The words we use when describing others can be important if we want to avoid a slide to something worse.
Sticks and stones famously break bones – but words can also hurt you. It is there in the charged rhetoric from both sides of the conflict unfolding in Israel and Gaza, just as it can be found in the language of clashes around the world: old tropes and name-calling that seek to paint whole groups of people as somehow less than human.
Research into dehumanisation was catalysed after World War Two, where psychologists tried to examine how populations could be led into war and genocide. The memoirs written by the chemist Primo Levi about his time in Auschwitz, provide just such an example.
"People who are higher in social dominance, or look at social hierarchy between groups as desirable, tend to be more likely to dehumanise," says Nour Kteily, co-director of the Dispute Resolution Research Center at Northwestern University in Illinois in the US. In the context of violence, groups who often feel dehumanised then dehumanise in kind, he says."We're starting to see we often assume or have perceptions about how dehumanised we are.
Expressing concern for the humanity of all even when you yourself have dealt with immense suffering, is to see others as human – Nour Kteily."Scholars have noted that it is often said that mass atrocities, such as massacres and genocide, can only take place once the victims have first been dehumanised," she says.
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