Emotional prejudice, essentialism, and nationalism The 2002 Tajfel lecture

Abstract

In explaining differences between groups, people ascribe the human essence to their ingroup and consider outgroups as less human. This phenomenon, called infra-humanization, occurs outside people's awareness. Because secondary emotions (e.g. love, hope, contempt, resentment) are considered uniquely human emotions, people not only attribute more secondary emotions to their ingroup than to outgroups, but are reluctant to associate these emotions with outgroups. Moreover, people behave less cooperatively (in terms of altruism, imitation, and approach) with an outgroup member who expresses himself through secondary emotions. Infra-humanization occurs for high and low status groups, even in the absence of conflict between groups. It does not occur when the outgroup target is adequately individualized, by a complete name or through perspective taking, for instance.

Values, identities and social constructions of the European Union among Turkish university youth

“…N-I identity and values related to rejection of outgroups constituted a package and predicted both positive and negative views of Europe. The finding that The N-I identity and the related value package was better at predicting negative than positive reactions was consistent with research on the association between nationalism and outgroup rejection (Leyens et al, 2003;Mummendey et al, 2001). Furthermore, supporting the view that identities may have social-structural antecedents (Deaux & Martin, 2003), the authoritarian-nationalistic package was related to a low level of urbanization.…”

“…A second limitation of the study was that it did not include a measure of different components of identification such as self-categorization, group commitment, and group esteem (Ellemers, Kortekaas, & Ouwerkerk, 1999). Neither were measures of emotional reactions nor measures related to infrahumanization of outgroups included (Leyens et al, 2003). It is possible that such reactions may mediate between identity-value clusters and reactions to outgroups.…”

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

“…The main hypotheses of infrahumanisation have been tested using different paradigms and stimuli to establish its validity and generalisability (for complete reviews see Demoulin, Rodrı´guez-Torres, et al, 2004;Leyens et al, 2003Leyens et al, , 2007. Our first attempt examined whether there was a preferential association between the ingroup and uniquely human emotions.…”

“…Nothing happened for uniquely human traits, a finding that initially did not cause much of a surprise given that the attribution of this dimension was only shown to differ between groups. Indeed, infrahumanisation is an intergroup, and not an interpersonal phenomenon (Cortes et al, 2005;Leyens et al, 2003).…”

Group membership influences social control of perpetrators of uncivil behaviors

“…As social control is considered effective when it elicits functional reactions of reparation and conformity (i.e., moral emotions), people tend to intervene when they believe that others will experience these specific emotions. As mentioned earlier, this anticipation of an in-group members' moral emotions might also reflect the infrahumanization bias, according to which people consider members of their in-group as more essentially human than members of out-groups (Leyens et al, 2000(Leyens et al, , 2001(Leyens et al, , 2003. One can imagine that manipulating groups that are more socially relevant or that differ on important social variable such as ethnicity or power would produce even greater asymmetrical attribution of moral emotions to the deviant.…”