Perceiving a victim’s shared humanity can break the disengagement that enabled violence

Evidence

Although the present discussion concerns dehumanization, it should be noted that people have the capacity for humanization, even under trying military conditions that put morality on hold. One of the interviews with veterans of the war who turned against it shows the transformative power of humanization amid a spree of gunfire: “I’ll tell you the point where I really turned. I go out to the scene and [there was] this little, you know, pudgy little 2-year-old child with the cute little pudgy legs, and I look and she has a bullet through her leg… . An IED [improvised explosive device] went off, the gun-happy soldiers started shooting everywhere and the baby got hit. … And this baby looked at me, wasn’t crying, wasn’t anything. It just looked at me like—I know she couldn’t speak. It might sound crazy, but she was asking me why. You know, why do I have a bullet in my leg? … This is—this is it. This is ridiculous” (Hedges & Al-Arian, 2007). — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 2424

Categorization

• XREF: Inverts the dehumanization mechanism: just as dehumanizing victims releases moral restraint, re-humanizing them breaks through the veteran’s moral disengagement mid-kill. — connects to: Structured face-to-face accountability with a harmed individual catalyzes recovery from hate. — Ryan Andrew Brown, Todd C. Helmus, Rajeev Ramchand, Alina I. Palimaru, Sarah Weilant, Ashley L. Rhoades, and Liisa Hiatt (RAND Corporation), Violent Extremism in America:…, 430; Sharing injustice stories across distance forges empathy and recognition that close moral distance — David Schlosberg, Defining Environmental Justice:…, 634; Posthumous martyr images of ordinary victims can unite a divided public — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and…, 215 (+3 more)
• SEED: The ‘eye of the humanized other’ as a counterweight to Cooper’s findings on how ordinary people adopt Islamophobic policy — moral engagement intervention angle.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 2424