It is a truth universally acknowledged that the human history was built from sea of blood and mountain of corpses. Genocide and mass murder are but few examples, ranging from the Genocide of Jews by Nazi Germany, to Rwandan Genocide. What these two have in common is that both of them involves hatred towards a certain group of people to the point of dehumanization. Dehumanization is a psychological process where opponents see each other as lesser than human being, and thus, does not deserve moral consideration and basic human rights. Such condition applies in the middle of a conflict, it leads to intense feeling of hatred between conflicting groups. This could cause moral exclusion, as the opponents will see each other as evil, and only see …show more content…
An “enemy image” is a negative stereotype where one’s view towards the opposing group is distorted, leading them believing that the opposite group is evil, and their own group is seen as good. (Stein, 1996, p. 94) However, it is not uncommon to find that only the group’s leader is seen as the hideous evil, while the ordinary group members are perceived as neutral. (Rubin & Pruitt, 1994, p. 99) This implies that dehumanization could increases aggressive and violent behavior because the dehumanized group is seen as not deserving of moral standards. (Castano & Giner-Sorolla, 2006) Dehumanization comes in various forms, there are cases where people are compared to animals, in which they are not seen with basic human rights and morals and the dehumanized group is being seen as barbaric, uncultured, and amoral. (Haslam et al., 2008), another also points out that applying demonic or bestial qualities to a person is also a form of dehumanization (Bandura, 2002) It is also worth knowing that comparing a person to a machine is also a form of dehumanization, in which the human is seen with robotic qualities, such as unfeeling, rigid, and lacking individuality (Haslam et al.,