killed Iraqi civilians from a helicopter in 2007, says dehumanization is part of basic US army training.

In an interview with Press TV, Josh Steiber explained the three years he spent in the US Army before he asked to be released as a conscientious objector.

Steiber said "the dehumanizing of people from other countries" was the main reason that he quit the Army.

"As far back as basic training, we were singing songs as we were marching around, joking about killing women and children," he told the Press TV correspondent in Washington.

The whistle-blower website, WikiLeaks, released a shocking video earlier this month showing US soldiers in an Apache helicopter killing dozens of Iraqi civilians, including two Reuters employees, in cold blood.

Steiber noted that he sang the following song together with other members of his unit:
I went down to the market where all the women shop
I took out my machete and I began to chop I went down to the park where all the children play
I pulled out my machine gun and I began to spray
Steiber pointed out that he did not personally know the pilot in the video because they were attached to his unit only on that one fateful day.

However, the former US Army specialist was not surprised by what was on the tape.

"You're focused on the physical aspect, but all along there is a psychological aspect."

"I think it would be wrong to put all [the blame] on the individual soldier. I think it's very telling that the secretary of defense, [Robert Gates], came out over the weekend and said there is no wrongdoing in the video."

"And so if you're only adjusting a few soldiers when the secretary of defense is putting his stamp of approval on this, then the system is not gonna change."

Steiber concluded that there are other soldiers and veterans who are as disillusioned and war-weary as he is.

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PressTV Former US Army specialist Josh Steiber A former US Army specialist, who was part of the same unit that killed Iraqi civilians from a helicopter in 2007, says dehumanization is part of basic US army training. In an interview with Press TV, Josh Steiber explained the three years he spent in the US Army...