The Psychology of Dehumanization and Moral Disengagement
Transcript
There’s a photograph from the 1960s that has always unsettled me. A group of ordinary citizens—neighbors, parents, people who look like they could be anyone’s grandparents—are gathered on a sidewalk, laughing as they watch a Black man being assaulted during a civil rights protest. What’s striking isn’t just the violence in the frame, but the faces of those watching. They’re smiling. They look entertained.
It raises a hard question: how do people who see themselves as decent, moral, and even kind become capable of not just tolerating cruelty, but enjoying it?
We often imagine cruelty as something carried out by villains, by extremists, or by people with broken moral compasses. But more often, it’s justified, explained away, and carried out by ordinary people who’ve convinced themselves that what they’re doing is acceptable, even necessary.
In psychology, we call this dehumanization and moral disengagement. Together, these processes help us strip away empathy and silence the part of our conscience that would normally object. In this episode, we’re going to look closely at how they work, how they’ve shaped history, and how they continue to show up in our everyday lives.
Dehumanization is not simply about hatred. It is about subtraction. Something is taken away. To dehumanize someone is to strip them of the qualities that make them recognizable as fully human, so that cruelty no longer feels like cruelty. When we reduce someone to an object, an animal, or a stereotype, we are not just insulting them. We are lowering the threshold for what can be done to them.
Psychologists like Albert Bandura and Nick Haslam have long studied this process. Haslam described two core forms of dehumanization. One is animalistic, where people are denied traits that separate humans from animals: rational thought, culture, refinement. Think of wartime propaganda that depicts the enemy as rats, dogs, or apes. The other is mechanistic, where people are denied warmth and individuality, treated like machines, cogs, or objects. That shows up in how we often speak about bureaucracies—patients reduced to numbers, employees reduced to “headcount,” or civilians referred to as “collateral damage.” Both forms achieve the same outcome: they allow us to disengage empathy.
History is full of devastating examples. In Rwanda in 1994, Tutsi people were regularly called “cockroaches” on the radio, a metaphor that made extermination feel like pest control rather than mass murder. In Nazi Germany, Jews were depicted in posters and children’s books as rats contaminating society. Once that image takes hold, violence begins to look not like an atrocity but like a necessity. These are extreme cases, but they are built on psychological mechanisms that exist in every society.
Dehumanization doesn’t always announce itself loudly. It can slip into everyday speech and behavior. Think of the language of a middle school cafeteria, where one child is labeled a “loser” or an “outcast.” Once those labels stick, cruelty becomes easier to justify. The target’s feelings, complexity, and humanity fade into the background, replaced by a single category that legitimizes exclusion. The same thing happens in workplaces when employees are reduced to their job titles, or worse, to performance metrics. If someone is “just a number,” their suffering under toxic management becomes less visible.
This process is powerful because it changes not only how we view others, but how we feel toward them. Neuroscience research shows that when people see members of an out-group described in dehumanizing terms, the areas of the brain associated with empathy and moral concern show less activation. In other words, the more we see someone as less-than-human, the less likely we are to feel guilt or compassion when they are harmed.
It’s also important to see how humor and casual talk reinforce this process. Racial jokes, sexist comments, or calling someone an “animal” in a heated moment may feel trivial to the speaker, but these small acts lay the groundwork for larger moral disengagement. They shift the cultural baseline of what is acceptable. Over time, the repeated framing of certain people as “different,” “dirty,” or “dangerous” makes empathy harder to summon when it matters most.
We should also recognize that dehumanization is not always about vilifying others. Sometimes it comes through absence, through indifference. Hannah Arendt, in writing about the Holocaust, called this the “banality of evil”—the ordinariness of people who didn’t necessarily hate, but who treated human suffering as background noise. When refugees drowning at sea become just another statistic, or when we scroll past footage of war casualties without pause, that too is a kind of dehumanization. Not active hatred, but passive detachment.
And this brings us to a more uncomfortable truth. Dehumanization is not something that happens only in war zones or totalitarian states. It happens in our own lives, in small and ordinary ways. It happens when we refer to a rival political group not as neighbors but as “idiots” or “animals.” It happens when someone with a mental illness is described as “crazy” rather than understood as a person in distress. It happens in customer service interactions when someone on the phone is treated as a faceless problem rather than a human being trying to do their job.
What makes dehumanization so dangerous is that it clears the path for moral disengagement. Once we have convinced ourselves that the person on the receiving end of our actions is less than fully human, we are free to do things we would never otherwise allow ourselves to do. We can justify cruelty, ignore suffering, or even take pleasure in humiliation.
And the most troubling part? Most people who dehumanize others do not see themselves as cruel. They see themselves as rational, as justified, as simply “telling it like it is.” That is why dehumanization is so insidious. It does not announce itself as hatred; it masquerades as common sense, as clarity, as truth-telling.
When you hear political rhetoric that frames entire groups as invaders, criminals, or parasites, you are hearing dehumanization at work. When you notice yourself dismissing someone as “nothing but” their worst trait, you are brushing up against the same process. The mechanism is ancient, but its applications are as modern as today’s headlines.
This is the first step in the psychology of cruelty: removing the human face from the person in front of us. Once that has been done, the next step—justifying our actions—becomes all the easier. That step is moral disengagement, and it is where we turn next.
Once a person or group has been stripped of their full humanity, the next psychological step is disengaging from our own moral standards. Albert Bandura, who is best known for his work on social learning, mapped out the mechanisms that allow ordinary people to commit or excuse harmful acts while still seeing themselves as decent and moral.
The first mechanism is moral justification. Harm is reframed as serving a noble purpose. Bombing a village becomes “liberation.” Torturing a prisoner becomes “protecting national security.” On a smaller scale, humiliating a coworker becomes “tough love” meant to make them stronger. The cruelty is not denied—it is recast as virtue.
Then there is euphemistic labeling. Language softens the sting of reality. Killing civilians becomes “collateral damage.” Spying on customers becomes “data collection.” When the words change, the moral weight of the act changes with them. Psychologists call this moral anesthesia: words that numb us against what we would otherwise feel.
Another pathway is advantageous comparison. Harmful acts are excused by pointing to something worse. A soldier who abuses a prisoner can say, “At least I didn’t kill them.” An executive defending a predatory business model might argue, “Others in the industry are doing far worse.” By changing the comparison point, the act looks small, even reasonable.
Displacement of responsibility is another classic mechanism. When people believe they are simply following orders or acting on behalf of an authority, they feel less accountable for the harm they cause. This is exactly what Milgram’s obedience studies revealed—participants continued delivering what they thought were painful shocks because they felt the experimenter bore the responsibility, not themselves. The parallel shows up in corporate scandals where employees say, “I was just doing what management told me to do.”
Closely related is diffusion of responsibility. When many people are involved, no one feels fully responsible. Group cruelty becomes easier because the blame is spread thin. Online harassment often works this way: hundreds of people pile on an individual, each one feeling like just a drop in the ocean. The person being attacked feels the full weight of the cruelty, but each perpetrator feels almost none of the responsibility.
Bandura also described distorting or minimizing the consequences of actions. If harm is out of sight, it becomes easier to pretend it is not real. Drone operators in distant rooms, corporate executives who never meet the workers affected by their policies, or social media users who never see the tears behind a post—they can all maintain distance and therefore disengage their moral concern.
Then there is blaming or devaluing the victim. Harm is excused because the victim “deserved it.” A bullied student is told they should “toughen up.” A laid-off worker is blamed for not working hard enough. A marginalized group is portrayed as criminal, lazy, or dangerous, which makes mistreatment seem less like injustice and more like consequence. This reversal of blame protects the perpetrator’s conscience.
These mechanisms are not just theoretical—they are embedded in how societies, institutions, and individuals operate every day. When prisons are described as “correctional facilities,” when layoffs are labeled “rightsizing,” when politicians describe entire populations as “illegals,” the language is not neutral. It is part of a larger system of moral disengagement that makes cruelty feel acceptable, even ordinary.
One of the most striking aspects of these mechanisms is how mundane they appear when you strip them from their context. They are the excuses and justifications most people have heard, and sometimes used themselves. “I didn’t have a choice.” “It wasn’t that bad.” “They brought it on themselves.” These aren’t extreme rationalizations reserved for tyrants or criminals. They are the everyday language of moral disengagement, scaled up in certain contexts to allow for extraordinary harm.
Understanding these mechanisms is unsettling because it forces us to recognize how thin the barrier really is between seeing ourselves as moral people and permitting or participating in cruelty. The shift does not require a complete rejection of our values. It only requires a clever reframing, a softening of language, a shifting of blame, or a diffusion of responsibility. And when those shifts accumulate, the unthinkable becomes thinkable.
The natural question is why. Why are human beings so ready to strip others of their humanity and silence their own conscience? The answer lies partly in psychology, partly in culture, and partly in the evolutionary scaffolding of how we were built.
From an evolutionary perspective, the tendency to divide the world into “us” and “them” is ancient. Early human survival depended on loyalty to the group. To protect resources, to guard against threat, to preserve cohesion, we had to be able to see outsiders as potential dangers. That instinct for in-group favoritism is not inherently malicious—it kept small bands of humans alive in an unpredictable world. But in modern life, the same instinct can make it far too easy to discount the suffering of those who fall outside our circle of belonging.
Psychologically, dehumanization and moral disengagement reduce the discomfort of cognitive dissonance. Most people want to see themselves as moral. They also sometimes want to participate in, or at least benefit from, actions that cause harm. To resolve the tension between self-image and behavior, the mind finds a shortcut: reinterpret the victim as less than fully human, or redefine the act as less than fully cruel. This allows people to preserve a positive view of themselves without having to change their behavior.
Social identity theory helps explain another piece. Much of our self-concept is derived from the groups we belong to—our nationality, religion, profession, or political affiliation. When the status of our group feels threatened, one way to protect it is by derogating or dehumanizing the out-group. By pushing them lower, we maintain our own group’s worth. This is why so much political rhetoric is filled with caricatures of the other side as unintelligent, immoral, or dangerous. It is not just about discrediting their views; it is about securing our own group’s moral high ground.
Culture amplifies these processes. Language is one of the most powerful carriers of dehumanization. When immigrants are called “illegals,” the word erases personhood and reduces identity to a single, criminalizing trait. When prisoners are referred to as “bodies” or “beds” in bureaucratic systems, the label transforms people into units of management. In both cases, the individual behind the label is obscured, which makes moral disengagement smoother.
Media environments, particularly digital ones, create their own accelerants. Online, where anonymity blurs accountability and distance muffles empathy, it is easier to dehumanize. An avatar is not a person, a username is not a neighbor. Harsh comments, pile-ons, and harassment are justified with the rationalizations Bandura described: everyone else was doing it, the target deserved it, it’s not real harm if it happens online. The victim experiences the cruelty fully, but the perpetrators experience only diluted responsibility.
There is also an efficiency element. Modern life moves quickly, and moral reasoning takes effort. Slowing down to consider the humanity of every individual requires cognitive and emotional investment. Dehumanization provides a shortcut. It allows people to conserve mental energy by treating entire categories of people as interchangeable. In high-stress environments—battlefields, hospital emergency rooms, customer service jobs—this detachment can even be functional in the moment, but it carries costs if it hardens into a permanent stance.
Humor is another cultural reinforcement. Jokes at the expense of groups normalize dehumanization under the guise of play. A sexist joke, a racial caricature, a casual insult—they may seem small, but they prime the mind to treat the target as less deserving of empathy. Over time, the accumulation of these cues makes serious acts of cruelty easier to rationalize.
And then there is fear. Fear magnifies the tendency to dehumanize. When people feel threatened—by crime, by economic instability, by cultural change—they are more likely to accept narratives that cast others as dangerous or subhuman. Political leaders often exploit this, framing groups as existential threats. Fear makes cruelty feel like self-defense.
Taken together, these forces create a psychological and cultural ecosystem where dehumanization and moral disengagement feel natural, even invisible. The mind feels lighter when empathy is switched off. The conscience feels quieter when cruelty is recast as necessity. And society often rewards this, praising toughness, loyalty, and efficiency over compassion.
The result is that cruelty thrives not in spite of ordinary psychology, but because of it. What was once adaptive in small groups on the savannah now distorts our moral reasoning in globalized, interconnected societies. What was once a survival mechanism has become a justification mechanism. And unless it is interrupted, it sustains cycles of division and harm.
The cost of dehumanization and moral disengagement is not only borne by the targets. It corrodes the moral fabric of those who participate in it, and it weakens the communities and institutions that tolerate it. When cruelty is normalized, trust erodes. When empathy is suspended, cooperation becomes fragile. Over time, the culture itself becomes harsher, more brittle, less capable of handling conflict without slipping into cycles of contempt.
For individuals, the habit of disengagement dulls moral sensitivity. People who repeatedly justify cruelty become less able to recognize it in themselves. Their conscience adapts to the rationalizations, and the boundary between what feels permissible and what should feel unthinkable shifts. This is why soldiers returning from war sometimes struggle with moral injury: they carry the weight of things they justified at the time but cannot reconcile later. It is also why people who participate in online harassment often express shock when confronted with the real harm they caused.
The social cost is equally stark. When groups are dehumanized, it becomes easier to deny them rights, opportunities, and dignity. History shows us where that road leads: segregation, ethnic cleansing, persecution. But even short of atrocity, the everyday forms of dehumanization—mockery, dismissal, stereotyping—chip away at the possibility of shared civic life. A society that permits cruelty in small ways will eventually permit it in larger ones.
So what is the path forward? It begins with awareness. Catching the mechanisms of disengagement as they arise is the first line of defense. When you hear yourself say, “They brought it on themselves,” pause. Ask whether that thought is protecting your conscience rather than reflecting reality. When you encounter euphemistic labels like “collateral damage” or “headcount,” notice how language is doing the moral work. When you feel tempted to compare your actions to something worse— “At least I didn’t do that”—remember that advantageous comparison is a trap.
Another step is deliberate rehumanization. This means restoring the individuality, the complexity, the face of the person in front of us. Research shows that perspective-taking—imagining another person’s inner life—activates the same neural pathways that underlie empathy. Small acts of recognition matter. Saying someone’s name instead of their label, listening to their story instead of their stereotype, can interrupt the slide toward disengagement.
At a cultural level, the work involves resisting the seduction of language and narratives that make cruelty palatable. Leaders, media outlets, and institutions shape the metaphors we live by. Holding them accountable for how they frame others is not symbolic—it is central. Words do not merely describe reality; they create the moral terrain on which action takes place.
Finally, there is the personal challenge. Most people will never participate in atrocities, but all of us face moments when the temptation to dehumanize is close at hand: an online argument, a workplace conflict, a political debate. The question is whether we recognize those moments as small crossroads. Choosing empathy in those ordinary situations is what prevents the extraordinary ones from taking root.
Cruelty does not begin with monsters. It begins with ordinary people, ordinary language, and ordinary justifications that add up to extraordinary harm. The path forward is not about grand moral heroism. It is about refusing to let the human face in front of us disappear, and refusing to let our conscience be managed by clever rationalizations.
Think back to that photograph I mentioned at the beginning—the crowd of ordinary people smiling as someone else’s dignity was stripped away. What made that possible was not just hatred. It was the quiet permission of dehumanization and the mental shortcuts of moral disengagement. It was the belief that the person suffering in front of them was somehow less deserving of empathy, and that their own actions—or inactions—were therefore justified.
The challenge for us is to notice when those same mechanisms creep into our own lives. Because they do. They show up in our words, in our jokes, in our silences, and in our justifications. The work is not about never failing; it is about refusing to let those failures become habits.
Cruelty does not need our enthusiasm to grow. It only needs our indifference. And so the task is simple, though not easy: to keep the face of the other person fully visible, and to keep our own conscience awake.