Dehumanization is the psychological process of perceiving or treating other people as less than fully human. It can take the form of viewing someone as animal-like, machine-like, or simply lacking the inner life and complexity you would grant to members of your own group. While the word tends to conjure images of wartime propaganda or hate speech, research over the past two decades has shown that dehumanization operates on a spectrum, from blatant rhetoric that casts entire groups as vermin to subtle, sometimes unconscious mental shortcuts that strip away someone’s perceived warmth, agency, or emotional depth.
Two Distinct Forms of Dehumanization
Psychologists have identified two broad patterns. One involves denying people traits considered uniquely human, like moral reasoning, refinement, and complex emotion. When this happens, the targets end up being perceived as more animal-like: driven by instinct, lacking civility or self-control. The second involves denying people traits associated with human nature itself, things like warmth, emotional responsiveness, and individual agency. Targets of this form are perceived more like objects or machines: cold, rigid, interchangeable.1Personality and Social Psychology Review. Dehumanization: An Integrative Review
These two forms matter because they predict different outcomes. Animalistic dehumanization tends to go hand-in-hand with disgust and contempt. The targets are seen as primitive, potentially dangerous, and morally beneath you. Mechanistic dehumanization, on the other hand, often accompanies indifference rather than hostility. You don’t despise a tool; you just don’t consider its feelings. This distinction helps explain why dehumanization looks so different in a genocide versus a corporate office, even though both involve a failure to fully recognize another person’s humanity.
Subtle Dehumanization and Infrahumanization
Most people don’t go around consciously thinking “that group is subhuman.” But researchers have found a subtler version that shows up even among people who hold no obvious prejudice. The concept is sometimes called infrahumanization: a tendency to attribute complex, distinctly human emotions like nostalgia, contempt, or hope to your own group more readily than to outsiders. People freely grant that outgroups feel basic emotions such as anger or joy, which even animals display. What they hold back are the more refined, “secondary” emotions that feel uniquely human.2Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. Infrahumanization or Familiarity? Attribution of Uniquely Human Emotions to the Self, the Ingroup, and the Outgroup
This isn’t always a product of hostility. Familiarity plays a role. You know the rich emotional lives of people you’re close to because you’ve observed them up close. Outgroup members remain more abstract, and the less you interact with them, the flatter your mental picture of their inner world becomes. The result is that you may implicitly treat their suffering as simpler, their motivations as more predictable, their humanity as somehow thinner than your own.
What Happens in the Brain
Some of the most discussed neuroscience work on dehumanization comes from studies using brain imaging to look at how people process different social groups. A well-known finding showed that when people viewed photographs of individuals from groups stereotyped as both low-warmth and low-competence, such as people who are homeless or who use drugs, a brain region called the medial prefrontal cortex showed less activation than it did for other social groups. The medial prefrontal cortex is typically engaged during social thinking, when you consider another person’s mind, intentions, or feelings. Instead, these extreme outgroup members activated brain areas linked to disgust.3Psychological Science. Dehumanizing the Lowest of the Low
A follow-up study attempted to replicate this and found a similar pattern, though the effect was weaker and only reached the threshold of significance when the statistical cutoff was relaxed.4Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience. Social groups that elicit disgust are differentially processed in mPFC The interpretation is suggestive rather than definitive: people may, under certain conditions, fail to spontaneously engage their social-cognition circuitry for the most stigmatized outgroups, essentially not thinking about those individuals as thinking beings. But the effect is context-dependent, not hardwired. It depends on what task people are doing and what they’ve been primed to consider.
How Language and Propaganda Weaponize Dehumanization
The most visceral examples of dehumanization involve explicit metaphors: calling targeted groups rats, cockroaches, or parasites. These images show up in the rhetoric surrounding genocide and mass violence, and they are often cited as a crucial enabling step. If you can get a population to see another group as vermin, the reasoning goes, the psychological barriers to violence weaken.
But research on genocide suggests the picture is more complicated than this neat narrative. Scholars have argued that dehumanization’s role in mass violence is broader and more layered than the simple propaganda-enables-killing model implies. Subtle forms of dehumanization, the gradual erosion of seeing a group as fully human, often precede the appearance of explicit animal metaphors. And the metaphors themselves aren’t always animalistic; they can involve framing targets as diseases, impurities, or existential threats to the social body.5Confronting Humanity at its Worst. The Many Roles of Dehumanization in Genocide
Dehumanizing language also works because it fits into a broader system of moral disengagement. Albert Bandura’s framework describes how people can commit or support harmful acts by cognitively restructuring them: sanitizing their language, displacing responsibility onto leaders or institutions, minimizing consequences, and attributing blame to the victims. Dehumanization is one piece of this machinery, not the whole engine.6Personality and Social Psychology Review. Moral Disengagement in the Perpetration of Inhumanities
Dehumanization in Hospitals, Prisons, and Workplaces
You don’t need a war or a propaganda campaign to find dehumanization in action. It shows up in the structures of everyday institutions. In healthcare, patients are routinely reduced to their diagnoses, assigned bed numbers instead of names, and processed through systems that leave little time for personal connection. This kind of dehumanization is largely unconscious and unintentional, driven by the organizational demands of busy hospitals rather than by malice.7PubMed Central. Rethinking dehumanization, empathy, and burnout in healthcare context For healthcare workers, emotionally distancing from patients can function as a coping strategy that lowers the risk of burnout, which makes it self-reinforcing.8PubMed Central. Dehumanization of Hospitalized Patients and Self-Dehumanization by Health Professionals and the General Population in Greece
Prisons are another environment where dehumanization becomes routine and, to some extent, built into the job. Correctional workers operate within systems designed to disempower incarcerated individuals, and the emotional dissonance of simultaneously controlling and caring for people pushes many workers toward dehumanizing those they supervise, seeing them as numbers, animals, or problems rather than people with full inner lives.9Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World. Animals, Robots, Numbers, and Monsters: Dehumanization Spillover in Prison Work
In corporate settings, a similar pattern can emerge. When organizations treat employees primarily as instruments for achieving production targets, workers notice. Research has found that this mechanistic approach, where people feel reduced to interchangeable units of labor, fuels what some scholars call organizational dehumanization. Post-pandemic shifts toward automation and algorithmic management have intensified this dynamic in some industries.10Asian Journal of Social Psychology. Organizational dehumanization fuelling opportunistic behaviour: A social exchange perspective
Sexual Objectification as a Form of Dehumanization
When a person is reduced to their body, their perceived humanness shrinks. Research on sexual objectification has found that sexualized individuals, particularly women, are judged as having less competence and less agency than the same people presented in non-sexualized ways. In one set of experiments, participants also reported being willing to administer more intense pain to sexualized targets, suggesting that the reduction in perceived humanness loosens moral restraint. This pattern showed up in both Western and Eastern cultural contexts.11Swiss Journal of Psychology. How Sexual Objectification Generates Dehumanization in Western and Eastern Cultures
The mechanism appears to involve an attentional shift. When sexual attraction enters the picture, the perceiver’s focus moves from the target’s personality and mind to their body. This shift triggers a process in which the person is mentally recategorized, not as a full agent with goals, beliefs, and experiences, but as something closer to an object. Both men and women can engage in this kind of processing, though the triggers and targets differ.12European Journal of Social Psychology. Are sexualized women complete human beings? Why men and women dehumanize sexually objectified women Online spaces have amplified this dynamic, as digital platforms make it easy to encounter others only as images detached from context or personality.13Development Policy Review. Safeguarding women in digital spaces: Legal responses to cyber harassment and objectification on social media
When People Dehumanize Themselves
Dehumanization doesn’t only flow outward. People can experience a diminished sense of their own humanness, and the causes are sometimes surprising. Across several experiments, people who were socially excluded, left out of a group activity or interaction, judged both themselves and the people who excluded them as less human afterward. The dimension most sensitive to this was “human nature”: the warmth, emotional openness, and vitality people associate with being a full person.14Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. Excluded from humanity: The dehumanizing effects of social ostracism
Self-dehumanization also occurs after harming others. People who perpetrated social ostracism, even in a lab setting, subsequently rated themselves as less human compared to people who had engaged in non-harmful interactions. The effect was driven by the perceived immorality of their own behavior. Interestingly, the more participants felt they had lost some of their humanness, the more likely they were to engage in prosocial behavior afterward, as if trying to reclaim it.15PubMed. Losing our humanity: the self-dehumanizing consequences of social ostracism This suggests that self-dehumanization functions partly as an internal alarm system, signaling that you have violated your own moral standards and prompting corrective action.
How Early Does Dehumanization Appear in Children
Dehumanization is not just an adult phenomenon. Studies with children as young as five have found that they perceive outgroup faces as less human than ingroup faces. In experiments where children rated ambiguous doll-human face morphs, they were less likely to see the faces as human when those faces belonged to a different gender or geographic group. Crucially, this tendency increased with age across the five-to-six-year-old range, even while simple ingroup preference (liking your own group more) stayed stable. This suggests that dehumanization and basic group favoritism may develop along partly separate tracks.16PubMed. Young children perceive less humanness in outgroup faces
More recent work has linked the emergence of dehumanization to developing cognitive abilities, specifically the capacity to understand that other people hold beliefs, and that those beliefs can be wrong. In two experiments, children who had mastered this skill were the ones who rated outgroup members as less human than ingroup members, while children who hadn’t yet developed it showed only a preference for their own group without the dehumanization component. Among children with more advanced mind-reading abilities, the intent to harm outgroup members was associated with dehumanization specifically.17Developmental Science. The Emergence of Belief Attribution and Dehumanization Are Associated The irony is hard to miss: the very cognitive ability that lets you understand another person’s mind may also be what allows you to deny them one.
Who Is More Prone to Dehumanize
Some individuals dehumanize more readily than others, and researchers have started treating this as a measurable trait rather than just a situational response. People who score high on social dominance orientation, a worldview that favors hierarchies and the dominance of some groups over others, are consistently more likely to dehumanize.18Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences. Dehumanization propensity as an individual difference This makes intuitive sense: if you believe the world should be hierarchically organized, then viewing those at the bottom as less fully human reinforces the legitimacy of the hierarchy.
Context matters too. Situations that activate intergroup competition, threat, or zero-sum thinking make dehumanization more likely regardless of individual personality. And as the institutional examples above illustrate, structural features of workplaces, prisons, or digital environments can push people toward dehumanization even when they wouldn’t engage in it under different circumstances.
Challenges to the Dehumanization Framework
Not all researchers are convinced that dehumanization is as central to understanding violence and prejudice as its prominence suggests. A growing number of scholars have raised pointed objections. One argument holds that the evidence linking dehumanizing perceptions to actual harm is weaker than commonly assumed: some nonhuman organisms, like pets or endangered species, are treated with extraordinary care, while some groups are targeted for violence precisely because of how their distinctly human qualities are perceived, such as intelligence or cunning, which would make them threatening, not subhuman.19Perspectives on Psychological Science. Seven Challenges for the Dehumanization Hypothesis
Critics have also questioned whether the psychological concept of dehumanization, as typically measured in lab studies, maps cleanly onto what happens in real-world violence. Some argue that the explanatory value of “dehumanization” is now in serious doubt, and that the concept may sometimes distort rather than illuminate the history of collective violence.20PubMed. The limited importance of dehumanization in collective violence On the measurement side, some research has found that when you carefully separate genuine trait-based dehumanization from simple ingroup favoritism (the tendency to rate your own group positively on all traits, not just human ones), the “dehumanization” effect shrinks or disappears.21PubMed Central. No convincing evidence outgroups are denied uniquely human characteristics: Distinguishing intergroup preference from trait-based dehumanization
These criticisms don’t mean dehumanization isn’t real or doesn’t matter. They mean the field is still working out what the concept actually captures and where its limits lie. The popular narrative of “seeing people as less than human causes violence” is probably too simple, but the patterns of perception that researchers have documented, the reduced empathy, the moral disengagement, the attentional narrowing, are robust enough to demand explanation even if the label itself gets refined.
What Reduces Dehumanization
If perceiving outgroups as less human is partly driven by unfamiliarity and social distance, then increasing contact should help. And that’s broadly what the evidence shows. Reviews of contact-based interventions, including both direct face-to-face interaction and even imagined contact scenarios, have found that contact reduces infrahumanization and promotes what researchers call outgroup humanization: the tendency to attribute full human traits to people outside your group.22Testing, Psychometrics, Methodology in Applied Psychology. Intergroup contact as a strategy to improve humanness attributions: A review of studies
This connects to a broader insight about the relationship between dehumanization and its flip side, anthropomorphism, the tendency to attribute human qualities to nonhuman things. The same psychological factors that lead people to see human characteristics in robots, animals, or storms also govern when people fail to see those characteristics in other humans. When you lack social connection, feel uncertain about your social world, or simply have limited information about another agent, your brain fills in the blanks. For outgroup members, the default fill is often thinner and less human. For nonhuman agents, it can be surprisingly rich.23PubMed Central. Social Cognition Unbound: Insights Into Anthropomorphism and Dehumanization Anything that thickens the picture of another person’s inner life, whether that’s a conversation, a story, or a shared task, pushes back against the impulse to flatten them into something less than what they are.