Dogs are nice. Antipathy is not.

Humans can be ruff on each other.

I am biased.

I am a dog person.

I am a volunteer at the Philadelphia Animal Welfare Society (PAWS), which involves doing shifts giving the dogs in the kennel some time outside with a person and, in the past, I have fostered dogs for the organization. Some of them—plus my sister’s dog, Gimlet—are pictured here.¹

‘Tis better to have fostered and adopted out than never to have fostered at all.

I love a good dog.

Actually, I also love a bad dog. Probably my favorite dog I fostered was a little fellow named Ocean, though I renamed him Bixby. (Renaming dogs is a perk of fostering, as long as the dog is relatively young.) Bixby had a disorder called pica, which means that he would eat anything—and I mean anything—he could get his jaws on. When I first got Bixby as a foster pup, he had just had surgery to remove items from his digestive tract. Anything.

I managed to keep Bixby safe until he was adopted by hiding away everything in my house that was not nailed down, but not before there was an Incident. Bixby also, for whatever reason, was deathly afraid of loud noises. One day when he and I were out for a walk, I was nearly home when the train by my house started to move, creating a loud metallic clang. Neither I nor Bixby had been expecting it and he was, in a word, terrified. Like lightning, he bolted toward the safety of my house. Unfortunately, I was just taking a step from the curb and—I take responsibility for this—the tug on the leash was so hard that he dragged me off of the sidewalk, twisting my ankle into an unnatural position. I managed to hobble home, but I couldn’t walk without crutches for three weeks.

He didn’t mean it. I still loved the guy. I miss him.

Bixby is sad.

Empathy

I’m going to tell you about some fascinating research that gets much less attention than it should. I have a bias here as well: I served on the dissertation committee of the author, Katrina Fincher.

Fincher’s work used a clever technique known as the facial inversion effect. (You might have come across this in the context of the so-called Margaret Thatcher illusion²) The facial inversion effect refers to a phenomenon in human perception such that it is more difficult to recognize faces when they are turned upside down than when they are right side up. Crucially, this difficulty is not as pronounced when other objects are inverted. The explanation for this effect is that humans are experts at processing faces in their upright orientation because this is how we usually see them. We tend to perceive individual features (like eyes, nose, mouth) in relation to the overall structure of the face: we use what is called “configural processing.” When a face is inverted, this holistic processing is disrupted, leading us to rely more on the less efficient feature-by-feature analysis. This effect adds to the evidence that face perception in humans is specialized: we do not perceive faces just by the sum of their individual parts but through a complex holistic process that is sensitive to orientation.

Fincher used this technique in an exceptionally clever way, turning the effect, well, on its head. She reasoned that if you show subjects a stimulus and they don’t show the effect—that is, they are just as good at recognizing the object upside-down as upside-up—then that is evidence that they don’t see the stimulus as a person but instead see the stimulus as more of an object.

In her dissertation reporting on eighteen studies, Fincher used this logic to ask some profound questions. Suppose you are shown a face and told that the person was convicted of a crime. Some have argued that this might lead to a process of “depersonalization,” so that now you see them more as an object than as a person. They are, to you, less than or perhaps not even human. In her first study, Fincher showed that this is exactly the case. If subjects learn that a particular person has violated a norm—convicted of stealing money, for example—the facial inversion effect for that person disappears. Using this low-level perceptual technique, she was able to show that we see thieves, in this example, as less than human.

Fincher then asks, from a functional perspective, why?³ She suggests that the reason we see norm violators more like objects is that dehumanization “functions to produce indifference towards harm.” That is, although humans are an empathic, cooperative species in certain contexts, when it comes to punishing people who violate norms—and individuals in rival coalitions—humans need to suspend seeing them completely as a person so that they can support harming others. And Fincher shows that’s exactly what happens: once you see someone as “bad” or “other,” you see them as less of a person. And once you see them as less of a person, you are more willing to punish them. 

As Fincher puts it, research suggests that “people (at least in affluent Western societies) are mostly reluctant intuitive prosecutors whose default reaction is to feel each other’s pain and who must switch that off to do their social duty and punish norm violators” (p. 28).⁴ Counteracting this default reluctance, dehumanization suspends empathy, facilitating harm.

Outgroups

In his classic book On Killing, Dave Grossman begins with the story of General Marshall’s fascinating and surprising discovery from interviewing soldiers who had seen battle in World War II. His findings, bolstered by a research team, were that “only 15 to 20 percent of the American riflemen in combat during World War II would fire at the enemy.” That’s not saying that only a fifth were in a position to fire. That’s saying that fraction fired given that they had an enemy that they could shoot at. In addition, and importantly: “Those who would not fire did not run or hide (in many cases they were willing to risk great danger to rescue comrades, get ammunition, or run messages), but they simply would not fire their weapons at the enemy” (pp. 3-4). In trying to explain this, Grossman writes that “there is within most men an intense resistance to killing their fellow man. A resistance so strong that, in many circumstances, soldiers on the battlefield will die before they overcome it” (p. 4).

But, of course, many do. Indeed, the study of dehumanization began because of its role in intergroup conflict. Early work in this area proposed that dehumanization played a key role in the holocaust, explaining how Germans were able to slaughter Jews.⁵ The propaganda of the time, of course, linked Jews and animal species, such as rats. Other researchers have suggested⁶ that dehumanization allows people to see others as falling outside the boundary of the normal rules of morality.

In short, according to these views, dehumanization is not just associated with norm violators. It applies to those we see as the outgroup, or the other.

And once we see others as less than human, we are not only less affected by seeing others’ suffering, we are willing to participate in it.

Unfortunately, the history of human evolution is a history of intergroup conflict and, very likely, warfare. While within-group cooperation is vital for individuals’ success, inter-group conflict was a tremendously powerful selection pressure over human evolutionary history, with the highest of stakes for fitness. Successful intergroup conflict requires harming other people, even though the work discussed above suggests that this is far from our natural inclinations.

There is strong evidence that humans have adaptations designed to kill, under certain circumstances.⁷ A key part of being able to kill is likely the removal of empathy, seeing another as less than human.

Other Routes to Harm

There are other reasons that harming other people might be adaptive. One reason is discussed above: humans are a punitive species. While there is some disagreement about why humans are inclined to punish norm-breakers, there is little doubt that we are. As Fincher’s work illustrates, to support punishment for norm violators, a first step is to strip our empathy for them.

A second reason that harming others might be adaptive is in the context of reciprocal exchange. As shown by models such as the well-known Prisoner’s Dilemma, punishing those who defect in repeated interactions is necessary to sustain cooperation. See Matt Ridley’s The Origins of Virtue for an accessible account.

A third reason is that humans are—unsurprisingly, given the way evolution by natural selection operates—competitive. These days competition rarely devolves into one-on-one physical combat, but, judging from history and our non-human relatives, it is likely that humans used violence to compete with others.

And, of course, humans occasionally must defend themselves from attack. Under these circumstances, suppressing any empathy for one’s attacker—which might not be as straightforward as one might think, given Grossman’s revelations above—might be required.

In short, there are any number of reasons that, over evolutionary time, it might have been adaptive to try to harm others.

It’s ruff out there.

Bixby un-coned.

Dogs vs. People

Bringing it all together, here is one way to think about the difference between dogs and people.

In our heads, we keep track of our relationships to others. Would you be willing to forgo a dinner party to take someone to the airport? This would probably only be true for close friends. How about lending a cup of flour? You’d probably do this for acquaintances. These values—how much of a cost would we endure to provide a benefit—help us make decisions when we have to choose among options.

My guess—I’m speculating more than usual here—is that for dogs, our “relationship tracker,” let’s call it, goes from zero to one. A score of one means I’d be willing to give my life for a dog, say. I would do quite a lot for Bixby, the little rascal. But if I were neutral toward a dog, then I’d assign a zero to my relationship with this hypothetical stranger dog.

However—and this is the core of my message here—my relationship never dips below zero. I, and I suspect many if not most people, do not ever wish any dog ill, even one that just sprained my ankle by dragging me off the curb.

Now, I don’t think this is a hard and fast rule. Steven King sets our relationship tracker to less than zero for Cujo. I mean, bad doggie.

Still, more or less, I think most of us most of the time have a positive relationship with dog welfare. We have sympathy for them. We feel their pain, and share it, at least metaphorically.

Now, our relationship to humans is not like this. Unlike our relationship to dogs, our relationship to humans can be negative. We can experience antipathy.

Why is this?

I think the explanation lies in the adaptive problems discussed above: humans are coalitional, moralistic, vengeful, and subject to attack.  

The coalitional element is a particularly distinctive trait. Members of our species can have a negative one relationship tracker for people we have never even met as long as we categorize them in the rival (hated) coalition.⁸ Empathy inhibits harming others, as illustrated even in the martial context of Marshall’s findings. Reciprocally, antipathy potentiates harming others.

This is one way to understand antipathy. It seems to measure how much benefit one would get for imposing harm on a specific other. In some cases, this might be because they are a rival. In other cases, it might be because they violated a rule. In many cases, it is because they are seen as a member of a rival group to your own. In each case, the benefit varies: improving your position, joining the punitive mob, harming the rival group and thereby earning status in your own, and so on. Antipathy is an emotion designed to motivate us to be horrible to other people, harming them, even killing them.

Unlike our relationship with dogs, which is generally either neutral or positive, we let our relationship with people go negative, sometimes very negative.

Antipathy is designed to get you to harm others.

(Before you experience antipathy or hate, it might be worth thinking about what you want to do with that emotion when you do.)

Conclusion

Antipathy is not as fun an emotion as satisfaction or the warm fuzzies. Still, it is part of the human repertoire. It measures the value of harming someone, whether because they are a rival, a norm-breaker, cheater, or a member of an enemy coalition and the emotion motivates harming them.

So, because that’s sad, I want to end on a positive note and get back to dogs.

Dogs play a special role in human life. Unlike nearly most other species, dogs have been artificially selected by humans. Dogs have the traits we want them to have. Many dogs truly are our best friends.

Dogs, unlike humans, cannot become our sworn enemies.

While our empathy switch for humans can be reversed and set to antipathy, the worst we ever feel about dogs is a setting of zero. The dial just doesn’t seem to go into negative territory.

Even if they drag you off a curb, sprain your ankle, and leave you hobbling on your big trip to visit South Africa, you still love them.

I mean, how could you not?

Maximally cute.

1. Two dogs in this image and Bixby have cones because it’s common for the animal shelter to need fostering right after a dog has had a procedure of some kind.

2. The Margaret Thatcher illusion builds on the facial inversion effect. In this illusion, a photo of a face, typically Margaret Thatcher’s, is inverted, and the eyes and mouth are also flipped right-side up within the inverted face. When viewed upside-down, the face appears relatively normal, even with the distorted features. However, when the image is turned right-side up, the grotesque distortion of the features becomes strikingly apparent. This demonstrates that our ability to process local features of faces depends heavily on their orientation within the overall facial structure. The illusion was first created by Peter Thompson in 1980 and highlights how our perception of facial features is context-dependent.

3. I mean, I was on her committee. It’s not surprising she was asking functional questions.

4. Yes, I read her dissertation.

5. Kelman 1973. Bar-Tal 2000

6. Opotow 1990

7. See Buss, The Murderer Next Door.

8. A post on coalitions, groups, and alliances is in the works. Watch this space!

REFERENCES

Bar-Tal, D. (2000). Shared beliefs in a society: Social psychological analysis. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Fincher, Katrina Marie, "Perceptual Dehumanization" (2015). Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations. Paper 1713.

Kelman, H. G. (1973). Violence without moral restraint: Reflections on the dehumanization of victims and victimizers. Journal of Social Issues, 29(4), 25-61.

Opotow, S. (1990). Moral exclusion and injustice: An introduction. Journal of Social Issues, 46(1),1-20.