Recognizing humanity: dehumanization predicts neural mirroring and empathic accuracy in face-to-face interactions

Abstract

Dehumanization is the failure to recognize the cognitive and emotional complexities of the people around us. While its presence has been well documented in horrific acts of violence, it is also theorized to play a role in everyday life. We measured its presence and effects in face-to-face dyadic interactions between strangers and found that not only was there variance in the extent to which they perceived one another as human, but this variance predicted neural processing and behavior. Specifically, participants showed stronger neural mirroring, indexed by EEG mu-suppression, in response to partners they evaluated as more human, suggesting their brains neurally simulated those targets’ actions more. Participants were also marginally more empathically accurate about the emotions of partners deemed more human and performed better with them on a cooperative task. These results suggest that there are indeed differences in our recognition of the humanity of people we meet—demonstrated for the first time in a real, face-to-face interaction—and that this mundane variation affects our ability to neurally simulate, cooperate, and empathize.

Mu rhythm suppression over sensorimotor regions is associated with greater empathic accuracy

“…It is correlated with trait measures of empathic concern ( DiGirolamo et al. , 2019 ) and inversely correlated with dehumanization ( Simon and Gutsell, 2021 ).…”

“…The mounting evidence from the literature suggests that mu suppression is linked to inferences about others from low-level visual motor cues such as photographs and possibly low-level auditory cues (see Simon and Gutsell, 2021 , for an exception). But the identification and discrimination tasks used in these previous experiments fall short of the complexity of everyday affective reasoning, and it is not clear whether or how these representations contribute to higher-level reasoning about others’ affective states, especially in naturalistic contexts (e.g.…”

The process of becoming ‘we’ in an intergroup conflict context: How enhancing intergroup moral similarities leads to common‐ingroup identity

“…Consequently, such malleability of social perceptions can result in different forms ranging from no (perceived) to exaggerated intergroup differences. So far, literature has consistently demonstrated that harsh intergroup differentiation (ingroup vs. outgroup) produce a range of biased intergroup responses: ingroup favoritism (Tajfel, Billig, Bundy, & Flament, 1971;Otten & Moskowitz, 2000); memory biases (Park & Rothbart, 1982); fundamental attribution error (Pettigrew, 1979); linguistic biases (Maass, Salvi, Arcuri, & Preprint: THE PROCESS OF BECOMING "WE" Semin, 1989), dehumanization (Demoulin, et al, 2009;Simon & Gutsell, 2021) and ultimately less prosocial intergroup behavior (Voci, 2006).…”

A Functional and Neuroanatomical Model of Dehumanization

“…An individual’s tendency to use animalistic dehumanization decreases the more the individual’s spatial and temporal features resemble the self (Hasson and Frith, 2016; Northoff and Huang, 2017; Scalabrini et al, 2019) and the more dissimilar those features are to those of animals, as suggested by electroencephalographic μ suppression in face-to-face dyadic interactions (Simon and Gutsell, 2021). In contrast, increased anthropomorphism, or extending human features to other animals or objects, may potentially increase animalistic dehumanization by blurring the human–animal boundary (Hortensius and Cross, 2018; Rottman et al, 2021).…”