Final Report Summary - JUSTICE_HUMANNESS (Infrahumanization:The Effects of Uniquely Human and Non-Uniquely Human Emotions on Justice)
Conclusions and socioeconomic impact of the project
The current project, which focused on intriguing social issues such as biased or even discriminatory judicial practices towards victimized outgroups attempts to reveal the importance of “human essence” and group membership (ingroup/outgroup) on judgmental processes, underlining the substantial role that “violation of human nature” plays in justice outcomes. The project showed that the characteristic that determines whether harm-doer is to be blamed or not, and whether harm-doer is to be punished or not, depends on whether the victim is ingroup or outgroup member as well as on whether the victim has experienced high or lower social value emotions (UH or NUH emotions). Although the current project did not directly examine issues related to intergroup relations in Europe, findings might indisputably generalize to political, social and economic issues that Europe faces nowadays (i.e. European economic crisis and “inhumane” measures applied to groups with decreased socio-economic power, refugees crisis and measures applied in order to provide help or in the opposite to marginalize refugees ets.).
It is believed that Europe, and mainly nations of European Union, might place much emphasis on how intergroup relations might improve. Considering the role of humanness and the ramifications that perceived violation of individuals‟ human essence causes may show Europe the way to propose viable solutions in future issues that will be respected and adopted by everyone no matter how hard they are. The timeliness as well as the importance of such issues in Europe render the current results very interesting.
Wider societal implications of the project
This project explored a very interesting and timely topic for Europe, that is the effects of experience of negative emotions of different social value (UH vs. NUH) by different group members (ingroups/outgroups) on preferences for administering justice. This is a really interesting topic especially for Europe, given the intense inter-group conflicts that have occurred the last years as a result of the economic crisis and the refugees issue. The project showed that justices cannot be administered in a really objective way, on the contrary it is biased by group membership and quality of emotions experienced by victimized groups. This rationale is implicitly close to the current intergroup issues that Europe faces, that is the conflict between Northern and Southern European nations, dominance orientation of strong and wealthy “humane” nations against weak nations and maltreatment of refugees, witnessing the unconscious infrahumanizing tactics involved. By detecting these implicit ways of marginalization of the outgroups, European Research Area is able to propose new ways of solving social phenomena linked to racism and discrimination.