ABSTRACT
Susan T. Fiske discusses the stereotype content model, which explores varieties of dehumanizing prejudice that all deny other people their full humanity, diminishing them by reducing them to animals, robots, or objects. Each inflicts its own distinct damage. This chapter offers the stereotype content model as a framework for understanding this. As the chapter argues, cultures share knowable dimensions for differentiating societal groups. Among them are groups' status and interdependence (cooperation and competition). Groups' perceived place in the social structure then predicts their stereotype content; status predicts competence, and cooperation predicts warmth. The stereotype content model locates a society's perceptions of its groups in a warmth-by-competence space. For example, homeless people are allegedly neither competent nor warm (not trustworthy, sociable); they are dehumanized as disgusting and animalistic. Older people are seen as well-intentioned (warm) but incompetent; they are dehumanized as passive objects that evoke pity. Rich people are stereotypically competent but cold, enviable, yet evoking robots. Only the society's ingroup is fully human, both competent and warm. This chapter also describes the nature of current evidence for the model from surveys and lab experiments. Many examples come from the extreme outgroups, the most dehumanized. Having summarized what the model says about dehumanization, the next section addresses what alternative theories have to say, and comments on points of consensus about the two primary dimensions and their nature. The closing sections discuss implications for dehumanization and interventions to rehumanize its targets.
