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Reducing conflict: Dehumanization (Hare) animal analogy for outside groups

Understanding Dehumanization

How and when people come to see other groups as less than fully human

0Chinese children aged 3 to 6 in the 2026 paper

0US participants in the 2022 paper: 150 children aged 5 to 12 and 482 adults

Executive Summary

Dehumanization means seeing members of another group as less than fully human. It is found in adults across cultures and is thought to motivate violence. Brian Hare and Wen Zhou have studied how early it appears in children and how it relates to punishment and harm. In the US they found it in children as young as five. Among Chinese preschoolers, only those who understood that other people can hold false beliefs rated a rival team as less human. The studies are correlational, and the authors present their results as initial evidence.

Who's behind this

Brian Hare is Professor of Evolutionary Anthropology, Psychology, and Neuroscience at Duke University and a CHP affiliate. He works in comparative cognition, the field that compares the minds of different species. He studies humans, bonobos, chimpanzees and dogs to understand how cognition and cooperation evolved, and he founded the Duke Canine Cognition Center. With Vanessa Woods he wrote Survival of the Friendliest (2020), a book for general readers about the self-domestication hypothesis and how people treat outsiders.

Brian Hare

Wen Zhou ran the 2022 and 2026 studies under Hare's supervision and is first author on both papers. She is now Assistant Professor of Evolutionary Anthropology at Duke Kunshan University. Aleah Bowie and Jingzhi Tan are co-authors on a related 2024 study. Duke University funded the 2022 research and Duke Kunshan University funded the 2026 research. A John Templeton Foundation grant supports part of Hare's work.

Key terms

Two open questions about dehumanization

  • How early does it appear?

    Zhou and Hare note that most earlier studies of children used word tasks that required reading, which excluded younger children. One picture-based study trained children to use its scale first, so it left open whether children could use such scales untrained. The Ascent of Man scale, common in adult research, had never been used with children.

  • Is it tied to theory of mind?

    Zhou and Hare's 2022 paper called the causal role of theory of mind in dehumanization "largely untested," and no study had yet examined the link in young children.

The hypothesis and the evidence so far

The paradox of kindness and cruelty

Hare proposes that humans domesticated themselves. In his account, the ability to see others as fully human or as less than human helps explain the human capacity for both extraordinary kindness and cruelty.

A link to theory of mind

In two experiments, Zhou and Hare assigned 247 Chinese children aged 3 to 6 to teams in a competition. Only children who understood false beliefs rated the rival team as less human than their own. Children liked the rival team less whether or not they understood false beliefs. The authors detected no relation between dehumanization and age or verbal ability. They call the result initial support for the link between theory of mind and dehumanization that Hare's account predicts.

Intent to harm

In the first experiment, children who dehumanized the rival team more chose spicier burgers for that team, after being told that spicy burgers made its members cry. The link held only among the 51 children who understood second-order beliefs (what one person thinks another person believes). Once the authors accounted for how much children liked the rival team, the link was only marginally significant, and they call its strength uncertain.

Case study: blatant dehumanization in children as young as five

Brian Hare and Wen Zhou set out to test whether blatant dehumanization depends on exposure to cultural norms through adolescence and adulthood or already appears in childhood.

Their two studies appeared in Human Nature in 2022. In the first, 482 US adults recruited online rated the humanness of their own ethnic group and of Muslims. The second took place at a summer camp at Zoo Atlanta. There, 150 children aged 5 to 12 rated their own camp group and a fictional rival, the "Slug group," which the experimenter described as "impolite, selfish and sloppy." Adults and children both rated humanness on three picture scales: the Ascent of Man scale from adult research, a scale of faces, and a new scale of human silhouettes.

Ascent of (Hu)Man

Children rated the rival group as less human than their own on all three scales, at levels similar to adults' ratings of Muslims. The researchers detected no difference between younger and older children. The authors write that the parallel results "suggest that dehumanization does not require intense exposure to cultural norms or extended indoctrination to be blatantly expressed." They caution that the children likely dehumanized this strongly because an adult had described the rival group negatively and the children did not answer anonymously.

Fifty-eight of the children also heard about a Slug group member who had torn up another child's painting. Each child chose how many hours that member should wait before visiting the zoo animals again. Children who dehumanized the rival group more chose longer waits. Among both adults and children, those who dehumanized more agreed more strongly with statements favoring group dominance and inequality. The design is correlational, so it cannot show that dehumanization causes punishment.

What is known and what is not

RowWhat the studies foundWhat remains open
AgeChildren as young as five dehumanized a rival group (US, 2022).Whether children dehumanize at these levels without an adult's negative description.
Theory of mindOnly preschoolers who understood false beliefs rated the rival team as less human than their own (China, 2026).Whether theory of mind causes dehumanization or both stem from another trait. Whether children judge humanness by looks, by metaphor or by more abstract qualities.
InterventionsDescribing animals as having human-like minds did not reduce blatant dehumanization in children or adults (2024).Whether early contact between groups or cooperative learning prevents dehumanization or weakens its link to harm.

Where the findings point

Zhou and Hare's preliminary evidence suggests a window in early childhood, when children already dehumanize other groups but dehumanization is not yet closely linked to intent to harm. They propose that interventions in that window could guide children's developing theory of mind toward moral concern for people outside their group. Cooperative learning and early contact between groups could do this by building shared identities and interdependence.

“Selection for in-group prosociality drove late human self-domestication and, as a correlated by-product, is responsible for extreme forms of out-group aggression.”

Brian Hare

Brian Hare

Annual Review of Psychology (2017), on the self-domestication hypothesis

Questions for the next studies

  • 1. Following children over time

    The studies compared children of different ages at one point in time, so they cannot show whether theory of mind leads to dehumanization. The authors propose following the same children as they grow.

  • 2. Testing other cultures

    Each study drew its participants from one country. The authors call it "theoretically urgent" to test whether the link between theory of mind and dehumanization appears in other cultures.

  • 3. Blatant and subtle forms

    The 2022 and 2026 studies measured only blatant dehumanization. The 2024 results suggest that blatant and subtle forms may need different interventions. Zhou and Hare give priority to testing how theory of mind relates to several forms of dehumanization.

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