Humankind
Katharine Greenaway & Winnifred Louis
British Journal of Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
We investigated the effects of salient shared humanity with a benevolent or hostile human norm on perpetrators of historical atrocities. Our findings suggest that a focus on benevolent superordinate humanity enables perpetrators to legitimize intergroup discrimination and preserve existing negative attitudes towards victims. In Expt 1 (N=135), salient shared humanity with a human norm of benevolence and kindness preserved the perceived legitimacy of intergroup inequality, while exposure to a hostile norm of human nature reduced perceived legitimacy. Expt 2 (N=51) replicated the association between exposure to a hostile human norm and reduced legitimization when perpetrator intentions were unambiguously negative. In contrast, when perpetrator intentions were ambiguous, a hostile human norm had no effect on perceived legitimacy. Our findings qualify previous research, and demonstrate that the effects of emphasizing shared humanity are not equivalent or universally positive for perpetrators and victims.
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Human Rights in Social Science Textbooks: Cross-national Analyses, 1970-2008
John Meyer, Patricia Bromley & Francisco Ramirez
Sociology of Education, April 2010, Pages 111-134
Abstract:
In reaction to the disasters of the first half the 20th century and World War II, a dramatic world movement arose emphasizing the human rights of persons in global society. The contrast-celebrated in international treaties, intergovernmental and nongovernmental organizations, and much cultural discourse-was with narrower world emphases on the rights of citizens of national states. Since the 1970s, this movement has increasingly emphasized the importance of human rights education as central to sustaining human rights principles. This article examines the rise of human rights themes in secondary school social science textbooks around the world since 1970, coding data on 465 textbooks from 69 countries. The authors find a general increase in human rights discussions, especially since 1995. Human rights receive less emphasis in history texts than in civics or social studies ones, and there is less human rights emphasis in books that discuss national, rather than international, society. Human rights emphases are associated with the pedagogical student-centrism of textbooks: The proactive student is a rights-bearing student. Finally, a number of indicators of national development and especially political culture show positive effects on human rights emphases. These findings broadly support the arguments of institutional theories that the contemporary "globalized" world is one in which the standing of the participatory and empowered individual person has very great legitimacy.
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"We Are People": Ingroup Humanization as an Existential Defense
Jeroen Vaes, Nathan Heflick & Jamie Goldenberg
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, May 2010, Pages 750-760
Abstract:
Prior research has shown the importance of humanness in shaping one's social identity, but no research has examined why this is the case. The present article reveals that humanizing the ingroup serves a terror management function. In 3 studies, Italian (Studies 1 and 2) and American (Study 3) participants humanized their own group more when their mortality was salient. In Study 3, humanizing the ingroup also functioned to reduce the accessibility of death thoughts. Together, these studies provide clear support for terror management theory as an explanatory framework for ingroup humanization.
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Dana Birnbaum, Inas Deeb, Gili Segall, Adar Ben-Eliyahu & Gil Diesendruck
Child Development, May/June 2010, Pages 757-777
Abstract:
Two studies examined the inductive potential of various social categories among 144 kindergarten, 2nd-, and 6th-grade Israeli children from 3 sectors: secular Jews, religious Jews, and Muslim Arabs. Study 1 - wherein social categories were labeled - found that ethnic categories were the most inductively powerful, especially for religious Jewish children. Study 2 - wherein no social category labels were provided - found no differences across sectors either in the inductive potential of ethnic categories or in children's capacity to visually recognize social categories. These results stress the importance of labels and cultural background in children's beliefs about social categories. The implications of these findings for accounts of the development of social essentialism are discussed.
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Catherine Lee
Sociological Forum, June 2010, Pages 248-271
Abstract:
Race too often is used as the explanatory variable for understanding immigration exclusion, marginalizing the significance of race making, ethnic differentiation, and gender construction in particular. This article explores these processes by examining exclusionary policies implemented against Chinese and Japanese immigrants from the mid-1870s to 1924, the year the National Origins Act was passed. Politicians, intellectuals, and moral reformers used a gendered logic - the construction of idealized gender norms, roles, and sexual propriety and the attachment of these meanings to male and female bodies - to distinguish Japanese immigrants from the Chinese immigrants they followed, allowing for ethnic differentiation and dissimilar policies. The convergence toward exclusion rested on a racialized logic - the construction and attachment of inferior status and meanings to immigrant groups through discourse, formal and informal categorization, or social closure - which claimed that the Japanese were unassimilable and racially undesirable like the Chinese. Exclusionists focused on the immigrant women, decrying their sexual and gender impropriety as evidence of the groups' threats to the sanctity of white families, which imperiled the nation. Gender and race both mattered in these logics and their meanings were constructed as their salience interconnected.
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Cultural values and outgroup negativity: A cross-cultural analysis of early and late adolescents
David Schiefer, Anna Möllering, Ella Daniel, Maya Benish-Weisman & Klaus Boehnke
European Journal of Social Psychology, June 2010, Pages 635-651
Abstract:
Based on Schwartz' theory of cultural values, the present research tested whether the level of outgroup negativity among adolescents is influenced by the preferred values shared by the individual's cultural group. Furthermore, it was expected that this correspondence increases during adolescence, due to (individual and social) identity development in that age period. Measures of cultural values as well as derogatory attitudes towards outgroups were administered to young (age 9-12) and older (age 15-18) adolescents in Germany (Native Germans, Turkish and Former Soviet Union immigrants) and Israel (Native Israelis, Former Soviet Union immigrants, Arab Israelis). Data were analysed on both the individual and the group level. Results confirm the hypothesis that cultural values are associated with outgroup negativity, especially for the culture-level value dimension of hierarchy versus egalitarianism. Both the degree to which a cultural group prefers one value and the degree to which the individual accepts this value for itself are influential for the level of outgroup negativity. On both levels of analyses, our data show that the relationship between the culture-level value dimension of hierarchy versus egalitarianism and outgroup negativity is stronger among older compared to younger adolescents. Our data imply that the cultural context an individual lives in needs more attention when examining origins of outgroup negativity among adolescents. Furthermore, it is argued that relationships between outgroup negativity and relevant predictors undergo crucial changes during adolescence.
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Human Rights and Public Opinion: From Attitudes to Action
Shareen Hertel, Lyle Scruggs & Patrick Heidkamp
Political Science Quarterly, Fall 2009, Pages 443-459
"Our results contain at least three significant findings. First, there is a much higher acceptance of a minimum standard of living as an inviolable right among Americans than is commonly assumed. There is also a high willingness to pay for ethically produced goods. This implies that the relative neglect of economic rights in American public policy discourse is out of step with what the average American citizen believes about such rights. Second, privileged groups are more likely to support some sorts of rights over others. White males, for example, are much more likely to support a human right to freedom of thought and expression than to support freedom from torture and a right to minimum guaranteed standard of living. These findings contradict the notion that more-privileged groups tend to be less enthusiastic about human rights overall. Third, we find that there is a weak connection between support for economic rights and willingness to pay more for ethically produced goods."
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Civil liberties and economic development
Ariel Benyishay & Roger Betancourt
Journal of Institutional Economics, September 2010, Pages 281-304
Abstract:
Skepticism prevails among a substantial number of economists over a possible connection between civil liberties and the level of economic activity. Until now, empirical research on economic growth has found mixed evidence on the influence of civil liberties. Disaggregation of the Freedom House Civil Liberties Index allows a fresh empirical look at the effect of human rights on long-term growth or economic development. Our results show that one of the four subcategories of the index outperforms all available indicators of property rights institutions in explaining long-term economic growth. This subcategory, Personal Autonomy and Individual Rights, captures the level of second generation human rights that affect the mobility of individuals with respect to housing, employment and university education, as well as the level of protection of property rights. This result is robust with respect to reverse causation, important omitted variables such as geography and human capital, as well as to a variety of sensitivity tests. We also discuss in our conceptual framework how civil liberties work as an indicator of the prevalence of the rule of law and how the latter affects growth or development as an essential public input.
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Micro-Situational Antecedents of Violent Atrocity
Stefan Klusemann
Sociological Forum, June 2010, Pages 272-295
Abstract:
This article presents an analysis of video recordings showing micro-situational events that preceded the 1995 Srebrenica massacre in which more than 7,000 Bosnian-Muslim men were killed by troops of the Bosnian Serb Army. The article focuses on the sequential unfolding of micro interactions and emotional dynamics that preceded the atrocity. Micro interactions constitute situational turning points toward, or away from, atrocities. Even if there are preplanned plots or macro-structural background conditions that lead particular persons to be motivated to commit violence, a micro-situational, emotional momentum is needed for atrocities to occur. The article brings together the analysis of video material of violent situations with Ekman's research tools for emotional cues and Collins's micro-sociological theory of violence.
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Economic Rents and State Repression: Evidence from the Indonesian Occupation of East Timor
David Yanagizawa
Stockholm University Working Paper, January 2010
Abstract:
Basic political economy theory suggests that the level of state repression and human rights abuses increases with economic rents associated with the government. I test this prediction by exploiting a natural experiment from the Indonesian occupation of East Timor. Shortly after the Indonesian invasion in 1975, the government imposed a coffee monopoly in East Timor that required all coffee farmers to sell their produce, at domestically fixed prices, through a private company closely associated with the Indonesian army. This created economic rents when the company resold the coffee in the international coffee market. I use quarterly, district-level, data on human rights violations and international coffee prices during the monopoly period to test whether increased monopoly rents increased civilian killings by the Indonesian army. The paper exploits variation in international coffee prices, and test whether price shocks increase civilian killings more in coffee-producing districts than in non-coffee producing districts. The preliminary results show that there was a positive and significant increase in killings due to coffee price shocks. Furthermore, there is no effect on killings after the monopoly was abolished. The evidence therefore suggests that the killings were driven by the rents associated with the coffee monopoly.