Fighting effectively without committing war crimes

and recently accepted to a clinical psychology doctorate program at University of California Berkeley, describe the brain’s workings in this week’s online issue of NeuroImage. Jack and French propose how the findings could be applied to the military in a preprint of a paper due to appear in the book: Responsibilities to Protect: Different Perspectives, edited by David Whetham, King’s College London. The papers can be found here.

Dehumanizing has preceded atrocities throughout history, from the Nazis comparing Jews to rats before systematically murdering them to Tamerlan Tsarnaev saying he did not understand Americans — that they cannot control themselves — before planting a bomb at the Boston Marathon this spring, the researchers said.

“There’s a kernel of hope in this,” French said, “because it suggests you first have to develop a certain mindset before you can get past the moral reservations we naturally have about killing another human. Killing is harder than some might think.”

The research
To learn what happens in the brain when someone dehumanizes another or does the opposite by focusing on the humanity of another, Jack’s team used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to record the brain activity of healthy adults.

The adults, who ranged in age from 19-59 years, were shown photographs with narrations designed to evoke the two recognized types of dehumanizing and humanizing, labeled as mechanistic (objectifying) and animalistic.

A runner who forgot her water bottle and was on all fours drinking from a puddle in the middle of the road evoked animalistic dehumanization, while a narrative of a student who rejected an easy chance to cheat on a hard test evoked animalistic humanization. An accountant who had no contact with others and spent his day working on spreadsheets evoked mechanistic dehumanization, while a basketball player lifting an opponent from the floor after a hard-fought game evoked mechanistic humanization.

While both forms of humanization are marked by sympathy, mechanistic dehumanizing is marked by indifference and animalistic dehumanizing by disgust.

Each image was followed by a text question: “How does this make you feel?” Images that evoked animalistic dehumanization made participants feel the worst, while those that evoked mechanistic humanization made them feel the best.

Their findings
Looking at overall activity in the brain networks, the fMRIs showed that relative to both forms of humanizing, mechanistic dehumanizing (or objectification) deactivated the social reasoning network while maintaining the same level of analytic reasoning activity. Three more complex stimuli in this category —