Blatant dehumanization in the mind’s eye: Prevalent even among those who explicitly reject it?

The paper, in plain language

Looking past what people say

On questionnaires, blatant dehumanization looks like a vice of the political right. With Christopher Petsko, the late Emile Bruneau, Nour Kteily and Ryan Lei, we went around self-report: hundreds of participants — including a second, preregistered sample built to approximate the US population — completed a reverse-correlation task whose choices aggregate into an image of the face their mind associates with 'Arabs' or 'Americans'. Over two thousand naive raters then judged those composite images.

What the images showed

The mental representations of Arabs were rated as significantly more dehumanizing than those of Americans — and the effect was not reducible to general negativity, nor to raters projecting their own prejudice. The uncomfortable finding: dehumanizing representations were just as prevalent among participants low in explicit dehumanization, such as liberals, as among those high in it. People also had little insight into it — those who rejected dehumanization expected their images to be benign, and they were not.

Why it matters

Self-report puts dehumanization safely in other people; this method finds it operating in minds that sincerely disavow it. That does not make explicit attitudes meaningless — they diverge from the representations precisely where it is most interesting — but it does mean interventions aimed only at what people are willing to say will miss a layer. The findings are US-based, and the behavioural consequences of these representations remain to be established; the measurement point stands.