Dehumanization increases instrumental violence, but not moral violence
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Author(s)
Valdesolo, Piercarlo
Graham, Jesse
Rai, Tage Shakti
Date Issued
July 2017
Journal
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Publisher
National Academy of Sciences (U.S.)
Citation
Rai, Tage S. et al. “Dehumanization Increases Instrumental Violence, but Not Moral Violence.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 114, 32 (July 2017): 8511–8516 © 2017 National Academy of Sciences
Version
Final published version
Abstract
Across five experiments, we show that dehumanization—the act of perceiving victims as not completely human—increases instrumental, but not moral, violence. In attitude surveys, ascribing reduced capacities for cognitive, experiential, and emotional states to victims predicted support for practices where victims are harmed to achieve instrumental goals, including sweatshop labor, animal experimentation, and drone strikes that result in civilian casualties, but not practices where harm is perceived as morally righteous, including capital punishment, killing in war, and drone strikes that kill terrorists. In vignette experiments, using dehumanizing compared with humanizing language increased participants’ willingness to harm strangers for money, but not participants’ willingness to harm strangers for their immoral behavior. Participants also spontaneously dehumanized strangers when they imagined harming them for money, but not when they imagined harming them for their immoral behavior. Finally, participants humanized strangers who were low in humanity if they imagined harming them for immoral behavior, but not money, suggesting that morally motivated perpetrators may humanize victims to justify violence against them. Our findings indicate that dehumanization enables violence that perpetrators see as unethical, but instrumentally beneficial. In contrast, dehumanization does not contribute to moral violence because morally motivated perpetrators wish to harm complete human beings who are capable of deserving blame, experiencing suffering, and understanding its meaning. Keywords: moral; violence; dehumanization; instrumental; aggression
MIT Department
Sloan School of Management
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1705238114
