ABSTRACT

Anthropological studies have attested for centuries that people sometimes perceive members of other groups outside human boundaries (Lévi-Strauss, 1952/1987) as pertaining to a different reality. Whereas the phenomenon of outgroup dehumanization has most frequently been observed in relation with intergroup situations of extreme conflict (Bar-Tal, 1989; Schwartz & Struch, 1989), recently, Leyens and colleagues (2000) have proposed that a milder form of outgroup dehumanization can occur in everyday situations. These authors use the term infrahumanization to refer to the tendency of associating outgroups with less uniquely human characteristics than ingroups. Most of the studies in this domain (but see Vaes & Paladino, 2005; Paladino & Vaes, submitted; Viki et al ., in press) have used the distinction between primary and secondary emotions to measure infrahumanization tendencies. Besides its innovative aspect, the focus on emotions has a special theoretical interest. As we will show, misunderstandings through the use of different kinds of emotions can potentially occur at various levels of the intergroup exchanges. If musicians interpret differently the notes of their partition, the performance will resemble more a clatter than a sonata. Similarly, if humans are not all totally humans (for a detailed discussion, see Haslam, 2006) their exchanges are likely to lead more to misunderstandings than to interactions.