TITLE:
Victims’ Dehumanization and the Alteration of Other-Oriented Empathy within the Immersive Video Milgram Obedience Experiment
AUTHORS:
Michaël Dambrun, Johan Lepage, Stéphanie Fayolle
KEYWORDS:
Dehumanization, Empathy, IVMOE, Torture, Crime of Obedience
JOURNAL NAME:
Psychology,
Vol.5 No.17,
November
24,
2014
ABSTRACT: Using the Immersive Video Milgram Obedience
Experiment (IVMOE; Dambrun & Vatiné, 2010), we studied
victims’ dehumanization and its underlying processes. Under the supervision of
the national service of security, participants were ordered to psychologically
weaken a person suspected of preparing an attack. We manipulated the ethnicity
of the victim and his terrorist membership. The doubly stigmatized victim (i.e.
a North African victim member of al Qaeda) was tortured more severely than the
other victims. We found some evidence that this effect was mediated by a
decrease in term of other-oriented empathy, but not by personal distress. These
results suggest that an empathy alteration process underlies dehumanization in
crimes of obedience perpetrated against members of extreme out-groups.