Dehumanization increases instrumental violence, but not moral violence

Across five experiments, we show that dehumanization—the act of perceiving victims as not completely human—increases instrumental, but not moral, violence. In attitude surveys, ascribing reduced capacities for cognitive, experiential, and emotional states to victims predicted support for practices where victims are harmed to achieve instrumental goals, including sweatshop labor, animal experimentation, and drone strikes that result in civilian casualties, but not practices where harm is perceived as morally righteous, including capital punishment, killing in war, and drone strikes that kill terrorists. In vignette experiments, using dehumanizing compared with humanizing language increased participants’ willingness to harm strangers for money, but not participants’ willingness to harm strangers for their immoral behavior. Participants also spontaneously dehumanized strangers when they imagined harming them for money, but not when they imagined harming them for their immoral behavior. Finally, participants humanized strangers who were low in humanity if they imagined harming them for immoral behavior, but not money, suggesting that morally motivated perpetrators may humanize victims to justify violence against them. Our findings indicate that dehumanization enables violence that perpetrators see as unethical, but instrumentally beneficial. In contrast, dehumanization does not contribute to moral violence because morally motivated perpetrators wish to harm complete human beings who are capable of deserving blame, experiencing suffering, and understanding its meaning. Keywords: moral; violence; dehumanization; instrumental; aggressionNational Science Foundation (U.S.) (Grant 1520031

Moral Psychology is Relationship Regulation

Genuine moral disagreement exists and is widespread. To understand such disagreement, we must examine the basic kinds of social relationships people construct across cultures and the distinct moral obligations and prohibitions these relationships entail. In Chapter 2 of the dissertation, I develop Relationship Regulation Theory, which postulates that there are four fundamental and distinct moral motives embedded in different social-relational schemas. Unity is the motive to care for and support the integrity of in-groups by avoiding or eliminating threats of contamination, and providing aid and protection based on need or empathic compassion. Hierarchy is the motive to respect rank in social groups where superiors are entitled to deference and respect but must also lead, guide, direct, and protect subordinates. Equality is the motive for balanced, in-kind reciprocity, equal treatment, equal say, and equal opportunity. Proportionality is the motive for rewards and punishments to be proportionate to merit, benefits to be calibrated to contributions, and judgments to be based on a utilitarian calculus of costs and benefits. The four moral motives are universal, but cultures, ideologies, and individuals differ in when they activate these motives and how they implement them. Unlike existing theories (Haidt, 2007; Hauser, 2006; Turiel, 1983), Relationship Regulation Theory predicts that any action, including violence, unequal treatment, and "impure" acts, may be perceived as morally correct depending on the moral motive employed and how the relevant social relationship is construed. In Chapter 3, I report two experiments that I conducted to investigate whether activating social-relational schemas would lead to corresponding activation of moral motives. In Experiment 1, I found that framing a social group in terms of Communal Sharing or Authority Ranking social-relational schemas led to activation of Unity and Hierarchy motives, respectively. In Experiment 2, I found that priming Communal Sharing and Market Pricing Schemas led participants to allocate bonuses in a hypothetical vignette differently in ways that reflected the use of Unity and Proportionality motives, respectively. In Chapter 4, I incorporate notions of character into Relationship Regulation Theory. Specifically, I argue that moral judgments are partially based on evaluations of other people as prospects for social relationships. I use this relationship-based perspective of moral judgment to explain cases where an actor's intentions are neglected in observers' moral judgments of them

Reply to Fincher et al.: Conceptual specificity in dehumanization research is a feature, not a bug

Fincher et al. (1) argue that our conceptualization of dehumanization as “the failure to engage in social cognition of other human minds” (2) is too narrow. Importantly, Fincher et al. (1) do not dispute our actual findings. They agree that reduced perception of mental and emotional states in victims generates apathy that enables harm for instrumental gain, while recognition of those same states may be required to harm victims to satisfy moral motives (2). Instead, the substance of Fincher et al.’s (1) critique is that we fail to investigate broader, vaguely defined dimensions of dehumanization that could conceivably be related to moral violence. However, we consider our conceptual specificity and tight operationalization of dehumanization to be a feature of our research, not a bug