Essentially Subhuman: Psychological Essentialism Facilitates Dehumanization

Dehumanization has played a prominent role in myriad human atrocities, which inspired us to investigate its social-cognitive basis. Since dehumanization consists of perceiving another to lack a defining human essence, scholars have suggested that this process may be grounded in psychological essentialism, the belief that members of a group all share an underlying essence. Indeed, essentialism predicted Americans’ blatant dehumanization of various national outgroups (Study 1). After demonstrating this relationship, we attempted to mitigate dehumanization by reducing the tendency to think in an essentialist manner. Subjects led to hold an incremental theory about human traits expressed less psychological essentialism than those led to hold an entity theory, and these reductions in essentialism accounted for reductions in dehumanization (Study 2). We conceptually replicated these findings by targeting essentialist beliefs about racial differences (Study 3). This provides a promising foundation for future research to investigate the generalizability of our results and identify potential suppressor variables.