Browsing by Author "Haapala, Pinja"

People have a tendency to attribute uniquely human features to real or imagined nonhuman agents, which is known as anthropomorphism. The inverse process of anthropomorphism is dehumanization, in which people fail to attribute humanlike features to other humans and treat them as animals or physical objects. Sociality motivation and effectance motivation are motivational determinants involved in both anthropomorphism and dehumanization and they predict the amount of dehumanization and anthropomorphism. In this review, I explore what kind of social circumstances make people anthropomorphize nonhuman agents and dehumanize others. I also consider the role of effectance motivation in anthropomorphism and dehumanization. The link between effectance motivation and dehumanization has not been explored before, but there are arguments that dehumanization can enable an individual to feel competent and function effectively in one´s environment. There is little research on the topics as a whole. Google Scholar was used as database and search terms were, for example, dehumanization, anthropomorphism, sociality motivation and effectance motivation. According to results, people who lack social connection, anthropomorphize nonhuman agents more than people who feel socially connected. Lonely people may try to satisfy the motivation of social connection by seeking connections with nonhuman agents, such as pets, gadgets of gods. On the contrary, people who feel socially connected, are more likely to dehumanize the outgroup than the ingroup. Review also showed, that subjects who highly identify themselves as members of the ingroup, have higher threshold to distinguish the faces of the outgroup members from the face of the doll than the faces of the ingroup members. The results suggest that, feeling of social connection and group membership might be factors that enable dehumanization, but the causal relationship cannot be deducted. According to results participants who have high motivation to be an effective social agent, anthropomorphize unpredictable nonhuman agents more than people who have low need for gaining social competence. People try to understand, control and predict the environment through anthropomorphism to achieve a sense of social competence. Review showed that in contexts of medical practice and decision-making in power, dehumanization can enable one’s effective functioning by creating a sense of control by suppressing the negative feelings, when hard decisions must have done for others. Dehumanization might be seen as a form of effectance motivation in medical practice through lack of empathy and mechanization, for example. However, it is not clear whether these forms of dehumanization promote patient healing, although they may enhance the clinician´s performance in patient care.