The effect of disgust-eliciting media portrayals on outgroup dehumanization and support of deportation in a Norwegian sample

The paper, in plain language

Simulating the coverage

After begging was legalized in 2006 and Roma migration to Norway grew, media coverage repeatedly associated Roma with filth and animality. With Madeleine Dalsklev, I built a controlled version of that coverage: a realistic fake article in which an anthropologist describes Roma eating habits as unhygienic and 'simply disgusting', against a matched control article describing normal hygiene — deliberately avoiding any animal metaphors, so that only disgust, not dehumanizing language, was manipulated.

The emotion does the work

Readers of the disgust article attributed fewer uniquely human emotions to Roma — the subtle dehumanization the infrahumanization paradigm measures. On deportation, the story is more instructive: the article had no direct effect on deportation support, but a substantial indirect one through felt disgust. Curiously, once disgust was accounted for, the remaining direct path turned negative — the article may have stirred empathy alongside revulsion. Dehumanization itself did not mediate the deportation effect, a hypothesis that simply failed, and the key effects were small.

Why it matters

This was among the first experimental demonstrations with a real, currently stigmatized group that emotional framing — not explicit slurs — can shift both how human a minority seems and how expellable it feels. For editors the implication is concrete: the disgust a story evokes is doing political work even when the text never argues a political point. The study grounds the media dimension of my Roma and dehumanization research, alongside the six-country anti-Gypsyism survey.