# data[].attributes.headline
C.S. LEWIS AND HUMAN NATURE (thanks Mrs. Ledet)

# data[].attributes.subject
C.S. LEWIS AND HUMAN NATURE (thanks Mrs. Ledet)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The following excerpt from Lewis' book "Mere Christianity" describes very well the idea of a Law of human nature, as a foundation for universal ethics.
Every one has heard people quarreling. Sometimes it sounds funny and sometimes it sounds merely unpleasant; but however it sounds, I believe we can learn something very important from listening to the kind of things they say. They say things like this: "How'd you like it if anyone did the same to you?"-"That's my seat, I was there first"-"Leave him alone, he isn't doing you any harm"- "Why should you shove in first?"-"Give me a bit of your orange, I gave you a bit of mine"-"Come on, you promised." People say things like that every day, educated people as well as uneducated, and children as well as grown-ups.

Now what interests me about all these remarks is that the man who makes them is not merely saying that the other man's behaviour does not happen to please him. He is appealing to some kind of standard of behaviour which he expects the other man to know about. And the other man very seldom replies: "To hell with your standard." Nearly always he tries to make out that what he has been doing does not really go against the standard, or that if it does there is some special excuse. He pretends there is some special reason in this particular case why the person who took the seat first should not keep it, or that things were quite different when he was given the bit of orange, or that something has turned up which lets him off keeping his promise.

It looks, in fact, very much as if both parties had in mind some kind of Law or Rule of fair play or decent behavior or morality or whatever you like to call it, about which they really agreed. And they have. If they had not, they might, of course, fight like animals, but they could not quarrel in the human sense of the word. Quarrelling means trying to show that the other man is in the wrong. And there would be no sense in trying to do that unless you and he had some sort of agreement as to what Right and Wrong are; just as there would be no sense in saying that a footballer had committed a foul unless there was some agreement about the rules of football.

Now this Law or Rule about Right and Wrong used to be called the Law of Nature. Nowadays, when we talk of the "laws of nature" we usually mean things like gravitation, or heredity, or the laws of chemistry. But when the older thinkers called the Law of Right and Wrong "the Law of Nature," they really meant the Law of Human Nature. The idea was that, just as all bodies are governed by the law of gravitation and organisms by biological laws, so the creature called man also had his law-with this great difference, that a body could not choose whether it obeyed the law of gravitation or not, but a man could choose either to obey the Law of Human Nature or to disobey it. We may put this in another way. Each man is at every moment subjected to several different sets of laws but there is only one of these which he is free to disobey. As a body, he is subjected to gravitation and cannot disobey it; if you leave him unsupported in mid-air, he has no more choice about falling than a stone has. As an organism, he is subjected to various biological laws which he cannot disobey any more than an animal can. That is, he cannot disobey those laws which he shares with other things; but the law which is peculiar to his human nature, the law he does not share with animals or vegetables or inorganic things, is the one he can disobey if he chooses.

This law was called the Law of Nature because people thought that every one knew it by nature and did not need to be taught it. They did not mean, of course, that you might not find an odd individual here and there who did not know it, just as you find a few people who are color-blind or have no ear for a tune. But taking the race as a whole, they thought that the human idea of decent behavior was obvious to every one. And I believe they were right. If they were not, then all the things we said about the war were nonsense. What was the sense in saying the enemy were in the wrong unless Right is a real thing which the Nazis at bottom knew as well as we did and ought to have practiced? If they had had no notion of what we mean by right, then, though we might still have had to fight them, we could no more have blamed them for that than for the color of their hair.

I know that some people say the idea of a Law of Nature or decent behavior known to all men is unsound, because different civilizations and different ages have had quite different moralities.

But this is not true. There have been differences between their moralities, but these have never amounted to anything like a total difference. If anyone will take the trouble to compare the moral teaching of, say, the ancient Egyptians, Babylonians, Hindus, Chinese, Greeks and Romans, what will really strike him will be how very like they are to each other and to our own. Some of the evidence for this I have put together in the appendix of another book called The Abolition of Man; but for our present purpose I need only ask the reader to think what a totally different morality would mean. Think of a country where people were admired for running away in battle, or where a man felt proud of double-crossing all the people who had been kindest to him.

You might just as well try to imagine a country where two and two made five. Men have differed as regards what people you ought to be unselfish to-whether it was only your own family, or your fellow countrymen, or everyone. But they have always agreed that you ought not to put yourself first. Selfishness has never been admired. Men have differed as to whether you should have one wife or four. But they have always agreed that you must not simply have any woman you liked.

But the most remarkable thing is this. Whenever you find a man who says he does not believe in a real Right and Wrong, you will find the same man going back on this a moment later. He may break his promise to you, but if you try breaking one to him he will be complaining "It's not fair" before you can say Jack Robinson. A nation may say treaties do not matter, but then, next minute, they spoil their case by saying that the particular treaty they want to break was an unfair one. But if treaties do not matter, and if there is no such thing as Right and Wrong- in other words, if there is no Law of Nature-what is the difference between a fair treaty and an unfair one? Have they not let the cat out of the bag and shown that, whatever they say, they really know the Law of Nature just like anyone else?

It seems, then, we are forced to believe in a real Right and Wrong. People may be sometimes mistaken about them, just as people sometimes get their sums wrong; but they are not a matter of mere taste and opinion any more than the multiplication table. Now if we are agreed about that, I go on to my next point, which is this. None of us are really keeping the Law of Nature. If there are any exceptions among you, I apologize to them. They had much better read some other work, for nothing I am going to say concerns them.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The following excerpt from Lewis' book "Mere Christianity" describes very well the idea of a Law of human nature, as a foundation for universal ethics. Every one has heard people quarreling.

# data[].attributes.body
-made in the image and likeness of God, so we're inherently good
-contaminated by original sin and society

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Human Nature and the Purpose of Existence

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Made in the image and likeness of God, humans are intrinsically good, though corrupted by sin. Humanity's purpose is to live forever with God in the happiness of heaven.

# data[].attributes.body
"Then, amid the roar of bees in the afternoon sunlight, Simon found for [the littluns] the fruit they could not reach, pulled off the choicest from up in the foliage, passed them back down to the endless, outstretched hands. The littluns watched him inscrutably over double handfuls of ripe fruit." (Golding)

~literally the feeding of the 5 thousand. the story of the talents. Simon reached out to the little kids just like Jesus and JP2. Also, could be analyzed like how Jesus takes our works and makes them more fruitful when we invite him in. Also, "the roar of bees" could represent the stinging words of the pharisees and Sadducees who couldn't understand how Jesus spent time with the sinners.~

# data[].attributes.headline
Simon as Jesus -Shmoop's take. (There's so much more than this, too! It's insane!)

# data[].attributes.subject
Simon as Jesus -Shmoop's take. (There's so much more than this, too! It's insane!)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Everything you ever wanted to know about Simon in Lord of the Flies, written by masters of this stuff just for you.

# data[].attributes.body
-got crazier as time when by
-had 76 items on the table, including a loaded pistol with one bullet, nails, metal objects
-note that read: I am an object. You can use everything on the table. I will take full responsibility, even of killing me. The time will be 6 hours.
-originally began with like playing dress up, giving her roses, kissing her on the cheek, but as time went by, they stripped her, scraped her, drank her blood, carried her, tied her up, put the pistol in her hand, etc.
-when the museum authority arrived and said that time was up. People waited until she moved and began acting like a human, and then they all ran away. They couldn't confront her.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Marina Abramovic on performing "Rhythm 0" (1974)

# data[].attributes.body
-It's not taking the humanity away, it's the fact that "our best and our worst tendencies arise precisely from seeing others as human."
-It's not that criminals or murderers are blinded by the chance to do something right, it's the fact that they believe they ARE doing what's right; that they're playing the role of an officer or a hero.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
A recent episode of the dystopian television series "Black Mirror" begins with a soldier hunting down and killing hideous humanoids called roaches. It's a standard science-fiction scenario, man against monster, but there's a twist: it turns out that the soldier and his cohort have brain implants that make them see the faces and bodies of their targets as monstrous, to hear their pleas for mercy as noxious squeaks. When our hero's implant fails, he discovers that he isn't a brave defender of the human race-he's a murderer of innocent people, part of a campaign to exterminate members of a despised group akin to the Jews of Europe in the nineteen-forties.

The philosopher David Livingstone Smith, commenting on this episode on social media, wondered whether its writer had read his book " Less Than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave, and Exterminate Others " (St. Martin's). It's a thoughtful and exhaustive exploration of human cruelty, and the episode perfectly captures its core idea: that acts such as genocide happen when one fails to appreciate the humanity of others.

One focus of Smith's book is the attitudes of slave owners; the seventeenth-century missionary Morgan Godwyn observed that they believed the Negroes, "though in their Figure they carry some resemblances of Manhood, yet are indeed no Men " but, rather, "Creatures destitute of Souls, to be ranked among Brute Beasts, and treated accordingly." Then there's the Holocaust. Like many Jews my age, I was raised with stories of gas chambers, gruesome medical experiments, and mass graves-an evil that was explained as arising from the Nazis' failure to see their victims as human. In the words of the psychologist Herbert C. Kelman, "The inhibitions against murdering fellow human beings are generally so strong that the victims must be deprived of their human status if systematic killing is to proceed in a smooth and orderly fashion." The Nazis used bureaucratic euphemisms such as "transfer" and "selection" to sanitize different forms of murder.

As the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss noted, "humankind ceases at the border of the tribe, of the linguistic group, even sometimes of the village." Today, the phenomenon seems inescapable. Google your favorite despised human group-Jews, blacks, Arabs, gays, and so on-along with words like "vermin," "roaches," or "animals," and it will all come spilling out. Some of this rhetoric is seen as inappropriate for mainstream discourse. But wait long enough and you'll hear the word "animals" used even by respectable people, referring to terrorists, or to Israelis or Palestinians, or to undocumented immigrants, or to deporters of undocumented immigrants. Such rhetoric shows up in the speech of white supremacists-but also when the rest of us talk about white supremacists.

It's not just a matter of words. At Auschwitz, the Nazis tattooed numbers on their prisoners' arms. Throughout history, people have believed that it was acceptable to own humans, and there were explicit debates in which scholars and politicians mulled over whether certain groups (such as blacks and Native Americans) were "natural slaves." Even in the past century, there were human zoos, where Africans were put in enclosures for Europeans to gawk at.

Early psychological research on dehumanization looked at what made the Nazis different from the rest of us. But psychologists now talk about the ubiquity of dehumanization. Nick Haslam, at the University of Melbourne, and Steve Loughnan, at the University of Edinburgh, provide a list of examples, including some painfully mundane ones: "Outraged members of the public call sex offenders animals. Psychopaths treat victims merely as means to their vicious ends. The poor are mocked as libidinous dolts. Passersby look through homeless people as if they were transparent obstacles. Dementia sufferers are represented in the media as shuffling zombies."

The thesis that viewing others as objects or animals enables our very worst conduct would seem to explain a great deal. Yet there's reason to think that it's almost the opposite of the truth.

At some European soccer games, fans make monkey noises at African players and throw bananas at them. Describing Africans as monkeys is a common racist trope, and might seem like yet another example of dehumanization. But plainly these fans don't really think the players are monkeys; the whole point of their behavior is to disorient and humiliate. To believe that such taunts are effective is to assume that their targets would be ashamed to be thought of that way-which implies that, at some level, you think of them as people after all.

Consider what happened after Hitler annexed Austria, in 1938. Timothy Snyder offers a haunting description in " Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning ":

The next morning the "scrubbing parties" began. Members of the Austrian SA, working from lists, from personal knowledge, and from the knowledge of passersby, identified Jews and forced them to kneel and clean the streets with brushes. This was a ritual humiliation. Jews, often doctors and lawyers or other professionals, were suddenly on their knees performing menial labor in front of jeering crowds. Ernest P. remembered the spectacle of the "scrubbing parties" as "amusement for the Austrian population." A journalist described "the fluffy Viennese blondes, fighting one another to get closer to the elevating spectacle of the ashen-faced Jewish surgeon on hands and knees before a half-dozen young hooligans with Swastika armlets and dog-whips." Meanwhile, Jewish girls were sexually abused, and older Jewish men were forced to perform public physical exercise.

The Jews who were forced to scrub the streets-not to mention those subjected to far worse degradations-were not thought of as lacking human emotions. Indeed, if the Jews had been thought to be indifferent to their treatment, there would have been nothing to watch here; the crowd had gathered because it wanted to see them suffer. The logic of such brutality is the logic of metaphor: to assert a likeness between two different things holds power only in the light of that difference. The sadism of treating human beings like vermin lies precisely in the recognition that they are not.

What about violence more generally? Some evolutionary psychologists and economists explain assault, rape, and murder as rational actions, benefitting the perpetrator or the perpetrator's genes. No doubt some violence-and a reputation for being willing and able to engage in violence-can serve a useful purpose, particularly in more brutal environments. On the other hand, much violent behavior can be seen as evidence of a loss of control. It's Criminology 101 that many crimes are committed under the influence of drugs and alcohol, and that people who assault, rape, and murder show less impulse control in other aspects of their lives as well. In the heat of passion, the moral enormity of the violent action loses its purchase.

But " Virtuous Violence: Hurting and Killing to Create, Sustain, End, and Honor Social Relationships " (Cambridge), by the anthropologist Alan Fiske and the psychologist Tage Rai, argues that these standard accounts often have it backward. In many instances, violence is neither a cold-blooded solution to a problem nor a failure of inhibition; most of all, it doesn't entail a blindness to moral considerations. On the contrary, morality is often a motivating force: "People are impelled to violence when they feel that to regulate certain social relationships, imposing suffering or death is necessary, natural, legitimate, desirable, condoned, admired, and ethically gratifying." Obvious examples include suicide bombings, honor killings, and the torture of prisoners during war, but Fiske and Rai extend the list to gang fights and violence toward intimate partners. For Fiske and Rai, actions like these often reflect the desire to do the right thing, to exact just vengeance, or to teach someone a lesson. There's a profound continuity between such acts and the punishments that-in the name of requital, deterrence, or discipline-the criminal-justice system lawfully imposes. Moral violence, whether reflected in legal sanctions, the killing of enemy soldiers in war, or punishing someone for an ethical transgression, is motivated by the recognition that its victim is a moral agent, someone fully human.

In the fiercely argued and timely study " Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny" (Oxford), the philosopher Kate Manne makes a consonant argument about sexual violence. "The idea of rapists as monsters exonerates by caricature," she writes, urging us to recognize "the banality of misogyny," the disturbing possibility that "people may know full well that those they treat in brutally degrading and inhuman ways are fellow human beings, underneath a more or less thin veneer of false consciousness."

Manne is arguing against a weighty and well-established school of thought. Catharine A. MacKinnon has posed the question: "When will women be human?" Rae Langton has explored the idea of sexual solipsism, a doubt that women's minds exist. And countless theorists talk about "objectification," the tendency to deny women's autonomy and subjecthood, and to scant their experiences. Like Fiske and Rai, Manne sees a larger truth in the opposite tendency. In misogyny, she argues, "often, it's not a sense of women's humanity that is lacking. Her humanity is precisely the problem."

Men, she proposes, have come to expect certain things from women-attention, admiration, sympathy, solace, and, of course, sex and love. Misogyny is the mind-set that polices and enforces these goals; it's the "law enforcement branch" of the patriarchy. The most obvious example of this attitude is the punishing of "bad women," where being bad means failing to give men what they want. But misogyny also involves rewarding women who do conform, and sympathizing with men (Manne calls this "himpathy") who have done awful things to women.

As a case study of misogyny, Manne considers strangulation-almost always performed by men on female intimate partners-which she describes as "a demonstration of authority and domination," a form of torture that often leaves no marks. Other forms of expressive violence are very much intended to leave marks, notably "vitriolage," or acid attacks, directed against girls and women in Bangladesh and elsewhere. Catalysts for such attacks include refusal of marriage, sex, and romance. Then, there are so-called family annihilators, almost always men, who kill their families and, typically, themselves. Often, the motivation is shame, but sometimes hatred is a factor as well; and sometimes the mother of murdered children is left alive, perhaps notified by phone or a letter afterward- See what you've made me do. The victim is also the audience; her imagined response figures large in the perpetrator's imagination.

Manne delves into the case of Elliot Rodger, who, in 2014, went on a killing spree, targeting people at random, after he was denied entry to a sorority house at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He slew six people and injured fourteen more before killing himself. In a videotape, Rodger, who was twenty-two, explained that women "gave their affection and sex and love to other men but never to me." And then, talking to these women, he said, "I will punish you all for it . . . . I'll take great pleasure in slaughtering all of you."

Manne makes clear that Rodger wasn't objectifying women; he was simply enraged that their capacity for love and romance didn't extend to him. Manne's analysis can be seen as an exploration of an observation made by Margaret Atwood-that men are afraid that women will laugh at them, and women are afraid that men will kill them. For Manne, such violent episodes are merely an extreme manifestation of everyday misogyny, and she extends her analysis to catcalling, attitudes toward abortion, and the predations of Donald Trump.

Nor are the mechanisms she identifies confined to misogyny. The aggressions licensed by moral entitlement, the veneer of bad faith: those things are evident in a wide range of phenomena, from slaveholders' religion-tinctured justifications to the Nazi bureaucrats' squeamishness about naming the activity they were organizing, neither of which would have been necessary if the oppressors were really convinced that their victims were beasts.

If the worst acts of cruelty aren't propelled by dehumanization, not all dehumanization is accompanied by cruelty. Manne points out that there's nothing wrong with a surgeon viewing her patients as mere bodies when they're on the operating table; in fact, it's important for doctors not to have certain natural reactions-anger, moral disgust, sexual desire-when examining patients. The philosopher Martha C. Nussbaum has given the example of using your sleeping partner's stomach as a pillow when lying in bed, and goes on to explore the more fraught case of objectification during sexual intercourse, suggesting that there's nothing inherently wrong about this so long as it is consensual and restricted to the bedroom.

As a philosopher, Manne grounds her arguments in more technical literature, and at one point she emphasizes the connection between her position and the Oxford philosopher P. F. Strawson's theory of "reactive attitudes." Strawson argued that, when we're dealing with another person as a person, we can't help experiencing such attitudes as admiration and gratitude, resentment and blame. You generally don't feel this way toward rocks or rodents. Acknowledging the humanity of another, then, has its risks, and these are neatly summarized by Manne, who notes that seeing someone as a person makes it possible for that person to be a true friend or beloved spouse, but it also makes it possible for people to be "an intelligible rival, enemy, usurper, insubordinate, betrayer, etc." She goes on:

Moreover, in being capable of rationality, agency, autonomy, and judgment, they are also someone who could coerce, manipulate, humiliate, or shame you. In being capable of abstract relational thought and congruent moral emotions, they are capable of thinking ill of you and regarding you contemptuously. In being capable of forming complex desires and intentions, they are capable of harboring malice and plotting against you. In being capable of valuing, they may value what you abhor and abhor what you value. They may hence be a threat to all that you cherish.

If there's something missing from these approaches to violence, it's attention to first-person attitudes, how we think about ourselves as moral agents. I can resent someone, but I can also feel shame at how I treated him or her. Fiske and Rai sometimes write as if the paradigm of moralistic violence were the final scene of the movie in which our hero blows away the terrorist or the serial killer or the rapist-a deeply satisfying act that has everyone cheering. But what about doubt and ambivalence? Some fathers who severely beat their misbehaving children, or some soldiers who engage in "punitive rape," are confident in the moral rightness of their acts. But some aren't. Real moral progress may involve studying the forms of doubt and ambivalence that sometimes attend acts of brutality.

In a masterly and grim book, " One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps " (Little, Brown), Andrea Pitzer articulates some of the perplexities of her subject. A concentration camp exists, she says, whenever a government holds groups of civilians outside the normal legal process, and nearly all nations have had them. They can be the most savage places on earth, but this isn't an essential feature. During the Second World War, American camps for the Japanese weren't nearly as terrible as camps in Germany and the Soviet Union. There are even some camps that began with noble intentions, such as refugee camps set up to provide food and shelter-though they tend to worsen over time, evolving into what Pitzer describes as "permanent purgatory."

When concentration camps are established, they are usually said to exist to protect the larger population from some suspect group, or to be part of a civilizing message, or to be a way to restrain some group of civilians from supporting hostile forces. From this perspective, concentration camps are a means to an end, an example of instrumental violence. Typically, though, the camps do have a punitive aspect. Pitzer tells of how, after the First World War, Bavaria's Social Democratic premier, Kurt Eisner, was slow to demand that Germans be released from French and British camps; he wished instead to appeal to the Allies' sense of humanity. Eisner was Jewish, and Hitler fumed about this "betrayal" in a speech in 1922, saying that the Jews should learn "how it feels to live in concentration camps!"

Certainly, Pitzer's description of various concentration camps contains so many examples of cruelty and degradation that it's impossible to see them as a mere failure to acknowledge the humanity of their victims. As the scholar of warfare Johannes Lang has observed of the Nazi death camps, "What might look like the dehumanization of the other is instead a way to exert power over another human."

The limitations of the dehumanization thesis are hardly good news. There has always been something optimistic about the idea that our worst acts of inhumanity are based on confusion. It suggests that we could make the world better simply by having a clearer grasp of reality-by deactivating those brain implants, or their ideological equivalent. The truth may be harder to accept: that our best and our worst tendencies arise precisely from seeing others as human. ♦

This article appears in the print edition of the November 27, 2017, issue, with the headline "Beastly."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A recent episode of the dystopian television series "Black Mirror" begins with a soldier hunting down and killing hideous humanoids called roaches. It's a standard science-fiction scenario, man against monster, but there's a twist: it turns out that the soldier and his cohort have brain implants that make them see the faces and bodies of their targets as monstrous, to hear their pleas for mercy as noxious squeaks.

# data[].attributes.body
- dehumanization - usually attacking people with differences (gender, race, religion, social class, disability, or even how we dress)
- people in the medical field talk about people by their diagnosis instead of by name ("the stroke in bed in number 6") i usually thought this was for security, but it is dehumanizing in a way
-Zimbardo (credited with Stanford experiment) wrote

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
[Article updated on 7 September 2017]

The ego defence of dehumanization involves seeing other people as less or other than human so as not to have to think about them so much and/or feel guilty for neglecting or abusing them.

One simple example of dehumanization is that of a person who thinks of her partner or child as a pet or even a great teddy bear so as to better forgive his many failings.

Dehumanization is easier if the target person or people are marked out as being different, perhaps by age, gender, race, religion, social class, disability, sexual orientation, or even so little as a different style of dress. Thus, in everyday life, it is all too common to see people in uniform such as waiters, cleaners, bus drivers, and police officers being treated as mere automatons devoid of any such human attributes as feelings or families.

In April 2011, riots broke out in Bristol, England over the opening of a new supermarket. During the riots, one Benjamin Cyster dropped a five stone concrete block from the top of a building onto an advancing line of police officers. The block caught PC Nicholas Fry square on the shoulder, knocking him flat to the ground. Instead of expressing anguish or remorse, Cyster continued rioting, and even exclaimed, 'I want to find that copper I hit on the head. I want to do it again.' During Cyster's trial (he received a total sentence of 11-and-a-half years), the court heard that Fry was recovering, but could not bring himself to tell his wife and three children about what Cyster had done to him for fear of upsetting them.

Diane Davies, a 62-year-old grandmother of nine from Anglesey in Wales, was holidaying in one of the most exclusive areas of Barbados. Then one day, in broad daylight, she was brutally raped by a complete stranger. One year on, in November 2011, she decided to talk about her ordeal in a national newspaper so as to expose the shabby treatment that she received from the island's authorities. Of particular note is that she felt certain that she would have been killed had she not remembered reading that a victim of attempted rape should talk to the rapist so that he might see her as a person rather than as an object of gratification. 'So I told him I was a 61-year-old grandmother with four children and nine grandchildren and felt he slightly softened. I think talking to him saved my life.'

Unfortunately, dehumanization is not limited to thugs and rapists, and may also be employed by supposedly decent, middle class people. For example, it is commonly employed by healthcare professionals to cope with distress at loss, grief, disease, and death - with patients being referred to by their diagnosis rather than by their name ('the stroke in bed number 6', 'the fractured hip in the ER'...), or just being thought of in terms of a long line of faceless 'patients'.

In the early 1970s, the psychologist Philip Zimbardo and his colleagues set up a mock prison with hidden cameras and microphones in the basement of Stanford University's psychology building. The researchers selected 24 healthy, well adjusted undergraduate students, mostly white and middle class men, and randomly assigned them to the roles of either prisoner or guard. The 'prisoners' were to remain in the mock prison 24-hours a day, while the 'guards' were to 'work' in three-man teams over eight-hour shifts. The experiment - which, not surprisingly, has been heavily criticized for its ethics - had been due to run for 14 days, but had to be stopped after just six days due to the aggressive and abusive behaviour of the 'guards' and the extreme adverse psychological reactions of the 'prisoners', five of whom had had to be released early.

Even Zimbardo, who had been acting as the prison warden, had overlooked the dehumanizing behaviour of the guards until graduate student Christina Maslach voiced objections to him. In his subsequent book, The Lucifer Effect, Zimbardo candidly looks back over the experiment and says, 'Only a few people were able to resist the situational temptations to yield to power and dominance while maintaining some semblance of morality and decency; obviously I was not among that noble class.' The Stanford Prison Experiment attracted a lot of interest after the horrific abuses that took place in the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, and is often upheld to demonstrate the important effect that situation can have on human behaviour.

Dehumanization is particularly common during times of war, when it may be incited by governments in a bid to prosecute, or quell opposition to, the war. If people can be seen as less than human, then they become dispensable, and any atrocity can be justified. Thus, Josef Goebbels, the Minister of 'Public Enlightenment and Propaganda' ( Volksaufkl ärung und Propaganda) in Hitler's Nazi regime, ruthlessly employed all contemporary methods of propaganda to inflame already existing anti-Semitic feelings. By pinning the blame for all the economic and social ills of the time on the Jewish people and then lampooning them as an 'inferior race', Goebbels prepared the ground for the progressive elimination of their rights and freedoms and, one thing leading to the next, for the mass genocide of the Holocaust.

Neel Burton is author of The Meaning of Madness, The Art of Failure: The Anti Self-Help Guide, Hide and Seek: The Psychology of Self-Deception, and other books.
Find Neel Burton on Twitter and Facebook

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Lucifer Effect: Creating Difference to Justify Atrocity

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Article updated on 7 September 2017] The ego defence of dehumanization involves seeing other people as less or other than human so as not to have to think about them so much and/or feel guilty for neglecting or abusing them.