Dehumanization: Trends, Insights, and Challenges

Despite our many differences, one superordinate category we all belong to is “humans.” To strip away or overlook others’ humanity, then, is to mark them as “other,” and typically “less than.” We review growing evidence revealing how and why we subtly disregard the humanity of those around us. We then highlight new research suggesting that we continue to blatantly dehumanize certain groups—overtly likening them to animals—with important implications for intergroup hostility. We discuss advances in understanding the experience of being dehumanized and novel interventions to mitigate dehumanization, address the conceptual boundaries of dehumanization, and consider recent accounts challenging the importance of dehumanization and its role in intergroup violence. Finally, we present an agenda of outstanding questions to propel dehumanization research forward.

Evidentiality In Romance Languages. Explanatory Potential of a Concept and Its Applications In Pragmatics

Defined narrowly, evidentiality pertains to the sources of knowledge or evidence whereby the speaker feels entitled to make a factual claim. But evidentiality may also be conceived more broadly as both providing epistemic justification and reflecting speaker’s attitude towards the validity of the communicated information, and hearer’s potential acceptability of the information, derived from the degree of reliability of the source and mode of access to the information. Evidentiality and epistemic modality are subcategories of the same superordinate category, namely a category of epistemicity. Since the first seminal works on evidentiality (Chafe and Nichols 1986), studies have for the most part centred on languages where the grammatical marking of the information source is obligatory (for example Willett 1988; Aikhenvald 2004). Recent years have witnessed a growing interest in the study of the domain of evidentiality in European languages, which rely on strategies along the lexico‐grammatical continuum. Assuming a broad conception of evidentiality and defining it as a functional category, we study linguistic means that fulfil the function of indicating the source of information for the transmitted content of a certain proposition in Romance languages.

The effect of spatial distance between objects on categorization level

We show that spatial distance between two objects influences how people categorize these objects. We report three (two pre-registered) experiments that show that when objects are presented close together (proximal), they are more likely to be categorized in a superordinate category than when they are presented further apart (distant). In Experiments 1A and 1B, participants provided spontaneous category labels in an open response format. In Experiment 2, we asked participants to indicate their preference for either of two category labels. We found that when objects were close together, they were categorized more often into superordinate categories than when objects were far apart (Experiments 1A and 2). Our findings demonstrate that the categorization of objects is, in part, determined by where they are in relation to other objects.

Welcome to Be Like Us: Expectations of Outgroup Assimilation Shape Dominant Group Resistance to Diversity

We propose a theoretical framework for when and why members of dominant groups experience threat and express intolerant attitudes in response to social change. Scholarship on symbolic threat suggests that the detection of intergroup differences in values and norms is sufficient to elicit negative intergroup attitudes. Building on this theory, we argue that the experience of threat is actually shaped by prospective beliefs about difference (i.e., expectations of whether outgroups will assimilate to ingroup norms over time or not). Across two studies and two accompanying pilots, we show how outgroup assimilation expectation shapes dominant groups’ experiences of threat, specifically as it relates to their ability to define the norms of their superordinate category (prototypicality threat). We observe that members of dominant groups are surprisingly tolerant of both social change and intergroup difference in the present, so long as they expect outgroup assimilation in the future.

The Effect of Spatial Distance between Objects on Categorization Level

We show that spatial distance between two objects influences how people categorize these objects. We report three (two pre-registered) experiments that show that when objects are presented close together (proximal), they are more likely to be categorized in a superordinate category than when they are presented further apart (distant). In Experiments 1A and 1B, participants provided spontaneous category labels in an open response format. In Experiment 2, we asked participants to indicate their preference for either of two category labels. We found that when objects are close together, they are categorized more often into superordinate categories than when objects are far apart (Experiment 1A and 2). Our findings demonstrate that the categorization of objects is, in part, determined by where they are in relation to other objects

“Racism” versus “Intersectionality”? Significations of Interwoven Oppressions in Greek LGBTQ+ Discourses

This paper seeks to make “racism” strange, by exploring its invocation in the sociolinguistic context of LGBTQI+ activism in Greece, where it is used in ways that may be jarring to anglophone readers. In my ongoing research on the conceptualisation of interwoven oppressions in Greek social movement contexts, I have been interested in understanding how the widespread use of the term “racism” as a superordinate category to reference forms of oppression not only based on “race,” “ethnicity,” and “citizenship” (e.g., racism, nationalism, xenophobia) but also those based on gender, gender identity, and sexuality (e.g., sexism, transphobia, and homophobia) relates to the increased adoption of “intersectionality” in movement discourses. In ordinary parlance, this commonplace usage of “racism” as an “umbrella term” nevertheless retains its etymological link to “race,” while its scope is extended to other regimes of superiority/inferiority or privilege/oppression. If intersectionality presupposes that oppressions are ontologically multiple and analytically separable, the use of “racism” as an umbrella concept seems to point in the other direction, implying that all forms of oppression originate from a common source, have a similar ontological basis, or generate privilege for the same social agents who deploy similar tactics vis-à-vis oppressed groups. My research examines how intersectionality – widely understood as a multi-axial theory of oppression, which contends that power relations are multiple, distinct, and irreducible to one another, yet converge simultaneously in the experiences of multiply oppressed social groups – relates to the use of “racism” as a struggle concept in Greek, but also in other languages commonly used in Greece, such as Albanian (racizmi) and Arabic (eunsuria).In this paper, I examine how these two vocabularies – of racism and intersectionality – are operative in movement discourses, but also how they shape and are shaped by activists’ perceptions, analyses, and theories of oppression.

Separable neural representations of sound sources: Speaker identity and musical timbre

Human listeners can quickly and easily recognize different sound sources (objects and events) in their environment. Understanding how this impressive ability is accomplished can improve signal processing and machine intelligence applications along with assistive listening technologies. However, it is not clear how the brain represents the many sounds that humans can recognize (such as speech and music) at the level of individual sources, categories and acoustic features. To examine the cortical organization of these representations, we used patterns of fMRI responses to decode 1) four individual speakers and instruments from one another (separately, within each category), 2) the superordinate category labels associated with each stimulus (speech or instrument), and 3) a set of simple synthesized sounds that could be differentiated entirely on their acoustic features. Data were collected using an interleaved silent steady state sequence to increase the temporal signal-to-noise ratio, and mitigate issues with auditory stimulus presentation in fMRI. Largely separable clusters of voxels in the temporal lobes supported the decoding of individual speakers and instruments from other stimuli in the same category. Decoding the superordinate category of each sound was more accurate and involved a larger portion of the temporal lobes. However, these clusters all overlapped with areas that could decode simple, acoustically separable stimuli. Thus, individual sound sources from different sound categories are represented in separate regions of the temporal lobes that are situated within regions implicated in more general acoustic processes. These results bridge an important gap in our understanding of cortical representations of sounds and their acoustics.

Processes as Patterns of Occurrence

This chapter explores the idea that processes may be understood as patterns of occurrence, whose individual realizations may take on the character of states or events, depending on the perspective from which they are considered. In this way the ontological relations between states, processes, and events are clarified by effectively defusing the question as to whether processes should be classed as subordinate to events, or vice versa, or whether they are both specializations of some broader superordinate category. A key distinction is made between open and closed patterns, initially in the spatial domain and then in the temporal domain, where new light is thrown on why the term ‘process’ has come to be used in strikingly different ways by different authors. Finally, the account of processes as patterns is put to use in providing a fruitful framework within which to investigate aspectual phenomena in natural language.

Group status is related to group prototypicality in the absence of social identity concerns.

Based on self-categorization theory, group status should be positively related to group prototypicality when the relevant superordinate category is positively valued. In this case, high status groups should be perceived to be more prototypical than low status groups even in the absence of concerns about maintaining a positive social identity. To test this hypothesis, a minimal group study was conducted in which participants (N = 139) did not belong to any of the groups involved. Consistent with predictions, participants perceived high status groups to be significantly more prototypical than low status groups. Consistent with self-categorization theory’s cognitive analysis, these results demonstrate that the relation between group status and group prototypicality is a relatively basic and pervasive effect that does not depend on social identity motives.