ArticlePloS one2022
Dehumanization and mass violence: A study of mental state language in Nazi propaganda (1927-1945).
Article in PloS one, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 3 papers.
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Who cites it
3 citing papers in PubMed.
- Beyond Fear: Disgust, Anger, and the Affective Core of Interpersonal Phobias.Integrative psychological & behavioral science · 2026Article
- Ideological diversity of media consumption predicts COVID-19 vaccination.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Social identity correlates of social media engagement before and after the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine.Nature communications · 2024Article
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Abstract
Dehumanization is frequently cited as a precursor to mass violence, but quantitative support for this notion is scarce. The present work provides such support by examining the dehumanization of Jews in Nazi propaganda. Our linguistic analysis suggests that Jews were progressively denied the capacity for fundamentally human mental experiences leading up to the Holocaust. Given that the recognition of another's mental experience promotes moral concern, these results are consistent with the theory that dehumanization facilitates violence by disengaging moral concern. However, after the onset of the Holocaust, our results suggest that Jews were attributed a greater capacity for agentic mental states. We speculate this may reflect a process of demonization in which Nazi propagandists portrayed the Jews as highly capable of planning and intentionality while nonetheless possessing a subhuman moral character. These suggestive results paint a nuanced portrait of the temporal dynamics of dehumanization during the Holocaust and provide impetus for further empirical scrutiny of dehumanization in ecologically valid contexts.
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