Dehumanization
What it is
Describing a group as less than fully human — as animals, vermin, disease, or objects — so that the moral rules that apply to people stop applying to them.
How it works
Real-world examples
- •Rwanda, 1994: Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines called Tutsi "inyenzi" (cockroaches) and told listeners to "cut down the tall trees"; the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda convicted its founders in the 2003 "Media Case" (Nahimana et al.).
- •The 1940 Nazi film "Der ewige Jude" intercut footage of Jews with swarming rats; Kangura's 1990 "Hutu Ten Commandments" and Julius Streicher's Der Stürmer used the same vermin-and-disease vocabulary decades apart.
- •Dower (1986) documented that wartime propaganda in both the United States and Japan portrayed the other side as apes, insects, or demons — dehumanization is a structure of conflict, not a property of one side.
- •In 1995–1996 the "superpredator" label for juvenile offenders, coined by political scientist John DiIulio and used by Hillary Clinton in a January 1996 speech, described children as having "no conscience, no empathy"; DiIulio later repudiated it. Since then "animals", "vermin", and "infestation" have been applied to migrants and to political opponents by figures across the spectrum in the United States, Britain, Italy, and Hungary.
- •Contemporary — US right: in May 2018 President Donald Trump called MS-13 gang members "animals" at a White House roundtable, and in December 2023, campaigning in New Hampshire, said immigrants were "poisoning the blood of our country"; both statements drew objections from opponents and from some members of his own party. Paired with the 1996 "superpredator" example above, the record shows the vocabulary is available to any side.
Historical case studies
Ethical guidelines
- ●No group of people is an animal, a disease, or an infestation; metaphors that say so are not rhetoric but preparation, and communicators bear responsibility for what the metaphor licenses.
- ●Condemning conduct never requires denying humanity; the test is whether the criticism would still work if the target were described as fully a person.
- ●Dehumanizing language aimed at people you oppose politically is the same device as dehumanizing language aimed at people you defend.
How to defend against it
- ►Listen for the category, not the insult: "vermin", "cockroaches", "infestation", "animals", "plague", and "subhuman" are the diagnostic words, and they mark an escalation regardless of who uses them.
- ►Re-humanize deliberately — name individuals, ask about their families and work; intergroup contact and individuating information are the best-supported counters to group-level dehumanization (Pettigrew & Tropp, 2006).
- ►Track the stage: Stanton's sequence gives you a checklist — classification, symbolization, discrimination, dehumanization, organization — and a place to object before the next step.
- ►Refuse the frame in your own speech, including about people who dehumanize others; Kteily, Hodson, and Bruneau (2016) found that feeling dehumanized by an outgroup drives reciprocal dehumanization, so mirroring it spreads the mechanism rather than resisting it.
From the Defense Playbook
A structured ten-to-twenty-minute conversation in which you ask someone's view without judgment, invite a story from their own life, share one of yours, and let them do the reasoning aloud; it is one of the few approaches shown in field experiments to shift attitudes durably.
To understand what another person thinks or wants, ask them and listen, instead of imagining yourself in their shoes; imagining feels insightful but in controlled tests does not improve accuracy, while asking does.
Check what you believe the other side thinks of your side against actual survey data, because partisans in many countries greatly overestimate how much their opponents dislike, dehumanize, and wish to obstruct them, and that exaggerated belief itself drives hostility.
Reduce hostility between groups by having them work together, as equals, toward a goal that both want and neither can reach alone; mere exposure or exhortation does little, but cooperative contact under the right conditions reliably lowers prejudice.
Every playbook entry states how strong its evidence is and when not to use it. Browse the full playbook.
References
- Haslam, N. (2006). Dehumanization: An Integrative Review. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 10(3), 252–264 · linkThe animalistic versus mechanistic distinction and the review of dehumanization mechanisms.
- Kteily, N., Bruneau, E., Waytz, A., & Cotterill, S. (2015). The Ascent of Man: Theoretical and Empirical Evidence for Blatant Dehumanization. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 109(5), 901–931 · linkThe blatant dehumanization scale and its prediction of support for aggressive policies independent of prejudice.
- Bandura, A. (1999). Moral Disengagement in the Perpetration of Inhumanities. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 3(3), 193–209 · linkDehumanization as one of the mechanisms of moral disengagement.
- Stanton, G. H. (2016). The Ten Stages of Genocide. Genocide Watch (expanded from the 1996 eight-stage model)Dehumanization as the fourth stage in the escalation sequence and the stage-based intervention checklist.
- Rai, T. S., Valdesolo, P., & Graham, J. (2017). Dehumanization Increases Instrumental Violence, but Not Moral Violence. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 114(32), 8511–8516The caution that dehumanization drives instrumental rather than moralistic violence.
- Kteily, N., Hodson, G., & Bruneau, E. (2016). They See Us as Less Than Human: Metadehumanization Predicts Intergroup Conflict via Reciprocal Dehumanization. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 110(3), 343–370Feeling dehumanized by an outgroup drives reciprocal dehumanization, the basis for the refuse-the-frame defense.