This chapter integrates empirical research on the pains of imprisonment with psychological and neuroscientific insights into the nature, sources, and effects of social pain, including its connection to the fundamental human need to belong. It argues that social pain provides a comprehensive framework for situating the pains of imprisonment – outlined in Chapter 3– within a unified conceptual construct. This argument rests on three interrelated premises. First, the contexts of exclusion that elicit social pain – social isolation, rejection, and ostracism – closely mirror the layers of exclusion that define the various domains of prison life. Second, the effects of social pain – particularly when pervasive or prolonged – on psychological well-being, behavior, and health significantly overlap with those documented among incarcerated individuals, both during and after imprisonment. Third, the psychological mechanisms that lead people to cause social pain in others, while underestimating its consequences, similarly underpin the logic of punishment, including the tendency to minimize the actual harms of the prison experience. Building on these premises, the chapter develops the book’s central claim: that the real pain of carceral punishment ultimately resides in the systematic threat to the fundamental human need to belong.

Chapter 5 assesses harms that people with mental illness experience that are related to how their self is constituted. These include harms of de-individuation and mis-identification, but also, as this chapter focuses on, harms of social exclusion and dehumanization that result from status loss and moral distancing. Dehumanization occurs through both being reduced to a stereotyped trait and being viewed as lesser compared to others. Having a sense of belonging and being accepted as an equal member of a moral/epistemic/social community are important parts of being viewed as and viewing oneself as a full human being; these are also critical for developing and exercising autonomous agency as well as for well-being and flourishing. People with mental illness are often excluded from these communities as a result of public stigma, diminishing their autonomy and well-being. This chapter shows how dehumanization, social exclusion, and belonging uncertainty threaten belongingness and autonomy.

Chapter 1 examines what mental illness stigma is and analyzes the components of mental illness stigma to show how people with mental illness experience stigma in their daily lives. These components include labeling, stereotyping, prejudice, moral distancing, social exclusion, status loss, dehumanization, microaggressions, discrimination, and epistemic injustice. In each case, I use empirical evidence from the social psychology literature on stigma to show ways in which people with mental illness experience these forms of stigma. Next, I look at factors that affect the kind, degree, and scope of stigma associated with mental illness, including beliefs, political values, cultural values, socioeconomic status, education, and gender. Finally, I examine how many people experience compounding stigmas that come from multiple sources.

The introduction motivates the book’s arguments by showing how mental illness stigma remains pervasive despite greater awareness of mental health issues and more resources directed at mental health treatment and destigmatization. The forms of mental illness stigma most commonly expressed are stigma against people with severe mental illness who are perceived as homeless, and internalized stigma that people with mental illness project onto themselves. Mental illness stigma arises as a reaction to the violation of social norms of what a human being should be in the Western world in the twenty-first century. I give an account of stigma as the devaluing and discrediting of a person based on possessing a social trait that is seen as violating social norms, constituting a relationship of power. Components of stigma include labeling, stereotyping, prejudice, moral distancing, social exclusion, status loss, dehumanization, microaggressions, discrimination, and epistemic injustice. The chapter ends with a description of the book’s scope, methodology, and chapter outline.

The goal of this chapter is to introduce dehumanization and humanness. It begins with the story of Carmelita Torres, a seventeen-year-old adolescent girl from Juárez, Mexico. In January 1917, she was asked to get naked, shave her hair, and take a kerosene bath by US immigration authorities when she was coming to work as a maid in El Paso, Texas. The story of Carmelita illustrates dehumanization, the denial of people’s full humanity. This chapter examines popular myths and different forms of dehumanization, such as treating people like animals (animalistic dehumanization), objects (mechanistic dehumanization), and supernatural beings (mystic dehumanization). To confront dehumanization, we need to affirm our humanness, the dignity and wholeness of all human beings that makes them unique, free, and entitled to rights. Carmelita and others affirmed their humanness by protesting in the 1917 Bath Riots. The chapter includes a Food for Thought section on Halloween, blackface, and redface. It ends with a discussion of Carmelita Torres and the affirmation of our humanity.

Dehumanization involves the representation of social targets, often social outgroups, as falling short of the ideal human – as “lesser” beings. Not surprisingly, dehumanization has been associated with violent behaviour in theorizing, especially the notion that dehumanization leads to violence by loosening moral restraints. Here we discuss how dehumanization is assessed in the psychological literature, contrasting classic and contemporary conceptualizations. We review research not only on dehumanization as a precursor to violence, but also on how violence can be a precursor to dehumanization, and how dehumanization and violence might reciprocally reinforce one another. We briefly distinguish dehumanization of extremists from dehumanization by extremists before discussing the latest findings on meta-dehumanization (the perception that others dehumanize us) as factor in perpetuating extreme violence. Lastly, we consider implications for policymakers and intervention strategists based on this review of the empirical literature

This chapter of the handbook introduces dehumanization as another dark side of humanity. Humanness is a central concept in moral psychology, and whereas people normally treat other humans with moral consideration, they may turn to dehumanize others as a result of moral disengagement and moral exclusion. The author reviews recent psychological accounts of dehumanization that are grounded in empirical research and highlights the diverse forms it takes: dehumanization varies from subtle to blatant, from interpersonal to intergroup, and from simple to complex. In these theoretical accounts, dehumanizing a person or group means ascribing less of certain human attributes to the target – both attributes that distinguish humans from other animals and attributes that distinguish humans from inanimate agents. Within this general framework, the author reviews the empirical literature on how dehumanization may function to prime, facilitate, and justify harm during intergroup conflict. He also considers a number of critiques and debates over these ideas and findings that have recently surfaced.

This chapter of the handbook discusses the role of mind perception in the categorization of individuals as moral agents and moral patients. Moral agents are defined as individuals that can commit morally wrong actions; moral patients are defined as individuals that can be morally wronged. It is generally agreed that the attribution of moral agency and moral patiency is linked to the attribution of mental capacities and traits. The chapter surveys a variety of models of mind perception, some of which focus on the representation of mental capacities, some of which focus on the representation of mental traits. The dominant model of mind perception in moral psychology is the experience-agency model, which divides the space of mindedness into experiential capacities like sentience and self-awareness, and agentic capacities like deliberative reasoning and self-control. Reviewing the empirical literature on moral categorization, the author argues that neither the experience-agency model nor any of the major alternatives to it captures all the factors to which everyday attributions of moral agency and moral patiency are sensitive.

The European Commission against Racism and Intolerance states that hate speech ‘poses grave dangers for the cohesion of a democratic society, the protection of human rights and the rule of law’. In hate speech, human dignity is violated through the use of dehumanising communicative means and through the tendency to rank people in hierarchies, in which some groups are considered more and others less worthy. In this chapter, I shall argue that critical linguistic awareness is a useful tool in combatting hate speech. The theoretical contribution is a linguistically based definition of hate speech, drawing on concepts from speech act theory, social semiotics and multimodality. The aim of this chapter is twofold: to enhance language activists’ and the general public’s understanding of the way hate speech is performed through communicative means and to provide activists with an analytic tool to cultivate critical linguistic awareness about hate speech.

This chapter explores the many forms of bondage in the early English tropics, showing how difficult it can be to even define slavery from a global perspective, especially over the course of the seventeenth century. There was a blurry line between slavery and other conditions of bondage or subjugation, but the English gradually developed a more consistent approach to non-European enslavement across the tropics. By the 1680s, one particularly inflexible and brutal genus of racial slavery – forged in the Caribbean – had outcompeted most other forms of slavery and became the default in the English empire. This chapter highlights the difficulty in defining slavery and shows overlapping elements in bondage systems in the English tropics. It argues that one of the reasons that English slavery became more draconian and permanent than most other forms of slavery was that the English took steps in the comprehensive slave codes passed in the Caribbean to deny the subjecthood of the enslaved.

Chapter 2 discusses the common belief that people different from us all look alike and act alike. The outgroup homogeneity effect, as it is called, is rooted in normal categorization processes that become oversimplified. Categorization produces a range of tendencies that contribute to prejudice such as stereotyping, inaccurate attributions, ingroup favoritism, outgroup derogation, dehumanization, even scapegoating and genocide. These phenomena are explained and connected to contemporary events such as anti-Asian hate crimes during the Covid 19 pandemic. Chapter 2 ends with strategies for change that include intergroup contact, creating more complex social identities, and cooperative learning.

This chapter rethinks Indigenous bodies and remains as unstable sources of scientific knowledge during a period of great violence and settler expansion: the late nineteenth-century incursions into Indigenous lands in Southern Argentina. Rodriguez compares the experiences of two prominent anthropologists, one an outsider (the German Rudolf Virchow) and one an insider-outsider (Argentine scientist Francisco P. Moreno) to show how their methods both overlapped and diverged based on their positionality. Rodriguez reads the scientists’ reports of their own emotive states as well as their interpretation of Indigenous peoples’ against the grain, revealing that underneath the authoritative scientific conclusions lay uncertainty and unease.

When we witness another person experiencing pain, be it emotional or physical, we have an empathic reaction. And even if we commit a harmful action against another person, we most of the time experience guilt in the aftermath, which prevents us from performing the same action in the future. Guilt and empathy are critical moral emotions that together usually prevent us from harming others. However, as this chapter shows, systematic processes of classification and dehumanization at play before a genocide can alter moral emotions towards another part of the population. Activity in empathy-related brain regions is generally reduced towards individuals that we consider as outgroup or towards dehumanized individuals. Neuroscience studies have further shown that when obeying orders to hurt another person, neural activity in empathy- and guilt-related brain regions is reduced compared to acting freely. Such results show how obeying orders diminishes our aversion to harming others.