Crossed categorisations and superordinate self-categorisations as moderators of dehumanisation

Historical events of the Nineteenth Century showed how destructive prejudice and discrimination can be, leading social scientists to consider in depth such degenerated intergroup relations. The study presented here was aimed at understanding the processes underlining a particularly dramatic form of prejudice involving the denial of humanness to the Others (i.e., dehumanisation). Thus this contribution was intended to analyse the role of crossed social categorisations and the co-salience of superordinate human identity as moderators of aggravated forms of prejudice such as dehumanisation. Crossed categorizations were operationalized as two orthogonal category memberships, that is Religion (Christian vs. Muslim) and Skin Colour (White vs. Black) of a generic target. Superordinate level of self-categorisation as human beings was primed asking participants to answer to an identification scale with the human group. Dehumanisation was measured asking participants to attribute uniquely human emotions (i.e., infra-humanisation) to the four targets defined by crossing the two categorisation dimensions. As a more explicit measure of dehumanisation, participants also evaluated the extent to which several human rights were acknowledged to targets. In the no prime condition, an infra-humanisation effect was found. Participants attributed uniquely human emotions to the target belonging to the double ingroup (i.e., White Christian) to a greater extent than to targets belonging to partial (i.e., Black Christian or White Muslim) or double outgroups (i.e., Black Muslim). As regards the human rights attribution, the same pattern of results was found. In the superordinate categorisation salience condition results showed the hypothesized effect of superordinate categorization salience in moderating both the attribution of uniquely human emotions and human rights to targets accepted within the human ingroup. Implications regarding the co-salience of qualitatively different levels of self-categorisation as well as simultaneous orthogonal social categorisations will be discussed.