The Social Psychology of Dehumanization

Nick Haslam traces the recent history of dehumanization scholarship and maps its current contours, in which psychology plays a dominant role. Over the past two decades in particular, dehumanization has emerged as a major focus of theoretical and empirical attention within that discipline. That focus has been especially keen in social psychology, the subdiscipline which addresses the embeddedness of human behavior in its interpersonal and group contexts. The social psychology literature on dehumanization is complex and expansive; and the chapter demonstrates some of the benefits, challenges, and limitations of investigating dehumanization through the lens of quantitative behavioral science. Haslam's overview summarizes the history of the research tradition in psychology; the theoretical frameworks that have been elaborated; the wide range of definitions, conceptualizations, and measures that have been developed; the many topic domains that have been explored; and what the research purports to tell us about the causes and consequences of dehumanization. The chapter concludes with a discussion of four concerns raised by the current state of psychological research on dehumanization, and how they might be addressed within the emerging multidisciplinary field of dehumanization studies. The chapter pays special and repeated attention to the issue of breadth: the definitional, theoretical, methodological, and substantive diversity of existing work in the field of social psychology, the fact that this diversity is growing, and the difficulties this expansion may generate.