Elaborating humanness: a direct comparison between mindful and mindless entities

Dehumanization is a well-known phenomenon in which people are perceived and elaborated as less than fully human. At the same time, it has widely been demonstrated how human beings are elaborated through different cognitive and neural processes compared with objects. Integrating both types of literatures, the current article proposes to study dehumanization as a fading of the human-object divide. Specifically, we introduce an innovative paradigm in which mindful human stimuli and perceptually similar mindless nonhuman entities are compared, demonstrating how these stimuli are elaborated more similarly when dehumanization can be expected. This approach opens up promising avenues to further our understanding of the underlying processes of dehumanization showing what really happens when humans are perceived as object-like.