They say you are what you eat: Cognitive dissonance as a predictor of dehumanization

The present study will expand the literature on dehumanization by highlighting its relationship with cognitive dissonance. Smith (2011) refers to dehumanization as conceiving of people as subhuman creatures rather than as human beings. Viki and others (2006) conducted a study looking at the possibility of people assigning stimulus words, specifically animalistic and humanistic descriptors, differently between individuals in their ingroups and outgroups. They found that people seemed to associate humanness more with individuals within their ingroup than with individuals belonging to their outgroup. When a person violates a belief that we hold, we can feel the need to dehumanize them, to separate them from ourselves. People may then justify their behavior by modifying existing or adding new cognitive elements of their behavior to keep it consistent (Panagiotou & Kadianaki, 2017). For example, while we can justify the eating of animals quite easily, we become rather squeamish about the idea of eating another human. The present study will examine cognitive dissonance as a predictor of dehumanization of ones’ ingroup and outgroup. Specifically, we will be using cannibalism as our dehumanization factor.