A Social Disengagement Theory of Dehumanization 

While prominent accounts suggest dehumanization facilitates immoral behavior, we argue that it serves a more general function: to regulate our drive to connect with specific person(s) or groups. In the first set of studies, we test a link between dehumanization and social distancing. Six experiments (N = 5,174) demonstrate that disease avoidance motives produce dehumanization, which in turn engenders social distancing. Studies 1 and 2, conducted before the COVID-19 pandemic, experimentally manipulated the degree to which a target triggered disease avoidance motives. Across five forms of dehumanization: perceptual, mind denial, mechanization, animalization, and blatant dehumanization, results revealed a significant effect of disease avoidance on dehumanization. Studies 3 through 6 explore the relationship between disease avoidance, dehumanization, and social distancing during the COVID-19 pandemic. These studies find COVID-19 leads to a global increase in the dehumanization of others. This increase in dehumanization facilitates social distancing behavior. Time permitting, I will discuss a second set of studies (N=1,250), which examines if dehumanization can facilitate moral behavior. Using scenarios which pit different moral principles against each other, we demonstrate that the targets participants dehumanize most are those harmed by the actions they believe to be morally righteous. In aggregate, these results suggest that dehumanization does not facilitate immoral behavior, but rather may function more generally to steer our impulse for social connection.