Abstract
Dehumanization is a type of social perception in which we fail to represent another as a full human with whom we can empathize, instead likening them with machines, objects, or animals. Seeing someone as “less-than” absolves the perceiver of the moral obligations they would be expected to abide by when dealing with another person. In turn, this disinhibits actions or attitudes that would otherwise be deemed extreme. For this reason, blatant dehumanization is associated with the worst of intergroup outcomes, including discrimination, mass violence, and genocide. Developing multiple strategies to reduce blatant dehumanization is important given its pervasiveness, the potentially high stakes outcomes with which it is associated, and because no intervention is universally effective in preventing it. Practices that are effective in engaging empathy and reducing some forms of bias, such as meditation, are a promising new category of intervention. For example, Cognitive-Based Compassion Training (CBCT), a secularized compassion meditation training, has been used to improve empathic accuracy, and similar interventions have yielded a reduction in some types of bias. To make the case that CBCT should be piloted as a rehumanization intervention, this review begins with an overview of what blatant dehumanization is, why people engage in it, how it arises, and why it is distinct from other forms of prejudice. Then, it describes existing interventions, proposes CBCT as an outgroup-independent rehumanization strategy, and theorizes potential mechanisms of change. These include decoupling automatic dehumanization from current perception, promoting connection, empathic accuracy, and security, and priming the perceiver for different social interactions via attitudinal, behavioral, neural, and somatic changes. Finally, it discusses how CBCT may overcome initial resistance to intervention and negotiate moral pitfalls in ways that other strategies may not be suited to do and concludes with limitations.