Study: Dehumanizing Belief Systems Linked to Support for Gun Rights, the Death Penalty, and Anti-Immigration Practices

A new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has doc­u­ment­ed a strong link between indi­vid­u­als who hold dehu­man­iz­ing belief sys­tems and sup­port for capital punishment. 

The study by University of Oregon Journalism and Communications Professor David Markowitz (pic­tured, left) and Psychology Professor Paul Slovic (pic­tured, right), was part of ongo­ing aca­d­e­m­ic efforts to explain why some peo­ple dehu­man­ize undoc­u­ment­ed immi­grants to the United States. The researchers found that those whose ver­bal behav­ior reflect­ed a dehu­man­iz­ing belief sys­tem were more like­ly to favor harsh anti-immi­gra­tion prac­tices and sup­port gun rights and the death penalty. 

The researchers found that the evi­dence ​“sug­gests that dehu­man­iza­tion is preva­lent and per­va­sive” in the United States and that ​“a sub­stan­tial num­ber of Americans can be clas­si­fied as dehu­man­iz­ers.” This, the report said, ​“indicat[es] a broad­er social prob­lem relat­ed to a pro­por­tion of Americans who wish to pun­ish out-group mem­bers who they believe are gen­er­al­ly bad, ​‘less than,’ or threatening.” 

“The sup­port for social harms, par­tic­u­lar­ly about guns and the death penal­ty, are seem­ing­ly unre­lat­ed to how one should treat an immi­grant, but they mat­ter in a large way,” Markowitz added in a state­ment accom­pa­ny­ing the release of the study. ​“We can move for­ward by acknowl­edg­ing our blind spots as individuals.”

Study par­tic­i­pants were ran­dom­ly assigned to read a sce­nario where either a lone immi­grant or an immi­grant with a child were caught cross­ing the south­ern U.S. bor­der ille­gal­ly. Participants were asked to rate how long the immi­grant should spend in jail and asked to explain their judge­ments through writ­ten answers to a series of ques­tions. Markowitz and Slovic then eval­u­at­ed the writ­ten respons­es for words that indi­cat­ed dehu­man­iza­tion: imper­son­al pro­nouns, such as it and who; pow­er words, such as oppo­site and piti­ful; and emo­tion terms, such as hate and dis­gust. The researchers wrote that words ​“are cru­cial because they pro­vide an oppor­tu­ni­ty to eval­u­ate poten­tial­ly large-scale and per­va­sive dehu­man­iza­tion that exists online through ver­bal behav­ior, such as alt-right cha­t­rooms, instead of rely­ing on self-report measures alone.”

The researchers found that ​“those who sent immi­grants to jail for more time also viewed them as social­ly dis­tant and less human, described immi­gra­tion in imper­son­al terms, and endorsed oth­er social harms unre­lat­ed to immi­gra­tion (e.g., the death penal­ty for convicted murderers).” 

The study com­ple­ments oth­er research on the psy­cho­log­i­cal dynam­ics of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment. Research on the ​“death qual­i­fi­ca­tion” process—the selec­tion of cap­i­tal-case jurors through a process that requires them to express a will­ing­ness to impose the death penal­ty — has found that as their lev­el of sup­port for the death penal­ty increased, jurors also exhib­it­ed more neg­a­tive atti­tudes towards women, gays, and peo­ple of oth­er races. As sup­port for the death penal­ty has declined in the U.S., stud­ies have found that the jury selec­tion process has pro­duced increas­ing­ly unrep­re­sen­ta­tive juries whose mem­bers are ​“unusu­al­ly hos­tile” to mit­i­gat­ing evi­dence intro­duced to spare a defendant’s life, par­tic­u­lar­ly in cas­es involv­ing African American defendants.

In addi­tion, the study’s analy­sis of ver­bal behav­ior as evi­dence of dehu­man­iz­ing ten­den­cies sheds light on a range of tac­tics pros­e­cu­tors have often employed in seek­ing death sen­tences. The study sug­gests that dehu­man­iza­tion is linked to ​“how peo­ple talk about ​‘less than’ out­groups, adverse child­hood expe­ri­ences, and per­ceived vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty in soci­ety.” Cases sug­gest that pros­e­cu­tors acti­vate dehu­man­iz­ing ten­den­cies through inflam­ma­to­ry argu­ments, includ­ing ani­mal ref­er­ences such as describ­ing black defen­dants as apes and Latinx defen­dants as insects and attempt­ing to ascribe gen­der non-con­form­ing roles to female capital defendants. 

Slovic said the ulti­mate goal of the dehu­man­iza­tion study was ​“mit­i­gat­ing cru­el­ty around the world.” ​“We hope that inter­dis­ci­pli­nary social sci­ence research can inform how vul­ner­a­ble pop­u­la­tions are treat­ed,” he said.