Product Code Database
Dehumanization is the process, practice, or act of denying full humanity in others, (2025). 9781138588158, Routledge. ISBN 9781138588158 along with the cruelty and suffering that accompany it. It involves perceiving individuals or groups as lacking essential human qualities, such as secondary emotions and mental capacities, thereby placing them outside the bounds of moral concern. In this definition, any act or thought that regards a person as either "other than" and "less than" human constitutes dehumanization.
Dehumanization can be overt or subtle, and typically manifests in two primary forms: animalistic dehumanization, which denies uniquely human traits like civility, culture, or rationality and likens others to animals; and mechanistic dehumanization, which denies traits of human nature such as warmth, emotion, and individuality, portraying others as objects or machines.
It has historically facilitated a broad range of harms, from discrimination and social exclusion to slavery, colonization, as well as other crimes against humanity, and is recognized as a significant form of incitement to genocide. (2025). 9780190612702, Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780190612702
Dehumanization can occur in both absolute and relative forms. Absolute dehumanization involves perceiving a group as entirely devoid of human qualities, while relative dehumanization entails attributing fewer human characteristics to one group in comparison to another. Historically, dehumanization has involved the outright denial of someone's humanity, such as in claims that certain groups, like enslaved people, were not fully human. It can also portray others as less human, such as through the objectification of women or the demonization of migrants. Both forms are understood as expressions of dehumanization, differing primarily in the extent to which human attributes are denied.
This distinction relates to the difference between blatant and subtle forms of dehumanization. Blatant dehumanization typically involves overt and explicit comparisons to animals or other non-human entities, often verbalized through direct language. In contrast, subtle dehumanization, often referred to as infrahumanization, manifests in the implicit belief that members of out-groups possess fewer uniquely human emotions or traits. These processes may occur unconsciously. Early studies on dehumanization focused primarily on its blatant forms, particularly in the context of intergroup conflicts. However, subsequent research has indicated that dehumanization could also occur in more subtle ways, even in the absence of overt hostility. Moreover, although traditionally associated with dominant or oppressive groups within hierarchical structures, research indicates that dehumanization can occur reciprocally, including amongst oppressed or disadvantaged groups.
officers in occupied China who competed to see who could kill one hundred Chinese people with a sword first during the Nanjing Massacre]]Animalistic and mechanistic dehumanization are further distinguished based on their distinct psychological underpinnings, which influence the contexts in which dehumanization occurs and the forms of harm it may motivate. Also, the distinction between animalistic and mechanistic dehumanization lies not only in their content but also in the typical contexts of application. Animalistic dehumanization is primarily observed on intergroup dynamics, where individuals or groups are seen as lacking culture, civility, or rationality, traits thought to separate humans from animals. In contrast, mechanistic dehumanization tends to occur in interpersonal settings, where people are perceived as lacking emotionality, warmth, and other qualities associated with lived beings, akin to robots and machines. Although animalistic and mechanistic dehumanization are often presented as distinct dimensions, they are not mutually exclusive; in some cases, individuals or groups may be denied traits associated with both.
Dehumanization is widely understood as a psychological mechanism that facilitates violence and inhumane treatment. It plays a central role in justifying harm by removing the moral consideration typically granted to human beings, thereby weakening psychological restraints such as compassion and empathy. One component of this process is the denial of others' mental states, known as "dementalization," which contributes to their moral exclusion and increases the likelihood of mistreatment. Scholars distinguish dehumanization from related psychological phenomena such as dislike, as it entails the denial of a person's moral and mental worth, adding a particularly harmful layer by diminishing the relevance of their suffering. Unlike people who are stigmatized or marginalized but still recognized as normatively human, individuals who are dehumanized are perceived as fundamentally lacking in essential human qualities and moral worth. This distinction is significant because moral inclusion often imposes limits on how individuals may be treated, whereas dehumanization removes such constraints, enabling more extreme forms of violence and exclusion.
Although dehumanization is a significant factor in enabling violent behaviour, scholars emphasize that it is not sufficient on its own to explain all instances of violence. Research indicates a strong association between dehumanization and increased levels of aggression, and it can be used to justify or sustain acts of violence and long-term animosity. It may also intensify intergroup conflict by sharpening distinctions between in-groups and out-groups. Beyond its role in facilitating violence, dehumanization can serve several social and psychological functions. These include legitimizing harm such as exploitation, submission, or killing by reducing moral restraint, managing existential anxieties through the projection of one’s fears and vulnerabilities, and reinforcing social stratification or defending the status quo.
According to Adrienne De Ruiter, dehumanization occurs in three manifestations: through the failure to perceive individuals as human, the portrayal of them in ways that disregard their humanity, or the treatment of them in ways that diminish their human qualities. These manifestations can occur discursively (e.g., idiomatic language that likens individual human beings to non-human animals, verbal abuse, erasing one's voice from discourse), symbolically (e.g., imagery), or physically (e.g., chattel slavery, physical abuse, refusing eye contact). Dehumanization often ignores the target's Individualism (i.e., the creative and exciting aspects of their personality) and can hinder one from feeling empathy or correctly understanding a Social stigma group.
Dehumanization has been examined across various disciplines as a mechanism that reinforces social hierarchies and exclusion. According to Maria Kronfeldner, ‘’dehumanization establishes difference and distance between human beings’’, and enables ‘’a stratified organization of humanity’’. Dehumanization may be carried out by a social institution (such as a state, school, or family), interpersonally, or even within oneself. Dehumanization can be unintentional, especially upon individuals, as with some types of de facto racism. State-organized dehumanization has historically been directed against certain political, racial, Ethnic group, national, or religious . Other minoritized and Marginalization individuals and groups (based on sexual orientation, gender, disability, Social class, or some other organizing principle) are also susceptible to various forms of dehumanization. The concept of dehumanization has received empirical attention in the Psychology literature.Moller, A. C., & Deci, E. L. (2010). "Interpersonal control, dehumanization, and violence: A self-determination theory perspective". Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, 13, 41-53. (open access) Besides infrahumanization, it is conceptually related to delegitimization,Bar-Tal, D. (1989). "Delegitimization: The extreme case of stereotyping and prejudice". In D. Bar-Tal, C. Graumann, A. Kruglanski, & Wolfgang Stroebe (Eds.), Stereotyping and prejudice: Changing conceptions. New York, NY: Springer. moral exclusion, and objectification.Nussbaum, M. C. (1999). Sex and Social Justice. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.
Philosopher Martha Nussbaum identified seven components of sexual objectification: , denial of autonomy, , fungibility, violability, ownership, and denial of subjectivity.
In this context, instrumentality refers to when the objectified is used as an instrument to the objectifier's benefit. Denial of autonomy occurs in the form of the objectifier underestimating the objectified and denies their capabilities. In the case of inertness, the objectified is treated as if they are lazy and indolent. Fungibility brands the objectified to be easily replaceable. Volability is when the objectifier does not respect the objectified person's personal space or boundaries. Ownership is when the objectified is seen as another person's property. Lastly, the denial of subjectivity is a lack of sympathy for the objectified, or the dismissal of the notion that the objectified has feelings. These seven components cause the objectifier to view the objectified in a disrespectful way, therefore treating them so.
The idea of universal human worth gradually gained prominence through what scholars call the invention of humanity, a historical process that gained momentum during the Enlightenment and promoted the belief in a shared human essence. However, as awareness of common humanity grew, so too did the ideological efforts to exclude certain groups from its scope, often through pseudo-scientific racial theories. Dehumanization became a powerful tool during the age of colonialism, enabling imperial powers to justify the colonization, enslavement, and extermination of subjugated peoples.
Throughout history, societies have engaged in and institutionalized this denial of humanity to enable mass oppression, exploitation, and killing.Luigi Corrias, “Dehumanization by Law 1.” In The Routledge Handbook of Dehumanization, 1st ed., 1:201–13. Routledge, 2021. doi:10.4324/9780429492464-chapter13. By portraying colonized groups as less than fully human, dominant groups were able to morally disengage from the suffering they inflicted, facilitating acts of exploitation, violence, and oppression. David Livingstone Smith, director and founder of The Human Nature Project at the University of New England, argues that historically, human beings have been dehumanizing one another for thousands of years. In his work "The Paradoxes of Dehumanization", Smith proposes that dehumanization simultaneously regards people as human and subhuman. This paradox comes to light, as Smith identifies, because the reason people are dehumanized is so their human attributes can be taken advantage of.
Modern scholarly interest in dehumanization intensified after World War II, especially in response to the Holocaust, with influential contributions from thinkers such as Hannah Arendt. During the Cold War and especially the Vietnam War, the concept became central to interdisciplinary research, spanning psychology, sociology, philosophy, genocide studies, and conflict analysis, as an important mechanism underlying social exclusion, violence, and moral disengagement.
The Pioneer has before declared that our only safety depends upon the total extermination sic of the Indians. Having wronged them for centuries we had better, in order to protect our civilization, follow it up by one more wrong and wipe these untamed and untamable creatures from the face of the earth. In this lies safety for our settlers and the soldiers who are under incompetent commands. Otherwise, we may expect future years to be as full of trouble with the redskins as those have been in the past.In Martin Luther King Jr.'s book on civil rights, Why We Can't Wait, he wrote:
Our nation was born in genocide when it embraced the doctrine that the original American, the Indian, was an inferior race. Even before there were large numbers of Negroes on our shores, the scar of racial hatred had already disfigured colonial society. From the sixteenth century forward, blood flowed in battles over racial supremacy. We are perhaps the only nation which tried as a matter of national policy to wipe out its indigenous population. Moreover, we elevated that tragic experience into a noble crusade. Indeed, even today we have not permitted ourselves to reject or to feel remorse for this shameful episode. Our literature, our films, our drama, our folklore all exalt it.
King was an active supporter of the Native American rights movement, which he drew parallels with his own leadership of the civil rights movement. Both movements aimed to overturn dehumanizing attitudes held by members of the public at large against them.
Nazi Germany institutionalized dehumanization through the construction of legal and bureaucratic structures that explicitly denied the full humanity of targeted populations. Legal frameworks played a central role in this process, with laws such as the Nuremberg Laws, codifying discriminatory categories and racial hierarchies that legitimized exclusion, persecution, and ultimately extermination.Luigi Corrias, “Dehumanization by Law 1.” In The Routledge Handbook of Dehumanization, 1st ed., 1:201–13. Routledge, 2021. doi:10.4324/9780429492464-chapter13. The Nazi regime also employed mass media and state propaganda to disseminate dehumanizing imagery and rhetoric that depicted these groups as subhuman threats to the German nation.Robert Wilson, “Dehumanization, Disability, and Eugenics.” In The Routledge Handbook of Dehumanization, 1st ed., 1:173–86. Routledge, 2021. doi:10.4324/9780429492464-chapter11.
Jews were frequently portrayed through animalistic metaphors, including comparisons to vermin, and framed as biologically impure threats to racial purity. The term Untermensch (subhuman) was used to deny Jews and others moral standing and membership to the human community. In an October 1943 speech, Heinrich Himmler framed the extermination of the Jewish people as a historical mission, specifically comparing the Jews to a bacillus, reinforcing the portrayal of Jews as a dangerous disease that needs to be eradicated. These dehumanizing narratives facilitated the systematic extermination of 6,000,000 Jews during the Holocaust at the hands of the nazis. In addition, a state-sponsored eugenics program, most notably through Aktion T4, targeted individuals with disabilities or others deemed possessing a ‘’life unworthy of life’’. These individuals were deemed inferior and a threat to the purity of the Aryan race, and were also systematically exterminated.
Empirical research has found that both Palestinian and Jewish Israeli participants who expressed dehumanizing views of the other group were more likely to support retributive forms of justice and violent measures, as opposed to restorative or conciliatory approaches. Historical examples of dehumanization in Israeli society include comparing Palestinians to the biblical “sons of Amalek”, a tribal group portrayed as inherently evil.Jay Martin, “The Vicissitudes of Empathy: Reflections on the Israel-Palestine Conflict.” Journal of Genocide Research, 2025, 1–17. doi:10.1080/14623528.2025.2458400. Dehumanization contributes to the justification of exclusionary and violent policies, with studies linking dehumanizing attitudes to public support for measures such as population transfers amongst segments of the Israeli population. Dehumanizing narratives have also historically appeared in nationalist slogans, such as the early Zionism phrase "a land without a people for a people without a land", which is interpreted as a symbolic erasure of Palestinian peoplehood. Dehumanization has been used not only to deny the humanity of Palestinians but also to undermine their historical presence on the lands.Zouheir Maalej and Aseel Zibin. “Metaphors They Kill by: Dehumanization of Palestinians by Israeli Officials and Sympathizers.” International Journal of Arabic-English Studies 25, no. 1 (2025): 201–22. doi:10.33806/ijaes.v25i1.693.
During the 2014 Gaza War, studies found high and comparable levels of blatant dehumanization among both Israeli and Palestinian participants. A survey using the "ascent of man scale", a common measure of dehumanizing attitudes, found that, on average, both sides rated each other closer to an animal than a fully evolved human when shown a March of Progress image. On the scale with "0 corresponding to the left side of the image (i.e., quadrupedal human ancestor), and 100 corresponding to the right side of the image ('full' modern-day human)" Israelis on average rated Palestinians 39.81 points lower than their own group and Palestinians on average rated Israelis 37.03 points lower than their own group.
Following the Hamas attacks on October 7, 2023, dehumanizing language intensified in Israeli political discourse. Senior officials used animalistic dehumanization through metaphors, such as "rats" and "cockroaches", to describe Palestinians in Gaza, which served to legitimize acts of violence. These statements have drawn international scrutiny and were cited in legal proceedings at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) concerning allegations of incitement to genocide. Dehumanizing content also circulates widely on social media. In Israel, such rhetoric targets not only Palestinians but also left-wing Jewish Israelis, who have been depicted in demonizing and animalistic terms, including "dogs’’, "microbes’’, and "vermin’’. Political orientation has also been shown to influence levels of dehumanization, with research indicating that right-wing Israelis are more likely to dehumanize Palestinians than left-wing Israelis.
Dehumanizing are found in both Israeli discourse and Palestinian discourse. During South Africa's submission to the ICJ that Israel was committing genocide against the Palestinians, the president of the ICJ cited Yoav Gallant for using the phrase "human animals" in reference to Palestinians. On the Palestinian side, dehumanization has also been linked to support for violence. According to Joana Ricarte, dehumanizing perceptions of Israelis have contributed to moral frameworks that legitimized violence, including the attacks of October 7 2023.
According to Daniel Bar-Tal, delegitimization is the "categorization of groups into extreme negative social categories which are excluded from human groups that are considered as acting within the limits of acceptable norms and values".
Moral exclusion occurs when out-groups are subject to a different set of moral values, rules, and fairness than are used in social relations with in-group members. When individuals dehumanize others, they no longer experience distress when they treat them poorly. Moral exclusion is used to explain extreme behaviors like genocide, harsh immigration policies, and eugenics, but it can also happen on a more regular, everyday discriminatory level. In laboratory studies, people who are portrayed as lacking human qualities are treated in a particularly harsh and violent manner.
Dehumanized perception occurs when a subject experiences low frequencies of activation within their social cognition neural network. This includes areas of neural networking such as the superior temporal sulcus (STS) and the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC). A 2001 study by psychologists Chris Frith and Uta Frith suggests that the criticality of social interaction within a neural network has tendencies for subjects to dehumanize those seen as disgust-inducing, leading to social disengagement. Tasks involving social cognition typically activate the neural network responsible for subjective projections of disgust-inducing perceptions and patterns of dehumanization. "Besides manipulations of target persons, manipulations of social goals validate this prediction: Inferring preference, a mental-state inference, significantly increases mPFC and STS activity to these otherwise dehumanized targets." A 2007 study by Harris, McClure, van den Bos, Cohen, and Fiske suggests that a person's choice to dehumanize another person is due to decreased neural activity towards the projected target. This decreased neural activity is identified as low medial prefrontal cortex activation, which is associated with perceiving social information.
While social distance from the out-group target is a necessary condition for dehumanization, some research suggests that this alone is insufficient. Psychological research has identified high status, power, and social connection as additional factors. Members of high-status groups more often associate humanity with the in-group than the out-group, while members of low-status groups exhibit no differences in associations with humanity. Thus, having a high status makes one more likely to dehumanize others. Low-status groups are more associated with human nature traits (e.g., warmth, emotionalism) than uniquely human characteristics, implying that they are closer to animals than humans because these traits are typical of humans but can be seen in other species. In addition, another line of work found that individuals in a position of power were more likely to objectify their subordinates, treating them as a means to one's end rather than focusing on their essentially human qualities. Finally, social connection—thinking about a close other or being in the actual presence of a close other—enables dehumanization by reducing the attribution of human mental states, increasing support for treating targets like animals, and increasing willingness to endorse harsh interrogation tactics. This is counterintuitive because social connection has documented personal health and well-being benefits but appears to impair intergroup relations.
Neuroimaging studies have discovered that the medial prefrontal cortex—a brain region distinctively involved in attributing mental states to others—shows diminished activation to extremely dehumanized targets (i.e., those rated, according to the stereotype content model, as low-warmth and low-competence, such as drug addicts or homeless people).
Dehumanization often occurs as a result of intergroup conflict. Ethnic and racial others are often represented as animals in popular culture and scholarship. There is evidence that this representation persists in the American context with African Americans implicitly associated with apes. To the extent that an individual has this dehumanizing implicit association, they are more likely to support violence against African Americans (e.g., jury decisions to execute defendants). Historically, dehumanization is frequently connected to genocidal conflicts in that ideologies before and during the conflict depict victims as subhuman (e.g., rodents). Immigrants may also be dehumanized in this manner. In 1901, the six Australian colonies assented to federation, creating the modern nation state of Australia and its government. Section 51 (xxvi) excluded Aboriginals from the groups protected by special laws, and section 127 excluded Aboriginals from population counts. The Commonwealth Franchise Act 1902 categorically denied Aboriginals the right to vote. Indigenous Australians were not allowed the social security benefits (e.g., aged pensions and maternity allowances) which were provided to others. Aboriginals in rural areas were discriminated against and controlled as to where and how they could marry, work, live, and their movements.
In the U.S., African Americans were dehumanized by being classified as non-human primates. A California police officer who was also involved in the Rodney King beating described a dispute between an American Black couple as "something right out of Gorillas in the Mist". Franz Boas and Charles Darwin hypothesized that there might be an evolutionary process among primates. Monkeys and apes were least evolved, then savage and deformed anthropoids, which referred to people of African ancestry, to Caucasians as most developed.
In Unit 731, an imperial Japanese biological and chemical warfare research facility, brutal experiments were conducted on humans who the researchers referred to as 'maruta' (丸太) meaning logs. Yoshio Shinozuka, Japanese army medic who performed several in the facility said, "We called the victims 'logs.' We didn't want to think of them as people. We didn't want to admit that we were taking lives. So we convinced ourselves that what we were doing was like cutting down a tree."
Words such as migrant, immigrant, and expatriate are assigned to foreigners based on their social status and wealth, rather than ability, achievements, or political alignment. Expatriate is a word to describe the privileged, often Light skin people newly residing in an area and has connotations that suggest ability, wealth, and trust. Meanwhile, the word immigrant is used to describe people coming to a new location to reside and infers a much less-desirable meaning.
The word "immigrant" is sometimes paired with "illegal", which harbors a profoundly derogatory connotation. Misuse of these terms—they are often used inaccurately—to describe the other, can alter the perception of a group as a whole in a negative way. Ryan Eller, the executive director of the immigrant advocacy group Define American, expressed the problem this way: A series of language examinations found a direct relation between homophobic and social cognitive distancing towards a group of homosexuals, a form of dehumanization. These epithets (e.g., faggot) were thought to function as dehumanizing labels because they tended to act as markers of deviance. One pair of studies found that subjects were more likely to associate Malignancy language with homosexuals, and that such language associations increased the physical distancing between the subject and the homosexual. This indicated that the malignant language could encourage dehumanization, cognitive and physical distancing in ways that other forms of malignant language do not. Another study involved a computational linguistic analysis of dehumanizing language regarding LGBT individuals and groups in the New York Times from 1986 to 2015. The study used previous psychological research on dehumanization to identify four language categories: (1) negative evaluations of a target group, (2) denial of agency, (3) moral disgust, and (4) likening members of the target group to non-human entities (e.g., machines, animals, vermin). The study revealed that LGBTQ people overall have been increasingly more humanized over time; however, they were found to be humanized less frequently than the New York Time's in-group identifier American.
Aliza Luft notes that the role of dehumanizing language and propaganda plays in violence and genocide is far less significant than other factors such as obedience to authority and peer pressure.
From its founding, the United States repeatedly engaged in dignity takings from Native American populations, taking indigenous land in an "undeniably horrific, violent, and tragic record" of genocide and ethnocide. As recently as 2013, the degradation of a mountain sacred to the Hopi people—by spraying its peak pot with artificial snow made from wastewater—constituted another dignity taking by the U.S. Forest Service.
The 1921 Tulsa race massacre also constituted a dignity taking involving dehumanization. White rioters dehumanized African Americans by attacking, looting, and destroying homes and businesses in Greenwood, a predominantly Black neighborhood known as "Black Wall Street".
During the The Holocaust, mass genocide—a severe form of dehumanization—accompanied the destruction and taking of Jewish property. This constituted a dignity taking.
Jewish settlers in the West Bank have been criticized for dehumanizing Palestinians and land grabbing on illegal settlements. These illegal settlement activities involve systemic settler violence against Palestinians, military orders, and state-sanctioned support. These actions force Palestinians to gradually give up their land and farming activities and gradually choke their sources of dignified income. Israeli soldiers sometimes actively participate in violence against civilians or look on from the sidelines.
Undocumented workers in the United States have also been subject to dehumanizing dignity takings when employers treat them as machines instead of people to justify dangerous working conditions. When harsh conditions lead to bodily injury or death, the property destroyed is the physical body.
In biological terms, dehumanization can be described as an introduced species marginalizing the human species, or an introduced person/process that debases other people inhumanely.
In political science and jurisprudence, the act of dehumanization is the inferential alienation of human rights or denaturalization of natural rights, a definition contingent upon presiding international law rather than social norms limited by human geography. In this context, a specialty within species does not need to constitute global citizenship or its inalienable rights; the human genome inherits both.
In a medical context, some dehumanizing practices have become more acceptable. While the dissection of human cadavers was seen as dehumanizing in the Dark Ages (see history of anatomy), the value of dissections as a training aid is such that they are now more widely accepted. Dehumanization has been associated with modern medicine generally and has explicitly been suggested as a coping mechanism for doctors who work with patients at the end of life. Researchers have identified six potential causes of dehumanization in medicine: deindividuating practices, impaired patient agency, dissimilarity (causes which do not facilitate the delivery of medical treatment), mechanization, empathy reduction, and moral disengagement (which could be argued to facilitate the delivery of medical treatment).
In some US states, legislation requires that a woman view ultrasound images of her fetus before having an abortion. Critics of the law argue that merely seeing an image of the fetus humanizes it and biases women against abortion. Similarly, a recent study showed that subtle humanization of medical patients appears to improve care for these patients. Radiologists evaluating X-rays reported more details to patients and expressed more empathy when a photo of the patient's face accompanied the X-rays.Turner, Y., & Hadas-Halpern, I. (2008, December 3). "The effects of including a patient's photograph to the radiographic examination" . Paper presented at Radiological Society of North America, Chicago, IL. It appears that the inclusion of the photos counteracts the dehumanization of the medical process.
Dehumanization has applications outside traditional social contexts. Anthropomorphism (i.e., perceiving mental and physical capacities that reflect humans in nonhuman entities) is the inverse of dehumanization. Waytz, Epley, and Cacioppo suggest that the inverse of the factors that facilitate dehumanization (e.g., high status, power, and social connection) should promote anthropomorphism. That is, a low status, socially disconnected person without power should be more likely to attribute human qualities to pets or inanimate objects than a high-status, high-power, socially connected person.
Researchers have found that engaging in violent video game play diminishes perceptions of both one's own humanity and the humanity of the players who are targets of the game violence. While the players are dehumanized, the video game characters are often anthropomorphized.
Dehumanization has occurred historically under the pretense of "progress in the name of science". During the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition, exhibited several natives from independent tribes worldwide, most notably a young Congolese man, Ota Benga. Benga's imprisonment was put on display as a public service showcasing "a degraded and degenerate race". After relocating to New York in 1906, public outcry led to the permanent ban and closure of human zoos in the United States.
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