Wednesday, March 5, 2014
Why can/do people dehumanize others?
Throughout history, people have treated minorities and such as lesser beings and made them suffer for being different. Americans driving Native Americans from their homes in North America, and enslaving Africans, Germany's massacre of the Jews, Gypsies, and other minorites, and Mao Zedong's genocide of 49,000,000 Cambodians, are all examples of this. However, people always seem to wonder: how can humans treat each other like this? A series of infamous studies known compiled into a book known as The Lucifer Effect suggests a number of answers to this question. Some of the conclusions it reaches are: a self-serving bias, in which it is concluded that people think that they are inherently good and can do no wrong. Furthermore, when one is anonymous or knows they will not be punished, they are more inclined to do something they know is morally wrong. Also, humans are quite obedient beings, especially to authority figures. Now, how do we connect this to genocides in history? Well, if you consider Hitler's mass extermination of the Jews, you may wonder how people could just standby, or even participate in this atrocity. Well, a self-serving bias, anonymity, and obedience would surely make it easier for Hitler to do so. One may say to oneself: "I would never do anything like Hitler did". However, those people are just the kind of people who were more likely to participate.
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I think when you talked about anonymity you could have listed a few examples, such as the internet.
ReplyDeleteAs we watched the social psychology video in class, I thought about the differences between good and evil, and how people are born evil or are they just forced to act evil because of their situation. Good comes with what one thinks is the right thing to do. Bad comes when people are not careful and are taken advantage by evil. Personally, I think that people aren't naturally evil, just that they are in a situation that influences them to act/do bad things. Evil is spread by its partners in power which ruins the mindset of a person. Human nature is mainly affected by the self-serving bias one takes into doing whats wrong rather than doing what is right.
ReplyDeleteI feel like the examples you listed do not really have to do with the dehumanization of others, but more of how normal people can do bad things. Because one would not dehumanize another due to the idea "self serving bias". I believe they are both examples of why people can bring themselves to do bad things. For example, I believe Hitler dehumanized the people he killed because he truly thought he was better than them and life would be better without them, not because he believed he could do no wrong, but because he thought he was doing the right thing by eliminating them.
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