Dehumanization and mass violence: A study of mental state language in Nazi propaganda (1927-1945)

Abstract

Dehumanization is frequently cited as a precursor to mass violence, but quantitative support for this notion is scarce. The present work provides evidence for this link by examining the dehumanization of Jews in Nazi propaganda. Our linguistic analysis of Nazi propaganda suggests that Jews were progressively denied the capacity for fundamentally human mental experiences in the lead up to the Holocaust. These results are consistent with the notion that, given that the recognition of another’s mental experience promotes moral concern, 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.