To be “othered” is to be treated as fundamentally different from and inferior to a dominant group, marked as not belonging on the basis of identity traits like race, ethnicity, religion, gender, disability, or social class. The term captures something more specific than simple exclusion. Othering is a process: a set of social, psychological, and institutional practices that cast certain people as outsiders whose perspectives, experiences, and even humanity are treated as less valid or less real. The concept has roots in philosophy and critical theory but has spread into everyday language because the experience it describes is so recognizable across contexts.
What Othering Actually Involves
At its core, othering draws a line between “us” and “them.” The “us” group is treated as the norm, the default, the standard against which everyone else is measured. The “them” group is defined primarily by how it deviates from that standard. A person who is othered doesn’t just face disagreement or dislike; they face the message that they are a different kind of person altogether.
Researchers who have tried to pin down othering as a formal concept identify it as operating on multiple levels simultaneously. At the interpersonal level, it shows up in how individuals treat each other: assumptions, microaggressions, avoidance, condescension. At the institutional level, it shows up in policies, hiring practices, and how systems distribute resources. A nursing science analysis proposed adding a structural dimension to the concept, drawing attention to broader historical, political, cultural, and social factors that shape relationships between groups and make othering feel natural or invisible to those doing it.1Ovid / Advances in Nursing Science. Revisiting the Concept of Othering: A Structural Analysis That structural layer helps explain why othering can persist even when individual attitudes improve: the architecture of exclusion is baked into how institutions operate.
One validated research scale designed to measure othering found that the concept breaks into two core dimensions: perceiving the other as “strange or foreign” and perceiving the other as “equal.”2PubMed Central. Otherness measuring scale: design and validation for social sciences These two factors are not simply opposites; someone can simultaneously acknowledge another person’s equal standing in theory while still treating them as fundamentally alien in practice. That gap between stated beliefs and lived behavior is central to how othering persists in societies that officially endorse equality.
The Psychology Behind Us-Versus-Them Thinking
Othering has deep psychological roots. Social identity theory, one of the most influential frameworks in social psychology, holds that people derive a sense of self-worth partly from the groups they belong to. That investment in group identity drives individuals to favor their own group over others, creating what researchers call “ingroup favoritism.”3Group Processes & Intergroup Relations. Self-esteem, ingroup favoritism, and outgroup evaluations: A meta-analysis The logic runs something like this: my group is good, I belong to my group, therefore I am good. For that equation to work, the outgroup often needs to be positioned as lesser.
This isn’t a rigid formula, though. People can be strategic in how they evaluate members of their own group. Research on hiring decisions found that ingroup favoritism sometimes reverses: when evaluating a fellow group member who is highly competent and therefore threatening to the evaluator’s own standing, people will denigrate that person to protect their self-esteem.4Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes. Hiring you makes me look bad: Social-identity based reversals of the ingroup favoritism effect In other words, the underlying engine isn’t loyalty to the group for its own sake; it’s self-esteem management. Othering is, in part, a strategy for feeling okay about yourself by positioning others as less than.
An evolutionary angle adds another layer. Researchers have identified what they call the “behavioural immune system,” a set of psychological processes that originally evolved to detect and avoid infection. Because unfamiliar people were historically more likely to carry unfamiliar pathogens, the brain developed a bias toward wariness of outsiders. These ancient infection-avoidance mechanisms now spill over into modern social attitudes, fueling prejudice and xenophobia in ways that have nothing to do with actual disease risk.5PubMed Central. The behavioural immune system and the psychology of human sociality A complementary review traced two distinct evolved psychologies of intergroup relations: one centered on competition for resources (historically more pronounced among men) and another centered on disease avoidance, both of which generate suspicion and hostility toward people perceived as different.6Social and Personality Psychology Compass. Guns, Germs, and Sex: How Evolution Shaped Our Intergroup Psychology
What Happens in the Brain
Neuroscience research has revealed that othering is not just an attitude; it registers in measurable brain activity. EEG studies found that when people watch someone from their own group experience sadness, their brains produce activation patterns that mirror the sad person’s state. When they watch an outgroup member in the same situation, that mirroring response weakens, and the more prejudiced the observer, the weaker it gets.7PubMed Central. Intergroup differences in the sharing of emotive states: neural evidence of an empathy gap In plain terms, the brain literally feels less for people it categorizes as “other.”
This empathy gap has been studied extensively in the context of pain perception across racial lines. Brain imaging research shows heightened neural responses when people observe someone of their own race experiencing pain, compared to weaker responses for someone of a different race, and this pattern appears across multiple ethnic groups rather than being limited to one.8Trends in Cognitive Sciences. Neurocognitive foundations of racial ingroup bias in empathy There’s even a genetic component: variations in the oxytocin receptor gene influence how strongly someone’s brain responds to ingroup versus outgroup pain, and these neural patterns predict real-world implicit attitudes and willingness to help outgroup members.9PubMed. Oxytocin receptor gene and racial ingroup bias in empathy-related brain activity
None of this means that empathy gaps are hardwired and unchangeable. The research consistently frames these as default tendencies that can be overridden with effort and awareness. But the findings do help explain why othering feels so automatic and why well-intentioned people can still fail to extend the same concern to outgroup members that they naturally feel for people they identify with.
From Othering to Dehumanization
At its most extreme, othering tips into dehumanization, where the target isn’t just seen as different but as less than fully human. Researchers distinguish two forms of this. In one, people are likened to animals by being denied qualities considered uniquely human, like rationality, moral sensibility, and self-control. In the other, people are treated as objects or automata by being denied qualities that constitute human nature, like emotional warmth, curiosity, and individuality.10PubMed. Dehumanization: an integrative review
Brain imaging work supports this distinction at a neural level. When people perceive others as human, they show high activity in a brain network associated with understanding other minds (the default mode network) and relatively low activity in a task-focused network. Dehumanizing perceptions disrupt this pattern, but the two forms of dehumanization do so differently: treating someone as animal-like and treating someone as machine-like produce distinct neural signatures, suggesting these are genuinely different psychological processes rather than just different labels for the same thing.11PubMed. Seeing human: distinct and overlapping neural signatures associated with two forms of dehumanization A neuroanatomical model pinpoints the mechanisms further: the animal-like form involves increased suppression of empathic responses (centered in the inferior frontal gyrus), while the machine-like form involves a breakdown in the brain’s ability to attribute a mind to others at all (centered in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex).12PubMed Central. A Functional and Neuroanatomical Model of Dehumanization
The link between everyday othering and full dehumanization is not a cliff edge but a continuum. Social essentialism, the tendency to view categories like race or gender as reflecting deep, natural, and fixed divisions between kinds of people, provides the conceptual scaffolding. When people essentialize a group, they treat its members as interchangeable representatives of a “type” rather than as individuals. Research on how children develop essentialist thinking shows it emerges early and has downstream consequences for stereotyping and prejudice.13PubMed Central. The development and developmental consequences of social essentialism The categories themselves may be socially constructed, but the human tendency to treat them as natural and absolute appears across cultures and developmental stages.
Othering in Language and Media
Othering doesn’t require overt hostility to function. It operates powerfully through language. Research on extremist rhetoric identified two distinct modes: overt othering, which uses direct statements and active-voice assertions to blame a target group for problems, and covert othering, which uses passive constructions and indirect framing to foreground harmful actions without explicitly naming an agent.14Humanities and Social Sciences Communications. Exploring the grammar of othering and antagonism as enacted in terrorist discourse: verbal aggression in service of radicalisation The covert form is particularly insidious because it can fly under the radar, allowing audiences to absorb othering frames without recognizing them as such.
Media coverage plays a major role in mainstreaming these patterns. A study of Islamophobic framing in U.S. and U.K. news outlets found persistent structural bias that reinforces negative stereotypes by disproportionately linking Muslims to threats, violence, and societal unrest, while marginalizing more complex and humanizing portrayals.15Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism. Framing the Muslim ‘Other’: Mass Media and Islamophobic Practices Shaping Identity, Representation and Power in the West The “other” in these narratives is defined almost entirely by perceived danger, leaving little room for the everyday ordinariness that characterizes any actual community.
Political rhetoric uses othering differently but just as effectively. Populist messaging, for instance, constructs a sharp opposition between “pure ordinary people” and “corrupt elites.” Research comparing populist blame attribution to standard causal attribution found that populist framing produces stronger negative perceptions of targeted elites, especially when the messaging attacks all elite groups (political, corporate, and scientific) simultaneously rather than singling one out.16Communications. They are all against us! The effects of populist blame attributions to political, corporate, and scientific elites Othering doesn’t only flow from powerful groups downward; it can target anyone positioned as fundamentally outside the “real” community.
How Social Media Amplifies the Process
Digital platforms have become accelerants for othering, and the mechanism is structural rather than accidental. Engagement-based ranking algorithms, the systems that decide which content you see first, tend to promote content that generates strong reactions. Research on one major platform’s algorithm found that, compared to simply showing posts in chronological order, the engagement-based system amplified tweets exhibiting greater partisanship and more outgroup animosity. Users who saw algorithmically ranked content ended up feeling worse about their political outgroup and better about their own group.17Knight First Amendment Institute. Engagement, User Satisfaction, and the Amplification of Divisive Content on Social Media
Broader empirical evidence supports the same pattern. Analysis of Facebook’s 2018 algorithm change, which increased emphasis on certain engagement metrics, found it contributed to increased ideological extremism and affective polarization among users surveyed in both Italy and the United States.18Journal of Public Economics. Ranking for engagement: How social media algorithms fuel misinformation and polarization The takeaway is uncomfortable: the platforms people spend hours on each day are, by design, rewarding the very content that deepens us-versus-them divisions. Othering content generates engagement, and engagement is what the algorithm optimizes for.
Intersectionality and Compounded Othering
People are rarely othered along a single axis. A person may be simultaneously marked as different by race, gender, class, religion, sexuality, or disability, and these categories interact in ways that produce distinct experiences that cannot be understood by examining any one dimension in isolation. Research on young ethnic minority men in Denmark, for example, found that they were subject to what the authors called “intersectional othering,” which combined racialized exclusion with elements of exoticist fascination, a particular kind of objectification that treats the other as both threatening and alluring.19Qualitative Studies. Othering, identity formation and agency
Othering can also take spatial forms. In Mexico City, an urban renewal program intended to “rescue” the historic center ended up reproducing segregation by creating distinct sensory environments, essentially different lived realities, for different groups in the same city.20International Journal of Education and Humanities. Urban Sensation and Segregation: Understanding Mexico City’s Programa de Rescate and Its Reproduction of Urban Othering The division between who belongs in a gentrified public square and who is pushed out of it is a form of othering that operates through architecture and urban policy rather than through individual attitudes.
The Toll on People Who Are Othered
Being consistently treated as “other” carries real psychological costs. Research on the relationship between otherness and mental health has found that the experience of otherness significantly influences psychological stress, operating as a distinct stressor alongside structural factors like poverty and institutional discrimination.21PubMed. Structural Stress and Otherness: How Do They Influence Psychological Stress? The stress doesn’t come only from dramatic events like overt discrimination; it accumulates through chronic, low-grade signals that you don’t fully belong.
One particularly damaging consequence is self-othering, or internalized stigma, where people absorb the negative attitudes directed at their group and apply them to themselves. In the context of mental illness, for instance, people who internalize public stigma about psychiatric conditions suffer consequences that go beyond what the condition itself would cause: reduced self-esteem, reluctance to seek help, withdrawal from social life.22PubMed Central. On the self-stigma of mental illness: stages, disclosure, and strategies for change The othering message becomes part of how the person sees themselves, which makes it far harder to resist or escape.
How People Push Back
Othering doesn’t go unchallenged. One of the most striking forms of resistance is reclamation: taking the very labels used to degrade a group and redeploying them with pride or irony. Research on this practice among activists found that reappropriating stigmatizing labels was associated with increased agency, empowerment, and willingness to participate in collective action, partly because the act of reclamation changes how people relate to their own identity.23Political Psychology. Wear it like armor and it can never be used to hurt you: Reappropriation, identity change, and collective action
This pattern isn’t limited to Western contexts. In Ethiopia, Amhara youth have formed resistance movements that deliberately reclaim derogatory epithets used by ethno-nationalist opponents, repurposing those labels as tools of mobilization and solidarity rather than accepting them as marks of inferiority.24Journal of Asian and African Studies. Identity Construction, Reverse Discourse and the Amhara Nationalism in Ethiopia The strategy draws on what the philosopher Michel Foucault called “reverse discourse,” resisting the dominant narrative without abandoning the language it uses, instead filling that language with new meaning.
At a broader social level, contact between groups remains one of the most effective ways to reduce othering. Studies comparing different types of intergroup contact found that positive face-to-face interaction occurred more frequently and had a stronger relationship with reduced prejudice than other forms of contact, including digital interaction.25PLOS ONE. The contact hypothesis and the virtual revolution: Does face-to-face interaction remain central to improving intergroup relations? Simply put, it is harder to treat someone as a fundamentally different kind of person when you’re regularly in the same room with them.
Common Ingroup Identity as a Counterweight
Another approach to reducing othering involves expanding the boundaries of “us.” When people are reminded that they share a larger group identity with members of a group they would otherwise other, their attitudes tend to soften. Research with Black and White students found that perceptions of a shared identity were linked to decreased intergroup threat and more positive attitudes toward the outgroup. A second study found the same effect between Democrats and Republicans: when their shared identity as Americans was made prominent, both sides experienced less threat and warmer attitudes toward the other party.26Group Processes & Intergroup Relations. Does a common ingroup identity reduce intergroup threat?
The common-ingroup-identity strategy has limits, though. Research on weight-based othering found that emphasizing a shared identity only reduced bias when the specific form of discrimination was made visible at the same time. When weight discrimination wasn’t highlighted, a shared-identity framing didn’t move the needle on weight bias.27PubMed Central. Does a Common Ingroup Identity Reduce Weight Bias? Only When Weight Discrimination Is Salient The implication is that broadening the “us” is not a magic fix; it works best when combined with explicit acknowledgment that othering is happening in the first place. Without that acknowledgment, the expanded identity can paper over the problem rather than addressing it.
When Othering Wears a Scientific Costume
One of the more dangerous forms of othering is the kind that wraps itself in the authority of science. Throughout colonial history, scientific race theories were developed and promoted specifically to justify the treatment of Indigenous and colonized peoples as naturally inferior, providing intellectual cover for dispossession and violence.28Academia. Colonialism and the Science of Race Difference These weren’t fringe ideas; they were published in respected journals, taught in universities, and cited in policy decisions. The institutional prestige of science made the othering it produced feel objective rather than ideological.
That history matters for how we think about othering today. The tendency to essentialize group differences, treating them as fixed, biological, and meaningful, didn’t disappear when eugenics fell out of fashion. It migrated into subtler forms: assumptions about group-level intelligence, cultural compatibility, or innate temperament that still circulate in popular discourse and occasionally in poorly framed research. Recognizing othering means being alert not just to who is being excluded but to the authority structures that make the exclusion seem reasonable.