Dehumanisation as a factor triggering linguistic discrimination

ocial psychological literature provides the basis to contend that humanity is a crucial dimension in the relationships with the others, leading to severe consequences such as aggression or harm doing. In this regard, it should be noted that the contributions directly and empirically addressing this role of dehumanisation in aggravating social discrimination are very scarce. In addition, literature on social discrimination has mainly considered prejudice as due to intergroup categorisation without considering that the superordinate human categorisation may also be at stake. A set of three studies was conducted in order to test whether relative dehumanisation vs. humanity of a target would trigger social discrimination, and also whether group membership would moderate the effects of relative dehumanisation on linguistic discrimination expressed through an implicit linguistic measures - language abstraction used in target descriptions (Study 1and Study 2) - and also a more explicit and derogating one - the language of insults (Study 3). Drawing from the available literature, in these three studies, relative dehumanisation was manipulated in terms of the target being characterised by prosocial values and expressing him/herself with secondary emotions vs. being characterised by lack of prosocial values and expressing him/herself with primary emotions. Evidence showed that the relative dehumanised target was discriminated to a greater extent than the human target. Group membership affected linguistic discrimination only towards the human target, with the being discriminated to a lower extent. Moreover, findings also showed that extremely derogating forms of discrimination assuming dehumanising contents, such as animalising insults, were addressed to relatively dehumanised outgroup members, thus revealing that not all outgroup might be dehumanised. The role of perceptions of humanity of the others - besides that of group membership - on discrimination will be discussed, contending that it is worthy to consider the co-salience of intermediate level self categorisations and of the superordinate human categorisation contrasting the human group to less/not human groups in order to human beings to explain discrimination outcomes and dehumanisation consequences on intergroup behaviour. The relevance of linguistic implicit, uncontrolled, measures as well as, of explicit, relatively uncontrollable measures of discrimination will be discussed.