“They’re not even people”: why Eric Trump’s dehumanizing language matters
The psychology of what happens when we think our opponents are less than human is troubling.
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The statement is of the hyperbolic sort that commonly plays on Fox
News’s opinion programming. But this is considerably more troubling. The
language is plainly dehumanizing, and such language — historically and
psychologically — is dangerous.
Now, Eric Trump’s phrasing is unlikely to incite anything
horrible. It was a flip remark that he probably put little thought into.
But let’s take this as an opportunity to remember that the
language we use to talk about people we disagree with matters deeply.
Dehumanization is already disturbingly prevalent in America. We don’t need influential
people stoking it further.
Dehumanization is a mental loophole that allows us to dismiss other people’s feelings and experience
Look back at some of the most tragic episodes in human history and
you will find words and images that stripped people of their basic human
traits. In the Nazi era, the film The Eternal Jew depicted Jews as
rats. During the Rwandan genocide, Hutu officials called Tutsis “cockroaches”
that needed to be cleared out.
In the wake of World War II, psychologists wanted to understand how the genocide had happened. And we got Stanley Milgram’s infamous electroshock experiment, which showed how quickly people cave to authority. There was also Philip Zimbardo’s “prison experiment,” which showed how easily people in positions of power can abuse others. At Stanford, Albert Bandura showed that when participants overhear an experimenter call another study subject “an animal,” they’re more likely to give that subject a painful shock. If you think of murder and torture as universally taboo, then dehumanization of the “other” is a psychological loophole that can justify those acts.
From these experiments and those that followed, it became clear
that “it’s extremely easy to turn down someone’s ability to see someone else in
their full humanity,” Adam Waytz, a
psychologist at Northwestern
University, told me
earlier this year. Studies find even children as young as 5 years old see the
world in terms of us versus them.
In the months since Donald Trump’s election, it’s become
shockingly commonplace for Americans to blatantly dehumanize Muslims and
Mexican immigrants — and then use violence against them. Hate crimes against
Muslims in the US
are at their
highest levels since 2001. And there’s plenty of anecdotal evidence (and
some empirical
research too) that America
is becoming a coarser, meaner place.
Eric is not the only Trump to use dehumanizing language. You may
recall that Donald Trump Jr. compared Syrian
refugees to a bowl of Skittles. And one of the president’s favorite vocal
tics is say
people who fail at things are “like dogs.”
Dehumanizing beliefs are linked to aggression
In the 1970s, Bandura predicted that dehumanization would lead to
increased aggression. Today, there’s something similar: Willingness to
dehumanize others
predicts aggressive attitudes — and perhaps actions — towards those people.
Dehumanization makes you less likely to believe a person is capable of having
agency (i.e. an independent mind) and experience (i.e. the ability to feel
complicated emotions). You can start to see a person as more animal than human.
Dehumanization likens our opponents “to disease, disease carriers,
or … a faceless horde,” Nick Haslam, one of the world’s leading experts in
dehumanization psychology, told me early this year. “That helps you have less
compassion for them; that allows you to see them as morally unequal and not
deserving.”
Simply put: Dehumanization is a mental loophole that lets us harm
other people.
We can’t kid ourselves. Inside us all is the same mental machinery
that fueled the atrocities of the past century. “We think others to
death and then invent the battle-axe or the ballistic missiles with which to
actually kill them,” writes the philosopher Sam Keen. Turning on dehumanization
won’t immediately lead to massacre, but it does make it easier to make life
marginally worse for the marginalized. And yes: dehumanization exists in America today, particularly
towards Muslims and immigrant groups. It’s self-sustaining: Believing you
have been dehumanized is correlated with willingness to dehumanize and act
violently against others.
It matters that Eric Trump said this. We
often look to the powerful and influential for cues on how to behave. If
it’s okay for the rich and successful Eric Trump to believe his father’s
opponents are less than human, then others may too.
The dark psychology of dehumanization, explained
As anti-Muslim rhetoric increases under Trump, more Americans are seeing Muslims as less than human.
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These mental programs — etched in all of us — are also the sources
of horror and pain.
Nour Kteily is a psychologist at Northwestern University
whose research is about understanding one of the darkest, most ancient, and
most disturbing mental programs encoded into our minds: dehumanization, the
ability to see fellow men and women as less than human.
Psychologists are no strangers to this subject. But the prevailing
wisdom has been that most people are not willing to admit to having prejudice
against others.
Kteily suspected otherwise. And so he and his colleagues created a
new way to measure people’s levels of blatant dehumanization of other groups.
It’s not subtle.
In Kteily’s studies, participants — typically groups of mostly white Americans — are shown this (scientifically inaccurate) image of a human ancestor slowly learning how to stand on two legs and become fully human. And then they are told to rate members of different groups — such as Muslims, Americans, and Swedes — on how evolved they are on a scale of 0 to 100.
Many people in these studies give members of other groups a
perfect score, 100, fully human. But many others give others scores putting
them closer to animals.
“We have this incredible capacity for cooperation; it’s what makes
us human in many ways,” Kteily says. “And yet we have this capacity for
othering.”
And that conclusion is opening a Pandora’s box of revelations
about the new wave of intolerance toward Muslims and immigrants in America under
President Donald Trump — and what it could bring about.
“Dehumanization doesn’t only occur in wartime,” says Nick Haslam,
a psychologist who is the world’s current leading expert on the topic. “It’s
happening right here, right now. And every day, good people who don’t see
themselves as being prejudiced bigots are nevertheless falling prey to it.”
Dehumanization is a mental loophole that lets us harm other people
Thousands of years ago, humans would have felt a pang of anxiety
when they saw the silhouette of a foreign tribe marching over a hill. We still
have that anxiety inside of us today. Often “people’s spontaneous, knee-jerk
reactions to other people who are dramatically different from them is
negative,” says Susan Fiske, a psychologist at Princeton University
and a leading expert on prejudice. This is especially true when we have quick,
minimal exposure to them — as we do today via the media. These thin slices
activate the us-versus-them conflict encoded in our minds since the dawn of
humanity.
Look back at some of the most tragic episodes in human history and
you will find words and images that stripped people of their basic human
traits. In the Nazi era, the film The Eternal Jew depicted Jews as
rats. During the Rwandan genocide, Hutu officials called Tutsis “cockroaches”
that needed to be cleared out.
In the wake of World War II, psychologists wanted to understand
how the genocide had happened. And we got Stanley Milgram’s infamous
electroshock experiment, which showed how quickly people cave to authority.
There was also Philip Zimbardo’s “prison experiment,” which showed how easily
people in positions of power can abuse others. At Stanford, Albert Bandura,
showed that when participants overhear an experimenter call another study
subject “an animal,” they’re more likely to give that subject a painful shock.
If you think of murder and torture as universally taboo, then dehumanization of
the “other” is a psychological loophole that can justify them.
From these experiments, and those that followed, it became clear
that “it’s extremely easy to turn down someone’s ability to see someone else in
their full humanity,” says Adam Waytz, a
psychologist at Northwestern
University who studies
how people think about minds and collaborates with Kteily. Even children as
young as 5 years old see the world in terms of us versus them.
Fiske at Princeton has studied how immigrants and refugees are uniformly discriminated against the world over. She’s conducted neuroscience research that shows when we dehumanize others, the regions of our brain associated with disgust turn on and the regions associated with empathy turn off. What’s shocking about Kteily’s results from the “Ascent of Man” experiment, she says, is that “people are willing to admit that they have relative scales of humanity in their heads.”
Kteily grew up in Lebanon,
a country with a front-row seat to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Where he’s
from, it’s not uncommon for people to compare members of another group to
animals or to lower life forms. Suicide bombers killing civilians at cafes and
soldiers being aggressive toward children, he says, are a constant reminder “of
what happens when you really don’t care if the other side lives or dies.”
And even though Americans don’t like to talk about it, Kteily had
a hunch that they too were just as capable of blatant dehumanization.
With the “Ascent of Man” tool, Kteily and collaborators Emile
Bruneau, Adam Waytz, and Sarah Cotterill found that on average, Americans rate
other Americans as being highly evolved, with an average score in the 90s. But
disturbingly, many also rated Muslims, Mexican immigrants, and Arabs as less
evolved.
“We typically see scores that average 75, 76,” for Muslims, Kteily
says. “Which I think is a lot on a scale that’s so extreme.” And about a
quarter of study participants will rate Muslims on a score of 60 or below.
This shows that perception of “otherness” is like a dial in our
minds that can be turned on. That would be troubling enough, if the research
also didn’t make two predictions about dehumanization’s power to make the world
a more hostile place.
Dehumanization is correlated with support for policies such as a “Muslim ban”
In the months since Donald Trump was elected president, it’s become
shockingly commonplace for Americans to blatantly dehumanize Muslims and
Mexican immigrants — and then use violence against them. Hate crimes against
Muslims in the US
are at their
highest levels since 2001. In the 1970s, Bandura predicted that
dehumanization leads to increased aggression. Today, Kteily and colleagues find
something similar: Willingness to dehumanize on the “Ascent of Man” scale
predicts aggressive attitudes toward the Muslim world.
People who dehumanize are more likely to blame Muslims as a whole
for the actions of a few perpetrators. They are more likely to support policies
restricting the immigration of Arabs to the United States. People who
dehumanize low-status or marginalized groups score higher on a measure called
“social dominance orientation,” meaning that they favor inequality among groups
in society, with some groups dominating others.
It goes on: People who dehumanize are more likely to agree with statements
such as, “Muslims are a potential cancer to this country,” and, “The attacks on
San Bernardino
prove it: Muslims are a threat to people from this country.”
And , in a study, blatant dehumanization of Muslims and Mexican
immigrants was strongly correlated with Trump support — even when compared with
support for other Republican candidates. The data is “consistent with the idea
that support for some of the Republican candidates (and Trump in particular)
comes not despite their dehumanizing rhetoric but in part because of it,”
Kteily and Bruneau conclude in the journal Personality and Social
Psychology Bulletin.
(Interestingly, their study found that dehumanization was negatively
correlated with support for Bernie Sanders. That is, the more people dehumanized,
the less likely they were to support Sanders. There was no correlation in
either direction for Hillary Clinton.)
Dehumanizing policies can kick-start a cycle of retribution and hostility
During the Republican presidential primary, Kteily and Bruneau
surveyed 200 Muslims in the US,
and asked them to respond to statements such as, “Donald Trump sees people from
Muslim backgrounds as sub-human,” and, “Donald Trump thinks of people from
Muslim background as animal-like.”
On average, the Muslims in the sample “felt strongly disliked and
dehumanized by both Trump and non-Muslim Americans more broadly.” On a scale of
1 to 7, with 1 indicating that Muslims did not feel dehumanized at all and 7
meaning they felt it intensely, the group average was 5.66, well beyond the
halfway mark. (Similar results were found in a concurrent study of Latino
Americans.)
This survey wasn’t designed to be nationally representative of all
the Muslims living in America.
Instead, it was designed to figure out what happens inside the mind of someone
who feels dehumanized.
“And the consequences were big,” Bruneau explains. The more
Muslims felt dehumanized by Trump, the more they dehumanized Trump.
The more they felt dehumanized, the less likely they were to say
they’d report suspicious activities in their communities.
The research predicts a vicious cycle. Trump’s policy and rhetoric
gin up fear and dehumanize Muslim Americans. That provokes a more violent
response from certain individuals in the Muslim community. Trump responds. And
suddenly the whole country is a more hostile, less safe place for everyone, the
researchers conclude in a paper that was recently published
in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.
Ben Herzig, a clinical psychologist in the Boston area who specializes in treating
people from the Muslim community, says some of his patients are responding by
withdrawing.
“When members of a marginalized group are dehumanized, their
tendency is ... to retreat into familiar circles where they know they will be
accepted by people like themselves,” Herzig says.
Dehumanizing rhetoric against Muslims is becoming more acceptable in the Trump era
As Vox’s Zack Beauchamp has written,
Trump’s top adviser, Steve Bannon, is a devotee of a right-wing worldview known
as “counter-jihad.” Counter-jihadists, Beauchamp explains, “argue that a
correct reading of Islamic scripture shows that violence is intrinsic to Islam
— that the religious doctrine itself, properly understood, commands Muslims to
kill subjugate unbelievers.”
Counter-jihad lumps all 1.3 billion Muslims together into one
malicious group of people less capable of compassion and cooperation. And it
suggests that Muslims are unable to separate themselves from their group as
individual thinkers.
Dalia Mogahed, the director of research at Institute
for Social Policy and Understanding, a nonprofit that studies Islamophobia,
says dehumanizing rhetoric against Muslims is becoming more acceptable to
Americans in the Trump era.
“What we have in this era that’s unique is the legitimizing of
those perspectives with laws, with people in [positions] of authority,” she
says. “It’s given license and legitimacy to these perspective. they’re not
perspectives that people have to hide or sugar coat, or qualify in any way.”
And as she points out “it isn’t just on the right.” Bill Maher, a liberal
pundit, routinely calls Islam a violent religion.
“I’m hearing dehumanizing language that I’ve never heard before,”
says Mogahed, who has conducted polling on the intersection of Islam and
society for most of her career. And it was especially acute during the
presidential election. Ben Carson compared Muslims to dogs. Trump told
an apocryphal story of soldiers killing terrorists with bullets dipped in
pig’s blood (as if Muslims were creatures that needed to be killed by
supernatural means). Donald Trump Jr., compared Syrian
refugees to a bowl of Skittles.
There are signs that anti-Islamic sentiment is getting stronger. A
January 2016 poll conducted by Mogahed’s group found
more than half of Muslim Americans experienced discrimination in the previous
year. Reports of hate crimes against Muslims in the US are at their
highest levels since 2001. In the past seven weeks, there have
been four mosque burnings across America.
It’s hard to draw a direct line from Trump to these incidents. But
it’s plausible that he is emboldening people with these feelings, and helping
to change norms
around talking about members of other racial and ethnic groups.
Meanwhile, Trump still has in
place a temporary ban on refugees. He just signed a new ban
on issuing visa to travelers from six Muslim-majority countries. In his
address to a joint session of Congress on February 28, he invited families of
people killed by “illegal immigrants,” furthering the
misconception that undocumented immigrants are more dangerous than other
people.
If Trump can stoke perceptions of threat, he can stoke
dehumanization. Kteily and his co-authors ran the “Ascent of Man” scale before,
during, and after the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013. After the attack,
blatant dehumanization of Muslims jumped up significantly.
It’s unlikely we’re on the verge of a horrific genocide. But we
also can’t kid ourselves. Inside us all is the same mental machinery that
fueled the atrocities of the past century. “We think others to death
and then invent the battle-axe or the ballistic missiles with which to actually
kill them,” writes the philosopher Sam Keen. Turning on dehumanization won’t
immediately lead to massacre, but it does make it easier to make life
marginally worse for the marginalized.
We can stop the cycle of dehumanization. But it’s far from easy.
As we’ve seen, the vicious cycles of dehumanization and
retaliation can spin — without end — for centuries.
So how to break the cycle?
Part of the reason some Americans dehumanize Muslims is because
they think Muslims dehumanize us. But this assumption is wrong.
In the book she wrote with John L. Esposito, Who
Speaks For Islam? What a billion Muslims really think,
Mogahed lay out data from 50,000 interviews from Muslims around the world. And
she finds that the Muslim world does hold a lot of admiration for American
values. “It’s not that Muslims have positive opinions of the United States.
They don’t. But they actually love and admire our freedom.”
In a study,
Kteily and Bruneau created a fake Boston Globe article that highlighted
Mogahed’s research. When mostly white participants read that Muslims actually
admired Americans, they didn’t dehumanize them as much on the Ascent scale.
This intervention is also remarkably simple. If you take one point
away from this article, make it this: Muslims don’t despise America. In
many ways, they admire it.
It also helps to get white Americans to think through their
hypocrisy. In a study under review, Bruneau finds that when white people are
asked questions such as, “Are all Christians responsible for the actions of the
Westboro Baptist Church?” they begin to see the folly of blaming all Muslims
for a single act of terror. “The hypocrisy is totally unconscious for people,”
Bruneau explains. (The point isn’t to call people hypocrites, but rather to
have them come to the realization on their own.)
Overall, the experts I spoke to all said that the No. 1 way to
combat dehumanization is also, frustratingly, one of the hardest to accomplish:
simply getting to know people who are different from us.
It’s hard because we have many opportunities — via the news and
social media — to get the thin-slice exposure to unfamiliar groups that
activates the us-versus-them program in our brains. And we have so few
opportunities to do the hard work of breaking through those first impressions
and getting to know the human soul inside.
“I don’t agree with the idea that multicultural societies have to
be a powder keg,” Kteily says.
Just as we have the mental capacity to dehumanize, we’re equipped
with the mental programs that forge trust and understanding. It’s up to us to turn
them on.
Further Reading: Understanding human psychology in the age of Trump
- Trump understands what many miss: people don’t make decisions based on facts
- Fear of refugees and immigrants is emotional, not logical. And that is what makes it so powerful.
- White fear of demographic change is a powerful psychological force
- The neuroscience of why it can be so hard to change someone's political beliefs
For diagrams and charts in this article go to:
https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2017/3/7/14456154/dehumanization-psychology-explained
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