Essentially Subhuman: Psychological Essentialism Facilitates Dehumanization

Public Significance Statement Dehumanization foments aggression and violence, so understanding the psychological mechanisms underlying it is crucial. Our results suggest that one such mechanism is psychological essentialism, laying the groundwork for interventions that aim to attenuate dehumanization by targeting this sociocognitive process. Dehumanization has played a prominent role in myriad human atrocities, which inspired us to investigate its social-cognitive basis. Since dehumanization consists of perceiving another to lack a defining human essence, scholars have suggested the process is grounded in psychological essentialism, the belief that members of a group all share an underlying essence. Indeed, Americans' essentialist thinking predicted their blatant dehumanization of various national outgroups (Study 1). After demonstrating this relationship, we attempted to mitigate dehumanization by reducing the tendency to think in an essentialist manner. Subjects led to hold an incremental theory about human traits (Study 2) or led to question the biological basis of racial differences (Study 3) subsequently expressed less psychological essentialism (limited to the specific aspect of biological essentialism in Study 3), and these reductions in essentialism predicted lower dehumanization. Despite these indirect effects, we generally failed to observe mean differences in dehumanization between experimental conditions, so we encourage future research to investigate third variables that may suppress the effect of essentialism-reducing interventions.