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Nathan Heflick is a doctoral student in social psychology at The University of South Florida. See full bio

You are Animals, but as for Me and My Group We are Human!

Research reveals we view our own groups as more human

Published on December 6, 2009

At what point does a person cease to be, well human? Nearly a decade of research suggests that the answer largely hinges on if they are part of your group or not.

Noting that nearly every conflict throughout history was marked with clear dehumanization of the opposition (e.g., during WWII Japanese people were depicted as rats and beasts in the media), Jacques-Phillipe Lyens sought to test these effects. The problem was that it was tricky to get people to say, for instance, that a given group was an animal. It turns out humans largely are unaware of the ways they dehumanize others.

So Lyens did something incredibly clever. He discovered that many emotions were percieved to be more in humans than animals (e.g., sorrow, nostalgia). He and his colleagues reasoned then, that if people see people of different groups as less human than them, then they should see their own group as higher in these uniquely human emotions.

Well a decade later, as many as two dozen published studies support this hypothesis. People see their own group as more human, and outgroups as less human. This isn't a small matter, because research also shows that when we harm another group, we tend to see them as less human, and further, this occurs even when we feel guilty. And further, research shows that such subtle ways of humanizing our own group are related to increased violence against different groups.

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So the bottom line is pretty much this. If you ask your neighbor (let's use a US neighbor as an example), "say, do you think Russians are less human than Americans?", they will look at you like you are some sort of crazy. But the truth is that the majority of your neighbors will see outside groups as less human (and more animalistic) than their own groups.

Looked at differently, many moral debates hinge largely on basic human rights. If you see the outside group as less human than your group, then you are more likely to deny them these basic human rights. The person that needs healthcare we have sympathy for and will help, but the pseudo 80% (or less) human who needs it we can turn our back on.

And ditto for any opponent during war. An animal is easy to blow up in the name of country, but a human who loves his wife and daughter, who has basic human emotions is not.