Humanising the self: Attributing humanness to self and others

Haslan, N. and Bain, P. (2006) Humanising the self: Attributing humanness to self and others. In: 35th Annual Meeting of the Society of Australasian Social Psychologists (SASP), 20-23 April 2006, Canberra, Australia.

Abstract

Research on interpersonal comparisons shows that people tend to judge themselves to be ‘better than average”. Our own woi-k indicates that people also tend to see themselves as embodying humanness better than others. This ‘self-humanising” effect appears to be robust, and is independent of self- enhancement. Three studies will be presented that attempt to clarify the processes that underpin the new effect. We show that people see themselves as more human than others in part because they attribute greater depth to themselves than to others, because they tend to focus more attention on themselves than on others, and because they represent others more abstractly than themselves. By implication, subtle forms of dehumanisation occur in everyday interpersonal perception, and not just in intergroup contexts of conflict and violence.

Item Type:	Conference Item
Murdoch Affiliation(s):	School of Psychology
Publisher:	The Australian Psychological Association
Copyright:	The Authors
URI:	http://researchrepository.murdoch.edu.au/id/eprint/22527

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