Putin says Ukraine is ruled by “Nazis and drug addicts”; Ukrainians call Russians “orks”, in reference to the race of evil creatures from the “Lord of the Rings” saga. Portraying the enemy as essentially despicable or less than human is a common impulse in modern warfare, but the phenomenon is probably as old as the emergence of our species’ cognitive abilities.
“The anthropological literature is full of examples of tribes that only consider the members of their own group to be fully human”, says Marco Antônio Corrêa Varella, a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Experimental Psychology at USP.
This is often reflected even in the names used to designate pre-industrial peoples. In general, there is a chasm between the meaning of these names when they are coined by the group itself or when they are used by neighboring tribes. People from the Tupi-Guarani language family, for example, often call themselves “Avá”, a word whose meaning is simply something like “person, human being”.
On the other hand, the name given to a Gê-speaking ethnic group (not belonging to the Tupi-Guarani family) is “kayapó” (literally, “similar to monkeys”). Of course, this is not the designation that the Kayapó chose for themselves—they use the term “mêbêngokrê”, that is, “men of the water place”.
Very similar things have also marked the thinking of European peoples since antiquity. “For the Greeks, the barbarians are the people who don’t even know how to speak, they only produce sounds that seem ‘bar, bar’, meaningless. The name of the Slavic peoples comes from a term that means ‘word’, so they are the ones who can use words, and the others don’t”, Varella remembers.
In a study published in the specialized journal Frontiers in Psychology, the USP researcher analyzed how human beings developed mechanisms to deal with other agents, that is, entities capable of deliberate action.
The first of these mechanisms, which is already present in very young children and is probably the oldest from the point of view of the cognitive evolution of our species, is the one used to deal with prey, predators and pests, and does not take into account the possible ability of other agents having beliefs or intentions of their own.
The second mechanism, which develops later (from the age of four), involves the so-called theory of mind, that is, the ability to infer intentions, desires and beliefs in other people or entities. There are indications that this mechanism is unique to our species, although there are glimpses of it in other animals with complex brains and social behavior, such as great apes (chimpanzees, gorillas, etc.).
“So, one way to dehumanize the enemy is to see him no longer through the lens of theory of mind, but through the oldest and simplest mechanism: as a mere prey that deserves to be subdued, an evil predator, a pest. disgusting plant that needs to be exterminated for health reasons,” he explains.
Indeed, in two of the greatest genocides of the 20th century, the sanitary analogy played a central role in the propaganda in favor of violence. In Nazi Germany in the 1930s-1940s, Jews were compared to rats that needed to be exterminated. In Rwanda, East Africa, during the 1994 civil war, radio programs incited members of the Hutu ethnic group to “kill the cockroaches”, referring to the Tutsi ethnic group.
There are indications that this kind of dehumanization of enemies and outsiders has its roots in the tendency to develop “tribal” identities that separate the group to which one belongs (“ingroup” or “ingroup” in English) from the other groups (“outgroups”). ” or “external groups”). The most accepted hypothesis is that this process is linked to the fact that, during almost the entire human evolutionary history, there was nothing similar to the State and the security and justice systems, with police, judges, prisons, etc.
Without formal instances to mediate conflicts, the only protection came from belonging to a group that could defend its members from external threats and, if necessary, retaliate attacks. This “baggage” would also end up being co-opted by states when they clashed with rival states, fueling conflicts on a much larger scale.
“A 2015 study showed that the more people identify with the ‘ingroup’ and consider it important, the more they dehumanize the ‘outgroup’. And this relationship is mediated by the perceived moral distance between ‘us’ and ‘them’. The more people see the outside group as distant from them in terms of honesty and trustworthiness, the more likely they are to dehumanize others,” says Varella. In an armed conflict, the practical effect of this process is to lessen the remorse of those who commit violent acts and even increase the chances of garnering support from the civilian population for atrocities.
Would there be a way to avoid or minimize this process? The less worse news, according to the USP researcher, is that the ease of dehumanizing opponents is counterbalanced by the ease of humanizing them, as long as the commonalities among all human beings are emphasized, from morality to family life.
“That’s why, in times of war, there is intense control over the spread of news, aimed at stifling contrary narratives so that the dehumanizing narrative seems more familiar, unanimous and convincing.”
