“You Little Creep”: Evidence of Blatant Dehumanization of Short Groups

The paper, in plain language

Size as a dominance cue

Physical size signals dominance across species and cultures — even preverbal infants use it. With Nour Kteily and Lotte Thomsen, I asked whether a group's perceived average height feeds the most consequential intergroup judgment: humanity itself. We measured perceived heights of ethnic groups, experimentally described a fictitious group as tall or short, and used reverse correlation to visualize the faces people imagine for short groups — with the dehumanization scale's silhouettes height-matched so stature could not contaminate the measure.

Shorter means less human — for some more than others

The shorter Americans perceived out-groups to be, the more blatantly they dehumanized them; describing an unknown group as short sufficed to lower its rated humanity; and hypothesis-blind raters judged the face imagined for a short group as less fully human. The height–dehumanization link was carried by people high in social dominance orientation — those invested in hierarchy read stature as rank. The pattern had instructive exceptions: it did not hold for Blacks or Jews, groups whose dehumanization runs through older, more entrenched channels, and the experimental effects, while consistent, were small.

Why it matters

Dehumanization research has mapped who gets denied full humanity; this study adds a bodily cue that helps decide it — and shows the cue works hardest in the minds most motivated by hierarchy. It belongs to the same programme as my work visualizing dehumanized faces of Muslims and measuring blatant dehumanization in conflict, each tracing how the denial of humanity attaches to visible features of groups.