Collective violence requires dehumanizing victims into abstract categories
Evidence
Unlike individual violence, “group violence is by definition abstract”; “real individual neighbors are not necessarily loved, but they are loved or hated for concrete, not abstract reasons… On the contrary, in order to apply group violence to the neighbor as belonging to a category, the concrete individual’s face has to be erased: the person must become an abstraction.” — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 383
Categorization
Category: Causal Relationships
- XREF: Connects to Milgram and Zimbardo’s work on how situational roles and abstractions enable ordinary people to commit harm; also echoes the wider genocide-studies literature on dehumanization as precondition.
- SEED: Article angle: the erasure of the concrete face as the psychological hinge between individual and collective violence — exploring what practical steps reverse that abstraction.
Related
- Group violence requires the victim to be abstracted into a category (similarity 0.92)
- Mass violence requires seeing victims as categories, not persons (similarity 0.83)
- Individual and collective violence operate through separate psychological mechanisms (similarity 0.80)
- Genocide requires victims to be dehumanized into an abstract category first (similarity 0.79)