If people favor their ingroup, are especially concerned with their own group, and attribute different essences to different groups, it follows that their essence must be superior to the essence of other groups. Intelligence, language, and certain emotions are all considered to be distinctive elements of human nature or essence. The role of inteligence and language in discrimination, prejudice, and racism has already been largely investigated, and this article focuses on attributed emotions. Specifically, we investigate the idea that secondary emotions are typically human characteristics, and as such, they should be especially associated with and attributed to the ingroup. Seondary emotions may even be denied to outgroups. These differential associations and attributions of specifically human emotions to ingroups versus outgroups should affect intergroup relations. Results from several initial experiments are summarized that support our reasoning. This emotional approach to prejudice and racism is contrasted with more classic, cognitive perspectives.

According to the psychological essentialism perspective, people tend to explain differences between groups by attributing them different essences. Given a pervasive ethnocentrism, this tendency implies that the human essence will be restricted to the ingroup whereas outgroups will receive a lesser degree of humanity. Therefore, it is argued that people attribute more uniquely human characteristics to the ingroup than to the outgroup. The present article focuses on secondary emotions that constitute such characteristics. Study 1 showed that members of high- and low-status groups attribute more positive secondary emotions to the ingroup than to the outgroup. Study 2 veri®ed that the differential attribution extended also to negative secondary emotions. No exemplars of emotions were provided in Study 3. Instead, participants had to estimate the means of two distributions of numbers that supposedly represented characteristics of the ingroup and of the outgroup. The results of this third experi- ment illustrated the reluctance to attribute secondary emotions to the outgroup. The findings are discussed from the perspective of psychological essentialism

Merging insights from the intergroup relations literature and terror management theory, the authors conducted an experiment in which they assessed the impact of death-related thoughts on a series of ingroup measures. Participants in the mortalitysalience condition displayed stronger ingroup identification, perceived greater ingroup entitativity, and scored higher on ingroup bias measures. Also, perceived ingroup entitativity as well as ingroup identification mediated the effect of the mortality salience manipulation on ingroup bias. The findings are discussed in relation to theories of intergroup relations and terror management theory. A new perspective on the function of group belonging also is presented.

Focusing on the dehumanization of sexually objectified targets, study 1 tested the extent to which objectified and non-objectified male and female publicity photos were associated with human compared to animal concepts. Results conrmed the hypothesis that, among all targets, only objectied women were associated with less human concepts. This pattern of results emerged for both male and female participants but likely for different reasons. Study 2 directly looked at female and male participants’ afnity with sexually objectfied women. Results indicated that the more women distanced themselves from sexually objectfied women the more they dehumanized them, whereas men’s sexual attraction moderated their tendency to dehumanize female targets. In study 3, this latter motivation was operationalized as the activation of a sex goal and showed to trigger man’s but not woman’s dehumanization of female targets. Overall, the present set of studies show that only sexually objectfied women are dehumanized by both men and women but for different reasons. Whereas sexual attraction shifts a men’s focus of a female target away from her personality onto her body triggering a dehumanization process, women are more inclined to dehumanize their sexually objectfied counterparts the more they distance themselves from these sexualized representations of their gender category

Infra‐humanizing outgroups involves considering outgroups less human and more animal‐like than the ingroup, which is perceived, in essence, as fully human. In this article, the first section presents the theoretical background of infra‐humanization and distinguishes it from related concepts, such as dehumanization. The three basic hypotheses of the theory are then presented with a summary of empirical evidence. Social implications follow. Reasons for the pervasiveness of the phenomenon are examined as well as conditions that lead a specific outgroup to be infra‐humanized. We also explore the consequences of infra‐humanization, such as a lack of forgiveness for the outgroup and the ingroup's justification for past misdeeds against the outgroup, rather than guilt. Policy issues center on ways to combat essentialism, walls of difference between groups, and irrational symbols of superiority. The roles of egalitarian values and of deprovincialized intergroup contact are emphasized.