AS I WRITE THIS, THE WORLD IS CURRENTLY EXPERIENCING several humanitarian crises. In Syria alone, over five million refugees have fled a civil war that has cost hundreds of thousands of lives. Meanwhile, European and American political referenda have rejected helping these refugees, over half of whom are children. Although Syria’s civil war began in March 2011, the rest of the world largely began paying attention only when two emblematic images of children began to circulate. The first image was that of three-year-old Kobani-born Aylan Kurdi lying lifeless on the beach after drowning in the Mediterranean Sea, trying to reach Europe. The second was one of a child left behind in Aleppo: five-year-old Omran Daqneesh shell-shocked, coated in dust and blood and waiting for medical attention after being pulled from a building damaged by an airstrike. The images of Kurdi and Daqneesh highlighted the human toll of the Syrian refugee crisis, a crisis in desperate need of a human face. These images represent, I believe, the power of human—to create meaning and morality and to influence and motivate action.
Refugees, particularly in this context, are one of the groups people most commonly dehumanize. In 2015, American presidential candidate and secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson likened Syrian refugees to dogs, stating, “If there’s a rabid dog running around in your neighborhood, you’re probably not going to assume something good about that dog, and you’re probably going to put your children out of the way.”1 During the influx of Syrian refugees to Europe, British Prime Minister David Cameron assured an interviewer that he would secure the French port of Calais (also referred to as the “jungle”) despite a “swarm” of migrants trying to access Great Britain.2
In one of the stranger instances of refugee dehumanization during the 2016 US presidential election, Donald Trump Jr., the presidential candidate’s son, tweeted an image of Skittles candy and wrote, “If I had a bowl of skittles and I told you just three would kill you, would you take a handful? That’s our Syrian refugee problem.” Many, including CNN host Chris Cuomo, immediately pointed out how dehumanizing the metaphor was. Others noted that the Skittles analogy stemmed from an anti-Semitic 1938 children’s story, titled “Der Giftpilz” or “The Poisonous Mushroom,” penned by Nazi propagandist Julius Streicher.3 In this story, Streicher equates the Jews with the poisonous mushroom as Trump Jr. did with the poisonous candy.
Fearing that Syrians would import Islamic extremism to the United States, Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller posted on Facebook side-by-side images of rattlesnakes and refugees pouring into a truck. Next to the images, he wrote, “Can you tell me which of these rattlers won’t bite you? Sure, some won’t, but tell me which ones so we can bring them into the house.”4 Donald Trump Jr.’s Skittles analogy seems quaint compared to that of Miller’s rattlesnakes. These statements explicitly represent Syrian refugees as dogs, snakes, and insects, deeming them subhuman. And Bosnian writer Aleksandr Hemon, writing in Rolling Stone, noted how these depictions are consistently reinforced by “syndicated images [that] show refugee hordes pushing against fences, overwhelming train stations, pouring out of ferries, resembling zombies, their individuality irrelevant and invisible.”5
None of this surprises social science researchers. Research I have coauthored led by psychologists Nour Kteily and Emile Bruneau, for example, shows how Americans blatantly dehumanize Mexican immigrants and Muslims.6 In these studies, we presented participants with the famous Ascent of Man image (also known as The March of Progress) depicting five figures showing humans evolving from Dryopithecus to Ramapithecus to Neanderthal to Cro-Magnon, and finally to modern man. We asked participants to indicate the image they felt best represented various ethnic and social groups. To our dismay (but not to our surprise), participants selected representations for Muslims and Mexican immigrants that were significantly less evolved than the representations they chose for the category Americans. Meanwhile, participants rated Japanese, European, French, Australian, Austrian, and Icelandic individuals to be no less evolved than Americans.
The genesis of this work comes from my graduate school training, when my doctoral advisor Nick Epley and I became dissatisfied with the existing measures of dehumanization. We had been relying on measures that involved asking people abstract questions but felt we needed something more visually powerful to illustrate dehumanization as a concrete phenomenon. Thus, we developed the Ascent of Man measure and, years later over coffee, Nour Kteily explained how he could put it to great use, taking it around the world to show how readily people dehumanize ethnic out-groups.
In follow-up work, Kteily and Bruneau demonstrated that people’s dehumanization of Mexicans through depicting them as lower on the Ascent of Man scale predicted several negative consequences.7 The more people blatantly dehumanized Mexicans this way, the more they endorsed statements like “Illegal aliens apprehended crossing the border must be detained until they are sent home, no more catch-and-release,” and the more willingly they signed an anti-immigration petition. Blatant dehumanization of Muslims on the Ascent of Man measure also statistically predicted anti-Muslim attitudes (e.g., endorsing statements like “Muslims are a potential cancer to this country”) and willingness to sign a petition urging Congress to support a ban on visas to Muslims. Most troublingly, follow-up studies by Kteily and Bruneau with Latino and Muslim participants revealed that these groups sensed this dehumanization, perceiving that Republicans, in particular, viewed their groups as subhuman. This sense of being dehumanized led these groups to support more violent collective action and to avoid assisting counterterrorism efforts. Thus, this work shows how dehumanization perpetuates distrust and conflict across intergroup boundaries.
When people feel dehumanized, they respond by asserting their agency and, hence, their humanity through self-defense. For example, when in 2012 Israel carried out eight days of strikes on Gaza Strip, Palestinian engineering student Ahmed Al Sabany stated, “We want them to know that when they attack us mercilessly, when they treat us like animals, we will fight back.”8 This cycle of dehumanization and violent response explains why conflicts like that between Israel and Palestine are often intractable (although we examine ways to quell these conflicts in chapter 8).
Other research conducted in Canada shows that both refugees and immigrants, especially Muslims, face vicious dehumanization north of the American border as well. Studies by University of Western Ontario psychologist Victoria Esses and colleagues conducted surveys showing that many Canadians endorsed statements that depicted refugees as barbaric and rejected statements like “Refugees raise their children to be humane.”9 In work examining how subtle media depictions perpetuate dehumanization, Esses and colleagues asked participants to read a short newspaper article that included an unrelated editorial cartoon depicting an immigrant carrying suitcases arriving at a Canadian immigration booth.10 For some of the participants, the suitcases were labeled with diseases (AIDS, SARS); for others, the suitcases did not include labels. When prompted, participants barely recalled seeing the cartoon. However, when they later completed surveys evaluating immigrants, those exposed to the dehumanizing cartoon reported that immigrants lacked core human values and were barbaric.
Research by psychologists Gordon Hodson and Kimberly Costello at Brock University (also in Ontario) examined links between “contamination” concerns and the dehumanization of immigrants.11 This research showed that dehumanization of Muslim immigrants—measured by participants’ unwillingness to attribute traits considered uniquely human (e.g., openness and conscientiousness) to immigrants—stemmed from feelings of interpersonal disgust. Hodson and Costello asked participants how disgusted various scenarios made them feel (e.g., “You sit down on a public bus, and feel that the seat is still warm from the last person who sat there”). The more disgusted they reported feeling toward scenarios like this, the more they dehumanized immigrants. These findings suggest a link between fears of being contaminated by disease and dehumanization.
Author Andrea Pitzer has written an extensive history of concentration camps, describing how a newfound focus on disease and public health in the late nineteenth century set the stage for the invention of concentration camps. She notes that “the germ theory of disease revealed the nature of contagion and how illnesses spread . . . But the same Enlightenment rationality and efficiency could be mixed in a stew of irrational fears and ignorance to assault those seen as inferior.” She also describes how in the early twentieth century, European institutions ranging from the British press to the German film industry used the “language of degeneracy, dishonor, and disease to frame the risk posed by immigrants, particularly Jewish ones” and to blame Jews for “filth and disease.”12 Today this disease-laden rhetoric toward outsiders persists. Donald Trump has warned that immigrants will “infest” the United States.13 And Polish right-wing political leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski has warned against refugees by stating, “There are already signs of emergence of diseases that are highly dangerous and have not been seen in Europe for a long time: cholera on the Greek islands, dysentery in Vienna.”14 This link between contamination fears and dehumanization of immigrants and refugees is particularly worrisome as it implies a need to eradicate them.
Research has also examined how the media perpetuates these dehumanizing representations of immigrants and refugees. For his dissertation, political scientist Stephen Utych analyzed New York Times articles during April and May 2010 surrounding Arizona’s passage of restrictive immigration law HB 2162 on April 23, 2010. Utych found that approximately one-third of articles on immigration contained dehumanizing language, referring to immigrants as animals, vermin, natural disasters, or viruses.15
As the research makes clear, blatant dehumanization of immigrants and refugees is insidious. In the wake of the Syrian refugee crisis, several right-wing European political campaigns including the campaign for Brexit (the United Kingdom’s decision to leave the European Union), France’s National Front Party, and Hungary’s Ordesz Party have capitalized on these depictions of foreigners as subhuman and animalistic who are harbingers of disease and barbarism. In response, more socially liberal groups have argued for welcoming immigrants and refugees in the United States and Europe.
Socially liberal narratives surrounding foreigners have intended to counter overt dehumanization, yet these narratives often provide a different, subtler, and unintended dehumanizing message. They treat immigrants and refugees as commodities instead of humans who deserve dignity and freedom, regardless of their benefit to society. The politically liberal website The Huffington Post, for example, has published numerous stories on the positive economic impact of refugees and immigrants with headlines like “Immigration Is Good for Economic Growth. If Europe Gets It Right, Refugees Can Be Too,” “What Europe Needs Most Is What It Fears Most: Migrants,” “Resettling Syrian Refugees Won’t Destroy the US Economy,” and “The Economic Case for Admitting Refugees Is (Again) Strengthened.” Many of these articles reference a January 2016 study conducted by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) focusing on the recent wave of refugees into the European Union. The study reports that “the expected initial effects on aggregate EU GDP are positive but small, with a more significant impact on the countries where the refugee inflows are concentrated.”16 The main destination countries for refugees including Austria, Germany, and Sweden stand to reap the greatest benefit, largely because of increased fiscal spending on asylum seekers and an increased labor supply. According to the IMF report, the economic benefit of refugees is modest and is more likely to emerge over the long term; nonetheless, refugee and immigration proponents have used economic growth as a major talking point.
The impetus behind this message is to alleviate people’s anxiety that “outsiders” will “steal” jobs or drain economic resources through relying on social benefits. This message also serves to elevate the image of refugees and immigrants as contributors to society. Parallel arguments praise the children of refugees and immigrants for serving in the American military. However, these messages treat such individuals only as instrumental to American prosperity. In doing so, they too become dehumanizing in presenting refugees and immigrants only in terms of their economic worth.
Another egregious example of this messaging around economic impact is a meme noting that the father of Apple founder Steve Jobs was a Syrian refugee. One version of this meme (that spawned numerous variations) posted by a liberal Facebook group called “Occupy Democrats” and shared nearly 90,000 times states, “Steve Jobs was the son of a Syrian Refugee . . . Remember this when Republicans say we shouldn’t take any.” The Nation writer John Nichols tweeted similarly, “Those who propose sweeping bans on refugees might want to consider this: Steve Jobs was the son of a Syrian migrant.”17 Even famed street artist Banksy adopted this reasoning, painting an image of Steve Jobs on a wall in the Calais refugee camp. Banksy depicted Jobs in his trademark black turtleneck and blue jeans, slinging a sack over his shoulder and holding a Macintosh computer in his other hand. In a public statement, Banksy wrote, “We’re often led to believe migration is a drain on the country’s resources, but Steve Jobs was the son of a Syrian migrant. Apple is the world’s most profitable company, it pays over $7bn (£4.6bn) a year in taxes—and it only exists because they allowed in a young man from Homs.”18
Aside from implying that Jobs’s father was a refugee (in fact, he was an immigrant), Banksy’s statement also strikes me as wrong-headed and dehumanizing. The rationale behind Banksy’s painting and the Jobs meme more generally is—like the economic arguments for immigration and refugee resettlement—that refugees and immigrants have financial worth aside from worth in terms of human dignity. Today’s Syrian migrant might birth the next great entrepreneur, suggests the artist. The idea for the next iPhone might originate on a boat leaving the port of Lakatia. Banksy produces great fodder for dorm room walls and freshman-year philosophizing, but his argument’s logical end suggests that foreigners who do not generate financial capital are less worthy of their rights than the ones who do. Such arguments are a far cry from philosopher Immanuel Kant’s guiding principle (described further in chapter 3) that we should treat human beings as ends in themselves rather than means to something else.
Late restaurateur and TV host Anthony Bourdain expressed a similar sentiment in response to Donald Trump’s inflammatory campaigning around deporting immigrants at record levels. In response to Trump’s plan targeting Mexican immigrants, Bourdain stated that in his thirty years of restaurant industry experience he noticed, “The person who had been there the longest, who took the time to show me how it was done, was always Mexican or Central American. The backbone of the industry . . . not once, did . . . any American-born kid walk into my restaurant and say I’d like a job as a night porter or a dishwasher.” Bourdain added that if Trump deported eleven million immigrants, “Every restaurant in America would shut down . . . they’d be up the creek . . . It is really, really getting hard to find people to do the jobs.”19 Bourdain’s statement champions those not born into American good fortune and who are thus willing to do the literal dirty work that enables the restaurant industry to run. Yet again, such a statement prioritizes immigrants’ economic worth rather than their intrinsic value as human beings.
Economic arguments like those of Banksy and Bourdain treat human beings as stores of potential capital waiting to be tapped. Of course, people often use such arguments to sway detractors of immigration and refugee resettlement, but in doing so they fail to acknowledge the central importance of just being a human. These economic arguments that frame migrants in terms of costs and benefits make no moral case for their freedom. And this tendency to cast moral issues in market-based terms, known as marketization, has increasingly dominated societies across the globe over the past four decades. It represents one of four pillars suggesting a rise in mundane dehumanization. This claim requires unpacking, and I will do so. But, first, we must delve more deeply into defining dehumanization. Then I will present empirical evidence of this four-decade dehumanizing shift, pointing to marketization as well as the three other pillars of this shift: stratification, polarization, and mechanization. These arguments provide the basis for the claims to follow: that this dehumanizing shift is a trend worth reversing and that there are scientifically proven strategies to do so.
Defining dehumanization requires defining human, which, for the linguistic sticklers out there, is a term that philosophers, dictionaries, and laypeople largely use interchangeably with the term person. What defines a human is the possession of a mind, and philosophers’ consensus on this conceptualization is strong.20 In the sixth century, the philosopher Boethius defined person as “an individual substance of a rational nature”; modern definitions reflect the centrality of mind as well.21 In a 1972 essay discussing abortion and the right to life, philosopher Michael Tooley notes that a person “possesses the concept of a self as a continuing subject of experiences and other mental states, and believes that it is itself such a continuing entity.”22 In a 1980 article on abortion, philosopher Joe Feinberg states, “Persons are those beings who are conscious, have a concept and awareness of themselves, are capable of experiencing emotions, can reason and acquire understanding, can plan ahead, can act on their plans, and can feel pleasure and pain.”23 In philosopher H. Tristram Engelhardt’s 1986 treatise on bioethics, he notes, “What distinguishes persons is their capacity to be self-conscious, rational, and concerned with worthiness of blame or praise.”24 The common theme of these definitions is mind and two dimensions of mind in particular, experience and agency. Experience refers to feelings, emotions, and desires and agency refers to intentionality, goals, thoughts, and reason.
Critically, philosophers are concerned with what actually constitutes a human whereas we psychologists focus more on how people perceive what constitutes a human. For example, in one study with my graduate student Shane Schweitzer, we asked hundreds of people to write about what distinguishes humans from animals and what distinguishes humans from technology. When we coded their essays for the types of words they used, we found that words related to agency and experience such as “feel,” “perceive,” and “perspective” prominently featured to a statistically significant degree.25
A 2007 study provides the most definitive empirical evidence that everyday people use the same agency-experience conceptualization of mind as philosophers do.26 This study, led by psychologists Heather Gray, Kurt Gray, and Daniel Wegner (the latter two have written the definitive book on perceiving other minds, The Mind Club), asked people to evaluate various entities—from robots to dead people to frogs to children to God to adult humans—on several mental characteristics. Gray and colleagues found that people’s evaluations mapped onto two categories—an experience dimension and an agency dimension. In their survey, people perceived targets to have varying amounts of agency and experience, stating, for example, that frogs had low agency and high experience and that robots had high agency but low experience. The only case where people afforded full agency and full experience was their evaluations of adult humans. So, we know that perceiving agency and experience in others represents the essence of humanization. Denying these capacities or overlooking them in others, conversely, represents dehumanization.
Trying to come up with a definition for human on your own is a daunting task. What comes to mind is likely an image of a stick figure or a human face. However, putting this image into words is far more difficult, and people vary considerably when trying to categorize whether marginal cases count as humans. Is a fetus human? What about a stem cell or a person in a persistent vegetative state? I’m not sure I could say with certainty. Despite this variability, if we again turn to the research on this question of defining human, once more a consistent pattern emerges.
Beyond Gray, Gray, and Wegner’s work, other studies also show that many people equate human with mind. A vast research program led by Australian psychologist Nick Haslam has shown that people conceptualize humanness in terms of two dimensions akin to agency and experience: human uniqueness, or what they believe distinguishes humans from other animals (such as vermin) including capacities such as self-control, intelligence, and rationality, and human nature, or what they believe are qualities essential to humanity (and distinct from automata) including interpersonal warmth and emotion.27 Again, these two dimensions focus on mind, and denying these characteristics to a person would represent denying that person experience and agency.
A separate research program developed by Belgian psychologist Jacque-Philippe Leyens also demonstrates that mind is central to people’s conceptions of what is human. Leyens’s work shows that, on one hand, people believe that humans alone can experience emotions like nostalgia, optimism, and humiliation.28 Notably, these emotions require some mental capacity such as memory, prospection, or self-reflection. On the other hand, people believe emotions like panic, surprise, and fright are not uniquely human and are shared by lower animals—again, these judgments reflect only people’s beliefs, not any hard evidence on whether these emotions extend across species. The source of these beliefs is unclear, but I suspect it involves how much the emotion represents a response to the external environment versus a response to oneself. Panic, fright, and surprise represent emotions triggered by external events and manifest in behavioral reactions (e.g., shaking) whereas nostalgia, optimism, and humiliation involve self-reflection. Dehumanization, in Leyens’s view, results when people deny distinctively human emotions—namely, those that require mental engagement—to other people.
What people say constitutes a human being may not map onto what actually happens when the concept of human comes to mind. Luckily, neuroscience research provides evidence beyond self-reporting. This research shows that the brain regions that respond specifically when people observe images of humans or think about humans are those regions involved in processing others’ mental states. Two decades’ worth of neuroimaging studies now show that a proscribed set of regions termed the mentalizing network activates whenever people think about the minds of others—their preferences, beliefs, and desires. These regions include the medial prefrontal cortex, the precuneus/posterior cingulate cortex, and the temporoparietal junction.
The typical neuroimaging study used to identify this network involves participants lying in a brain scanner machine while observing stimuli (e.g., shapes, words, objects, faces) that momentarily appear on a computer screen across hundreds of trials. Study after study has shown that whenever people are asked to reason about persons compared to reasoning about objects (e.g., tools, musical instruments), regions in the mentalizing network are involved.29 And, as might be expected, when people are asked to evaluate an entity’s mental characteristics (e.g., whether an entity is “curious”) versus its physical characteristics (e.g., whether an entity has arteries), regions in the mentalizing network again become active.30 One study even demonstrated that this network activates more readily when people play a computerized rocks-paper-scissors game against a human compared to when they play against a machine.31
The moral of the story told by two decades of sophisticated brain research is that when people reason about humans, they are reasoning about minds. Neuroimaging research by psychologists Lasana Harris and Susan Fiske has also shown that when people think about commonly dehumanized social groups (e.g., homeless people or drug addicts), the mentalizing network is less active than when people think about groups like Olympic athletes or middle-class Americans.32 And work that I have led shows that when people think about technology that behaves in a humanlike fashion, the mentalizing network becomes more active than when people think about non-humanlike technology.33 In this work, we presented people in the brain scanner with descriptions of various gadgets that people reliably see as humanlike (e.g., an alarm clock with “eyes” that rolls around on wheels and controls its own movement) or gadgets that people see as simply machinelike (e.g., a user-controlled air purifier). When participants viewed the humanlike technology compared with the more mechanistic technology, the same brain regions became active as when people think about other humans’ minds.
This brain research further indicates that perceiving someone or something to have a mind is the essence of humanization. By extension, this work indicates that neglecting another person’s mind is the essence of dehumanization. Next, we explore evidence suggesting that humanization has declined over the past five decades while dehumanization has gradually, and disturbingly, ascended.
You have probably already heard that people are growing apart. Perhaps even you have lamented how young people don’t call their parents like they used to or write letters to each other anymore. Perhaps you have wondered what happened to the neighborhood pharmacy or watering hole? Maybe you have asked how we could ever solve Israeli-Palestinian tensions when we can’t even look up from our smartphones to glance kindly at the barista taking our coffee order. We can feel dehumanization around us, and we have felt it pulling us apart over time. Yet feelings aren’t enough to tell whether we are truly fracturing, or whether this Norman Rockwell–like image of an idealized communal past is simply something every generation wishes for when they reach a certain age. Instead, we must look at the evidence.
Actually demonstrating a dehumanizing shift over recent decades requires digging into diverse data sources that examine assorted variables “standing in” for people’s tendency to humanize. Because no research has explicitly measured humanization over time, we must instead turn to variables that closely approximate this construct. Empathy is the closest such proxy variable because it involves engaging with others’ minds. Although social scientists bicker over how to define empathy precisely, psychologists Jamil Zaki and Kevin Ochsner’s tripartite definition, in my view, captures the construct best.34 In their view, empathy involves mentalizing (i.e., considering another person’s perspective), experience sharing (i.e., vicariously sharing another person’s emotions), and displaying prosocial concern (i.e., expressing the desire to improve another person’s well-being). Each of these three processes presupposes that one has considered another’s mind, the core process underlying humanization.
The research on empathy supports evidence for rising dehumanization. Psychologist Sara Konrath, for example, has led a now famous study showing a decline of self-reported empathy among college students between 1979 and 2009.35 This study analyzed seventy-two samples of American college students (13,737 in total) who completed a well-validated questionnaire that asks students to indicate how well various statements describe them. These statements tap explicitly into empathic concern (a construct akin to both prosocial concern and experience sharing, e.g., “I often have tender, concerned feelings for people less fortunate than me”) and perspective-taking (a construct akin to mentalizing, e.g., “I sometimes try to understand my friends better by imagining how things look from their perspective”).36 Konrath’s analysis found that empathic concern and perspective-taking have dropped considerably over time, suggesting a marked decline in students’ willingness and tendency to get into the minds of others.
Related work that supports the dehumanizing shift comes from psychologist Jean Twenge. Twenge has painstakingly examined survey data on Americans from the 1970s through the 2000s that show people becoming more individualistic. Individualism represents a constellation of traits including narcissism, mistrust in others, cynicism, entitlement, and materialism, and these traits produce an overall sense of disengagement from others. In Twenge’s book, Generation Me, she describes this phenomenon stating, “Generation Me believes, with a conviction that approaches boredom because it is so undisputed, that the individual comes first.”37 This individualism frees people from the need to connect with others or to rely on others. Although scholars have debated the strength of these patterns,38 with some suggesting a decline in narcissism in particular, the data trend toward showing a generation less socially engaged and potentially more dehumanizing than in the 1980s.39
Both Konrath and Twenge’s studies suggest an emerging younger generation less inclined to engage deeply with others, reflecting a broader retreat from communal life. Perhaps no scholar has more famously documented this decline than sociologist Robert Putnam, whose 2000 masterpiece Bowling Alone described the American decline in social capital between 1950 and the late 1990s. Social capital, in this context, means participation in civic groups like religious organizations, Boy Scouts, and labor unions. These broader community trends correspond to declines in basic communal activities such as having friends over, playing cards, and having family dinners. Putnam argues that these declines, in turn, contribute to people becoming more isolated. Putnam offers several potential causes of these trends including women entering the workforce, which limits a person’s time to participate in, for example, the PTA or League of Women Voters. He also points to increased mobility, demographic shifts like increased divorce and fewer children, and the “transformation of leisure” by technology whereby television and other gadgets have made downtime more individualizing and less communal.40
Revisiting these trends in 2010, Putnam qualified his original findings by noting that young people became more civic-minded following the September 11 attacks on the United States.41 However, only upper-middle-class young people have become more engaged in their communities, producing a troubling engagement gap between this group and their less affluent contemporaries. Adult Americans, Putnam reports, have become no more civically engaged, suggesting a persistence of the phenomenon he described in 2000.
A concomitant trend to the decline in social capital is the decrease in general trust of others, which has persisted in recent years. The General Social Survey, a nationally representative survey of Americans, has long included a question asking, “Generally speaking, would you say that most people can be trusted or that you can’t be too careful in life?” Putnam has observed that people’s responses to this question were about split in the early 1970s and had declined considerably by 1998. In 2012, just over 30 percent of people responded that they felt people could be trusted.42 Although scholars have proposed several reasons for this decrease in trust, one of the most robust causes appears to be the rise of income inequality,43 which I discuss further below.
At this point, two qualifications are necessary. The first is to reiterate that none of the research I have cited here measures dehumanization per se. Reduced empathy constitutes dehumanization insofar as it involves disengaging from others’ thoughts, feelings, and emotions. The rising individualism and declining social capital that Twenge and Putnam describe, respectively, represent a surge in independence, which I see as dehumanization’s root cause. Independence is simply the opposite of interdependence—that is, a state in which one’s goals depend on another person. In my earliest work with my graduate school mentors Nick Epley and John Cacioppo, we demonstrated that people are most likely to humanize others when they’re in an interdependent state. This means that when we seek connection with others or seek to understand others’ behavior, we spend more time considering other people’s mental states and treating them as fully human.44 The trends that Twenge and Putnam describe represent a departure from people seeking to connect with and understand others and a clear shift toward independence.
The second qualification is that independence does not equal loneliness, although studies generally point to a steady rise in loneliness over recent decades as well.45 Loneliness (subjective social isolation from others) and independence (freedom from others) are not perfectly correlated, but overall research on social isolation generally suggests that people are less socially engaged with others than they were four decades ago.46
The next natural question is whether increasing fragmentation is primarily an American phenomenon. Although the bulk of the data presented so far comes from the United States, evidence also suggests individualism has increased worldwide in recent decades. The World Values Survey, a global survey of people’s values, opinions, and beliefs administered in 100 countries since 1981, demonstrates the rise of what political scientist Christian Welzel refers to as “emancipative values.” These values, which are central to individualism, include preferences for individual choice, freedom, and autonomy. Welzel’s book, Freedom Rising, documents the rise of emancipative values in the past three decades in virtually every country for which data exist.47 The World Values Survey measures these values by asking people’s opinions on issues such as freedom of speech, women’s equality, and tolerance for practices like divorce and abortion. In other words, emancipative values capture how much people care about the rights of individuals to make autonomous choices, independent of others’ views and reactions.
Research led by psychologist Henri Santos has also confirmed this shift toward individualism by looking at World Values Survey data as well as census data from 1960 up to 2011. Santos and colleagues found that individualist values (e.g., feeling that it is important to teach independence to children) and practices (e.g., living alone) have risen over this period by 12 percent across fifty-three countries. And this pattern toward individualism emerges even for traditionally collectivistic countries in Latin America and Asia that are typically thought to prioritize group values over individual ones.48
Critically, emancipative values and individualistic values as measured in this research do not correspond to selfishness or egotism and don’t simply equate to animosity toward others. I personally characterize individualism as a “live and let live” philosophy in which people value all individuals equally but feel little obligation to engage deeply or meaningfully with these individuals. When I think of individualism, I think of my Northside Chicago neighborhood, whose lawn signs, communal Facebook posts, and coffee shop exchanges champion equality for all and proudly display support for immigrants, the LGBT community, and the homeless. However, when faced with a referendum on granting a nearby apartment complex a permit to transform into a sober living facility for folks struggling with drug and alcohol abuse, most voted to oppose the permit. One online commenter wrote, “Just seems to allow its residents to congregate en masse on street corners. We do not need another facility like that.” Another sarcastically noted, “Potential buyers LOVE halfway houses next door. Recovering addicts hanging out with my kids—SIGN ME UP! It is GREAT for property values.” In other words, individualism represents a sort of tolerance that says, “We tolerate everyone; we just don’t necessarily want to live next to them.”
Having provided some preliminary evidence for a rise in independence and social disengagement over the past five or more decades, let’s next turn to four pillars of the subtle dehumanization that emerges from these trends. These pillars represent both causes and consequences of the dehumanizing shift.
The first pillar, as noted earlier in this chapter, is the global trend toward marketization, a corollary to the global rise of free market economies. By free market economies, I simply mean economic systems whereby open competition and consumers’ willingness to pay determine the prices of goods and services. Despite the economic efficiency of these systems, there is a potentially troubling implication for human relationships. As political philosopher Michael Sandel documents in his treatise What Money Can’t Buy, the rise of what he calls “market triumphalism” over the past three decades has corrupted people’s relationships with one another. Sandel describes how relationships that typically operate on moral and social norms—sense of community, fairness, and reciprocity—are now based on market exchange (i.e., buying and selling). Sandel states, “Putting a price on the good things in life can corrupt them. That’s because markets don’t only allocate goods; they also express and promote certain attitudes toward the goods being exchanged.”49 Treating our social relationships—the “goods being exchanged” in this context—in transactional, buyer-seller terms fundamentally transforms them in a dehumanizing way.
In fact, a clever study by Lasana Harris created a labor market where participants could “purchase” individuals to complete a time estimation task.50 Participants received an endowment of twenty-five dollars to spend on five individuals (about whom they received minimal information) and learned they would earn additional money based on how well their “purchased players” performed. Consistent with the idea that participants now saw these players as commodities, when participants later viewed these players’ faces in a brain scanner, their brain scans revealed deactivation in the mentalizing network, suggesting dehumanization.
Understanding how this process works requires understanding the seminal work of anthropologist Alan Fiske. Fiske conducted extensive cross-cultural research to demonstrate that across the globe, all social relationships can be captured by one of four templates: Communal Sharing (people care for all others equally as in kin groups), Authority Ranking (people operate in terms of a hierarchy such as the student’s interaction with his teacher), Equality Matching (people attempt to reciprocate favors and exchanges as in the case of work colleagues assigned to complete a report together), and Market Pricing (people’s relationships are based around the utility they receive in an often monetary-based transaction as in the case of buyer and seller).51 The first three of these are governed by social norms of group unity (Communal Sharing), respect for authority (Authority Ranking), and egalitarianism (Equality Matching). Only the Market Pricing template operates based on market norms.
Fiske has traditionally suggested that dehumanization occurs when people fail to form relationships with others at all. However, I would argue that Market Pricing is just as dehumanizing. Market Pricing considers people in terms of their financial and instrumental value instead of their sheer value as human beings.
I have already described how the characterizations of refugees by Banksy and Bourdain capture Market Pricing well, but let’s look at two additional examples that more explicitly illustrate how marketization dehumanizes. The first comes from Disney World. For many years, the popular theme park held a policy that allowed individuals with disabilities to get priority access to rides by using an auxiliary entrance at each attraction. According to a New York Post article, wealthy Manhattan mothers participated in a practice of hiring “black market” tour guides with disabilities for just over a thousand dollars for an eight-hour day.52 This practice objectifies these individuals and, even with their consent, treats them as luxury goods for those who can afford them.
The second example of dehumanization via marketization occurred at popular music, film, and technology festival, South by Southwest, in Austin, Texas. During the 2012 festival, marketing firm Bartle Bogle Hegarty equipped homeless people (some of whom had been displaced by Hurricane Katrina) with wireless router devices that allowed them to function as mobile Wi-Fi hotspots. The homeless individuals fitted with these devices wore T-shirts that read:
I’M [FIRST NAME],
A 4G HOTSPOT
SMS HH [FIRST NAME]
TO 25827 FOR ACCESS
www.homelesshotspots.org
Festivalgoers were asked to pay two dollars for fifteen minutes of wireless internet access with the homeless individual receiving the money. One could charitably interpret this endeavor as providing money to the homeless and visibility to their cause. Most observers, however, criticized the effort as exploitation. These two examples demonstrate how marketization transforms our interactions with two of society’s most vulnerable groups, the disabled and the homeless, to stores of value. And yet they are extreme examples. The more mundane plight of workers, from the Uber driver who must sleep in her car to the automotive factory worker exposed to phosphoric acid, is the experience of being treated as a commodity. This is the essence of marketization.
The second pillar of the dehumanizing shift is political polarization, which has reached an apex in the United States, with the gulf between liberals and conservatives continuing to widen. Congress has reached record levels of polarization.53 Presidential approval ratings at one time showed George W. Bush and Barack Obama to be the most polarizing presidents ever.54 Following their administrations, the presidency of Donald Trump surpassed both Bush and Obama in terms of polarization.55 Partisan media bias in the political press has also approached record levels.56 A 2016 Pew Research Center study showed political polarization among the general population to be at its highest in twenty-five years.57 The survey revealed that both Democrats and Republicans describe the other party as immoral, close-minded, dishonest, and lazy. Research has also found that social media can exacerbate this polarization, with Twitter users clustering into liberal or conservative echo chambers when discussing issues ranging from the presidential election to the Newtown school shootings of 2012.58
This polarization represents a widening social distance between political tribes that degrades people’s capacity and desire to consider the other side’s thoughts, feelings, and motivations. In research with psychologists Liane Young and Jeremy Ginges, we found that Democrats and Republicans dehumanize each other in a very specific way—both sides believe that the other side is driven by hate and is relatively less capable of love.59 We call this phenomenon the motive attribution asymmetry.
Other research goes further to demonstrate that people neglect to consider that their political opposites exhibit basic human sensation. Research by psychologists Ed O’Brien and Phoebe Ellsworth showed that Democrats and Republicans assume people who possess opposing political views from them would not be cold while standing outside during winter or would not be thirsty after eating salty snacks, despite the ostensible universality of these experiences. Participants in these studies literally fail to recognize that ideologically dissimilar others experience the same degree of cold or thirst.60 Other studies have demonstrated that Democrats and Republicans judge opposing party members as less evolved and less likely to have minds at all.61
Of course, dehumanizing rhetoric in politics ramped up during the 2016 presidential election and in its aftermath. Rather than focusing on policy differences, politicians on both sides described the other side as relatively mindless. Democrats, for example, painted Trump voters as bigoted, misinformed, and blind to the truth with Hillary Clinton encapsulating this rhetoric by calling them a “basket of deplorables.”62 Republicans, on the other hand, painted Hillary Clinton’s supporters as uncaring, unethical, and unaware of real Americans’ struggles. Even more bluntly, Trump called Clinton supporters “animals” when accusing them of firebombing North Carolina’s Republican headquarters.63 The widening gap between the two sides of the political spectrum continues to grow, representing both a consequence and a cause of a broader societal dehumanizing shift.
Stratification, a third pillar of the dehumanizing shift, refers to the global rise in income inequality that has increased the social distance between the haves and have-nots. Economist Thomas Piketty most definitively documented these trends in his book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century.64 Piketty showed evidence that in the United States the upper decile’s share of national income has steadily increased since the mid-1940s. More recent analyses have shown these trends continuing as well. Pick your favorite statistic—average income, household share of net worth, or wealth (property and financial assets minus debt)—and each one reveals an increasingly widening gap over the past five decades between society’s richest and those at the bottom.65 Notably, economic recovery efforts following the Great Recession of 2008 have done little to reduce the divide between the super-wealthy and everybody else.
Although statistics on rising stratification are plentiful, they insufficiently illustrate the social divide between lower-class and upper-class individuals and the inherent dehumanization that results. Aside from mere income, low socioeconomic status (SES) individuals and high SES individuals differ on several dimensions—for example, preferences for classical music versus heavy metal music, consumption of organic versus processed foods, prevalence of smoking, and various moral beliefs—that make relating to one another more difficult. The expansion of suburban sprawl and gentrification within cities means that poverty is more concentrated within the United States and the poor and rich are more geographically separate from each other now than in the past couple of decades.66 The physical and psychological isolation of the poor from the rich (and, really, from everyone else) helps explain why studies find poor people to be one of the most commonly dehumanized social groups.67
One widespread form of dehumanization in this context is the critique of low-wage workers as mentally inferior. Hardee’s CEO (chief executive officer) Andrew Puzder once criticized efforts to increase the minimum wage by asking, “How do you pay someone $15 to scoop ice cream?”68 Others resist political efforts to increase low-wage workers’ minimum wage by suggesting such a raise will just lead companies to automate workers’ jobs instead.
Another common dehumanizing narrative is to disparage individuals who use social welfare programs. An op-ed in The Tennessean, titled “Feeding Animals Makes Them Dependent,” criticized these programs by stating, “It’s like animals at the zoo—they are totally taken care of—food, shelter, medical help, etc.”69 Rejecting basic human services for people who most need them is an unfortunately common tendency.
It is not only the rich who dehumanize the poor, but the opposite is true as well. The rich have faced the wrath of the masses in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis and the rise of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Research led by psychologist Susan Fiske and her colleagues reveals that most people view the rich as lacking warmth and compassion, a perception only strengthened by the growing economic divide.70
Automation, the fourth pillar of dehumanization, is the most complicated. The exponential advances in technology and technology’s intrusion into every aspect of our lives are obvious, yet the contribution of automation to the dehumanizing shift is not uniform. Technology is dehumanizing in several ways. It has eliminated the fundamentally human elements such as vocal tone and facial expressions, gesture, and interruption (cues that even emojis cannot replicate) from conversation. It has generated content from video games to pornography that displaces the time we might spend with others. And most critically, technology reduces our dependence on others through taking over tasks once performed by humans. Each of these factors increases indifference toward the minds and the humanity of others.
Let us not forget that technology also has the potential to humanize us, as it connects us and makes our world smaller. Recent research on digital screen use and general well-being demonstrates that although excessive technology use diminishes well-being, so does the absence of technology use.71 Moderate technology use can benefit happiness, and a review of scientific literature that Kurt Gray and I conducted shows the same to be true for empathy and, hence, humanization.72 We learn more about the relationship between technology and humanity in chapter 7, where I show how to optimize our interactions with and through technology to rehumanize rather than dehumanize each other.
NOW THAT we’ve established evidence for a dehumanizing shift, I want to turn to why reversing this trend is beneficial. In the next chapter, we begin to understand why seeing human is important.