PSYC12H3 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Mind, Likert Scale, Grayscale
Document Summary
Dehumanized perception may be necessary to facilitate extremely inhumane acts like torture against other people. Dehumanized perception is a cognitive bias characterized by spontaneous failure to think about mental contents thoughts and feelings in a social target"s mind. Members of social categories (e. g. , homeless people, drug addicts) perceived as low on both warmth and competence reliably elicit more disgust than do other social categories. Study 1: tests whether participants fail to engage social cognition in response to dehumanized targets. They should spontaneously produce fewer mental-state verbs when describing a day in a dehumanized target"s life: also testing targets of dehumanized perception are rated lower on all these dimensions, method: surveyed around 119 participants from undergraduates. Participants are spontaneously inferring the contents of the dehumanized targets" minds less often than other social targets: overall, these findings support the hypothesis, showing that dehumanized targets are rated significantly lower on 10 out of 14 rating dimensions.
