Imagined Otherness: Perceived Schematic Difference Can Fuel Dehumanization

Why do people withdraw the dignity of humanity from others? Sociologists have focused on the roles of institutional processes through which blatantly dehumanizing norms and narratives diffuse through a population, whereas social psychologists have emphasized different ways in which both blatant and subtle forms of dehumanization emerge through the denial of mind to others. In contrast, we propose that blatant dehumanization can also arise through the subtle process of people actively contemplating others’ minds. We introduce the construct of imagined otherness–perceiving that a prototypical member of a social group construes an important facet of the social world in ways that diverge from the way most humans understand it–and argue that such attributions can catalyze blatant dehumanization above and beyond the effects of general perceived difference and group identification. Adapting established methods from cultural sociology, we develop a technique for measuring perceived schematic difference relative to the concept, “America,” and examine how this measure relates to the tendency of U.S. Republicans and Democrats to blatantly dehumanize members of the other political party. We report the results of two pre-registered studies (N=1,169)–one correlational and one experimental–that together lend support for our theory. We discuss implications of these findings for research on social boundaries, political polarization, and the measurement of meaning.