Beastly: What Makes Animal Metaphors Offensive?

Haslam, Nick; Loughnan, Steve; Sun, Pamela

doi:10.1177/0261927x11407168

Cited by 81 publications

(62 citation statements)

References 31 publications

(15 reference statements)

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“…Sarah Palin." Reports suggested that many people who had already been supporting McCain were similarly upset by the remarks, but those who were already supporting Obama thought that his remarks were being taken out of context (52). This was one of many instances where politically motivated individuals (of both major political parties) attempted to convert the lack of an exact relationship between concept and language into leverage for their favored causes.…”

Section: Source Credibility In Politicized Environmentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Communicating science in politicized environments

Lupia

2013

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

146

130

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Many members of the scientific community attempt to convey information to policymakers and the public. Much of this information is ignored or misinterpreted. This article describes why these outcomes occur and how science communicators can achieve better outcomes. The article focuses on two challenges associated with communicating scientific information to such audiences. One challenge is that people have less capacity to pay attention to scientific presentations than many communicators anticipate. A second challenge is that people in politicized environments often make different choices about whom to believe than do people in other settings. Together, these challenges cause policymakers and the public to be less responsive to scientific information than many communicators desire. Research on attention and source credibility can help science communicators better adapt to these challenges. Attention research clarifies when, and to what type of stimuli, people do (and do not) pay attention. Source credibility research clarifies the conditions under which an audience will believe scientists' descriptions of phenomena rather than the descriptions of less-valid sources. Such research can help communicators stay true to their science while making their findings more memorable and more believable to more audiences.embers of the scientific community share a frustration: many attempts to communicate science are badly received (1-4). This frustration is particularly evident in politicized environments: that is, settings where decisions on divisive public issues must be made.These communicative frustrations are salient because many scientists work hard to make socially valuable discoveries. Science can help nonscientists make better decisions. However, scientists often find that their advice is ignored or willfully misinterpreted. This article seeks to help science communicators expand the set of circumstances in which they can achieve better outcomes.In some respects, the difficulty of communicating science to broader audiences is easily explained. Scientists discover new phenomena as well as new relationships among existing phenomena. Describing these discoveries and relationships often requires new language or using existing language in unusual ways. Many nonscientists, however, find our lexicon difficult to access: they see many scientific presentations as needlessly abstract and disconnected from their lives (5, 6). Audiences who see scientific presentations in these ways have less motivation to pay attention to them (7). If such motivations are sufficiently low, seeds for communicative failure are sown.We, as scientists and science communicators, can improve how scientific information is conveyed to policymakers and the public. One way to realize this potential is to build from a social scientific knowledge base that can help communicators develop more realistic expectations about when others will pay attention to us and when they will believe what we write and say. This knowledge base can help science communicators ...

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Section: Source Credibility In Politicized Environmentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Communicating science in politicized environments

Lupia

2013

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

146

130

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Unfamiliar groups or people, for example, are often understood in terms of more concrete concepts, such as animals. Greedy individuals lacking decorum are likened to pigs, while plodding, dimwitted individuals are called cows (Haslam, Loughnan, & Sun, ). Sweet and gentle individuals are likened to lambs or kittens.…”

Section: Significance Of Metaphoric Framingsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Agency's Role in Dehumanization: Non‐human Metaphors of Out‐groups

Tipler

Ruscher

2014

Social & Personality Psych

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Dehumanization, the psychological process by which individuals or groups of individuals are denied human qualities or are believed to be less than human, has important negative consequences for intergroup relations: dehumanization reduces intergroup helping and excuses aggression towards members of other groups. Current models of dehumanization are unable to explain the variety of dehumanization that occurs in metaphorical thought. For example, they cannot account for the labeling of comatose individuals as “vegetables,” nor do they adequately distinguish between of humans as predators vs. metaphors of humans as prey. We argue that this results from the paucity of attention devoted to the role of agency in the dehumanization process. The ABC model of dehumanization proposed in this paper broadens the scope of dehumanization theory by describing three unique components of agency: affective, behavioral, and cognitive. This article then delineates how the differential attribution of agency components impacts emotional responses toward out‐groups in addition to the metaphors used to describe them. By incorporating both traditional types of dehumanization (extreme and overt negative evaluations) and ambivalent types of dehumanization (mixed positive and negative evaluations) into our model, we provide a more nuanced view of the dehumanization process that accounts for the variance in dehumanization by analogy.

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“…A more systematic investigation of the animal metaphors and dehumanisation stems from Haslam, Loughnan, and Sun (2011). These authors analysed the factors that make animal metaphors offensive and proposed a content-by-context approach.…”

Section: Dehumanising Metaphorsmentioning

confidence: 99%

We are human, they are not: Driving forces behind outgroup dehumanisation and the humanisation of the ingroup

Vaes

Leyens

Paladino

et al. 2012

European Review of Social Psychology

135

124

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Mostly invigorated by infrahumanisation theory, our knowledge on processes of dehumanisation in intergroup relations has grown considerably in the last decade. Building on these earlier endeavours, the present chapter reviews some recent empirical extensions that highlight the importance of differentiating between ingroup humanisation and outgroup dehumanisation because they are often moderated by specific variables. The role of these separate processes is discussed as a function of the main structural elements that define intergroup behaviour; that is, the defining boundaries of the groups, the relation between the groups at hand, and the ideologies of its members. Finally, the role of the different senses of humanness is discussed, suggesting that the folk conception of humanness differs between cultures

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Beastly: What Makes Animal Metaphors Offensive?

Cited by 81 publications

References 31 publications

Communicating science in politicized environments

Communicating science in politicized environments

Agency's Role in Dehumanization: Non‐human Metaphors of Out‐groups

We are human, they are not: Driving forces behind outgroup dehumanisation and the humanisation of the ingroup

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