Dehumanization
behavior or process that undermines individuality of and in others
Dehumanization is the process, practice, or act of denying full humanity in others, along with the cruelty and suffering that accompany it. It involves perceiving individuals or groups as lacking essential human qualities, such as secondary emotions and mental capacities, thereby placing them outside the bounds of moral concern. In this definition, any act or thought that regards a person as either "other than" or "less than" human constitutes dehumanization.
Dehumanization can be overt or subtle, and typically manifests in two primary forms: animalistic dehumanization, which denies uniquely human traits like civility, culture, or rationality and likens others to animals; and mechanistic dehumanization, which denies traits of human nature such as warmth, emotion, and individuality, portraying others as objects or machines.
It has historically facilitated a broad range of harms, from discrimination and social exclusion to slavery, colonization, as well as other crimes against humanity, and is recognized as a significant form of incitement to genocide.
Conceptualizations
Behaviorally, dehumanization describes a disposition towards others that debases the others' individuality by either portraying it as an "individual" species or by portraying it as an "individual" object (e.g., someone who acts inhumanely towards humans). As a process, dehumanization may be understood as the opposite of personification, a figure of speech in which inanimate objects or abstractions are endowed with human qualities; dehumanization then is the disendowment of these same qualities or a reduction to abstraction.
Dehumanization can occur in both absolute and relative forms. Absolute dehumanization involves perceiving a group as entirely devoid of human qualities, while relative dehumanization entails attributing fewer human characteristics to one group in comparison to another. Historically, dehumanization has involved the outright denial of someone's humanity, such as in claims that certain groups, like enslaved people, were not fully human.
The public source identifies “Dehumanization” as behavior or process that undermines individuality of and in others. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Dehumanization, behavior and process.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 19, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3495037. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Dehumanization” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.