2011/01/01 by Lasana T. Harris, Susan T. Fiske · 175 citations
Neuroscience · Psychology · #Action Observation and Synchronization #Anthropology #Dehumanization #Emotions and Moral Behavior #Neuroscience #Perception #Psychology #Psychology of Moral and Emotional Judgment #Social psychology #Sociology
paper · open access · doi:10.1027/2151-2604/a000065
published in Zeitschrift für Psychologie 219(3), 175-181 (Johann Ambrosius Barth Verlag)
openalex publication_date 2011/01/01 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01
Dehumanized perception, a failure to spontaneously consider the mind of another person, may be a psychological mechanism facilitating inhumane acts like torture. Social cognition - considering someone's mind - recognizes the other as a human being subject to moral treatment. Social neuroscience has reliably shown that participants normally activate a social-cognition neural network to pictures and thoughts of other people; our previous work shows that parts of this network uniquely fail to engage for traditionally dehumanized targets (homeless persons or drug addicts; see Harris & Fiske, 2009, for review). This suggests participants may not consider these dehumanized groups' minds. Study 1 demonstrates that participants do fail to spontaneously think about the contents of these targets' minds when imagining a day in their life, and rate them differently on a number of human-perception dimensions. Study 2 shows that these human-perception dimension ratings correlate with activation in brain regions beyond the social-cognition network, including areas implicated in disgust, attention, and cognitive control. These results suggest that disengaging social cognition affects a number of other brain processes and hints at some of the complex psychological mechanisms potentially involved in atrocities against humanity.