Reading about colonial harm reduces perceived emotional capacity of the harmed group

Evidence

In a first study, we assigned participants, U.K. citizens, to either a high-impact condition, in which they learned that the arrival of the British in Australia had a dramatic impact on the life of Aborigines (causing a sharp decrease in their population due to military operations by the British as well as diseases introduced by the British settlers) or to a low-impact condition, in which a decline in the number of Aborigines happened shortly after the arrival of the British, but their number subsequently stabilized to a level similar to that prior to the arrival. After reading one of these two accounts, participants indicated to what extent they estimated the capacity of Aborigines to feel a series of emotions. The emotions presented to them varied in the degree to which they were considered uniquely human (as derived from previous normative studies). — Roderick M. Kramer, Geoffrey J. Leonardelli, Robert W. Livingston, Social Cognition, Social Identity, and…, 2107

Categorization

• XREF: Paralleles moral disengagement theory’s justification mechanisms — framing colonizer harm through historical impact narratives. — connects to: Participants rated Aborigines’ capacity for uniquely human emotions after reading about the history. — Emanuele Castano, On the Perils of Glorifying the…, 43; the MOC “The Word Is a Fence: Language as Battleground, Property, and Partition”