The complexity of humanness: Strategies to promote social equality

People tend to perceive others as less human than them and this legitimizes the most heinous forms of intergroup discrimination. One way to reduce this social inequality is to encourage people to perceive the various affiliations of others or themselves. We demonstrated that three social cognitive strategies used to reduce reliance on heuristic thinking and prejudice have much broader benefits than previously thought. This was accomplished in multiple lines of research. First, increasing the number of the categories simultaneously attributed to outgroup members (multiple categorization) or oneself (social identity complexity) promote the re-humanization of the outgroup. This effect was consistently showed using different measures, including fix format attributions of uniquely human traits, the ability to express uniquely human emotions, and the spontaneous generation of human characteristics to describe the outgroup. Second, besides increased humanness judgments, these two social cognitive strategies enhanced positive behavioral intensions to financially support outgroup members’ health and autonomy. Third, increasing not just the number but the complexity of the interrelation between others’ categories (counter-stereotypic categorization) lead to re-humanization of them. Fourth, this humanization effect was generalized to unrelated outgroup targets and explained by increased cognitive flexibility. Whereas the re-humanization of a specific outgroup target was explained by individualization of it and reduced threat from it. Overall, evidence suggests educational initiatives that challenging social categorization may reduce one of the current world-wide most urgent issue that is social inequality.