The Impact of Helping Behavior on Outgroup Infrahumanization

Abstract

Infrahumanization research has verified that in intergroup contexts, there is a strong tendency to attribute secondary emotions, which are uniquely human, to the ingroup, while limiting that attribution in outgroups. Experiments have shown it to be as common as ingroup bias. However, it is not yet known what characteristics may mitigate this trend. This paper presents two studies. The first analyzes the impact of helping behavior on attributions of human traits to two fictitious groups. The second study's objective was to determine if members of the Spanish ingroup would infrahumanize an Ethiopian outgroup less when that outgroup performs prosocial behavior towards another group. Infrahumanization was determined by a lexical decision task, using the names of ingroup and outgroup members as priming. The results demonstrate that describing a fictitious group in altruistic terms increases their human profile (experiment one) and reduces infrahumanization (experiment two).