Understanding Dehumanization and Social Perception Across Development
A special issue of Behavioral Sciences (ISSN 2076-328X). This special issue belongs to the section "Social Psychology".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 20 September 2026 | Viewed by 326
Special Issue Editor
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Dehumanization is a topic that has a rich history and has been explored through various psychological and philosophical lenses and, whilst early research focused on egregious forms of dehumanization, exploring it as a mechanism to explain extreme violence and intergroup conflict, more recent work has explored its more subtle forms. This expansion of the phenomenon, with a focus on social perceptions of human attributes, has enabled researchers to investigate dehumanization across a wider range of everyday social contexts. A unifying factor linking explorations of both subtle and unsubtle forms of dehumanization is the lack of work assessing dehumanization across a developmental trajectory. This gap in the literature limits our understanding of the phenomenon and is something this Special Issue aims to address. We welcome empirical and theoretical work that attempts to explore dehumanization through a developmental lens that could include, but is not limited to, the developmental trajectory of dehumanization, its early predictors and behavioral consequences, and children’s growing understanding of what it is to be human.
Dr. Adam Eggleston
Guest Editor
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Keywords
- dehumanization
- infrahumanization
- social perception
- child development
- intergroup bias
- human perception
- social cognition
- social categorization
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