Scholar research
Throughout this week, I took the time to try and find out how the homelessness dilemma was perceived by the academic community. Scholars have debated on whether policies that aimed to tackle the housing crisis were effective in aiding people without shelter. However, how are these policies thought of? Are they prejudiced is the manner we perceive the disenfranchised of our society?
In my first reading, Dehumanizing the Lowest of the Low, Harris and Fiske analyse how our perception of the homeless shape the policies put in place that affect them: "Extreme discrimination reveals the worst kind of prejudice: excluding out-groups from full humanity" (p.849). It is to be understood that our everyday interactions with homeless people ostracizes the from the society they live in, which takes away from their own sense of humanity. What would then separate the position of a homeless person to that of a stray dog? Hypothetically, our sense of empathy would be greater for a being that ressembles us to another that doesn't, would it not? To answer these questions, there needs to be scientific analysis of human psychology and how our brains are receptive of the homeless.
In their work, the aforementioned scholars lead an interesting piece of research which reveals that human psychology is inherently biased to how we view people in low-competence groups. Indeed, when presented with particular images that displayed people from low socio-economic backgrounds, blood-oxygen-level-dependant activations in our brains rose considerably. This is interpreted as an action from a brain alerting us of a person that is considered to be "undesirable" and therefore prejudiced in that sense.
As hypothesized, members of low socio-economic backgrounds seem to be dehumanized, especially the ones without shelter, as indicated by the absence of the typical neural signature for social cognition. Moreover, the exaggerated reactions from areas in our brain consistent with disgust (the amygdala and insula areas) highlight how we are predisposed to form our perceptions of the homelessness without even coming into contact with any of them.
The link to the full work of Harris and Fiske can be found at the following link: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2006.01793.x
- Zinedine
In my first reading, Dehumanizing the Lowest of the Low, Harris and Fiske analyse how our perception of the homeless shape the policies put in place that affect them: "Extreme discrimination reveals the worst kind of prejudice: excluding out-groups from full humanity" (p.849). It is to be understood that our everyday interactions with homeless people ostracizes the from the society they live in, which takes away from their own sense of humanity. What would then separate the position of a homeless person to that of a stray dog? Hypothetically, our sense of empathy would be greater for a being that ressembles us to another that doesn't, would it not? To answer these questions, there needs to be scientific analysis of human psychology and how our brains are receptive of the homeless.
In their work, the aforementioned scholars lead an interesting piece of research which reveals that human psychology is inherently biased to how we view people in low-competence groups. Indeed, when presented with particular images that displayed people from low socio-economic backgrounds, blood-oxygen-level-dependant activations in our brains rose considerably. This is interpreted as an action from a brain alerting us of a person that is considered to be "undesirable" and therefore prejudiced in that sense.
As hypothesized, members of low socio-economic backgrounds seem to be dehumanized, especially the ones without shelter, as indicated by the absence of the typical neural signature for social cognition. Moreover, the exaggerated reactions from areas in our brain consistent with disgust (the amygdala and insula areas) highlight how we are predisposed to form our perceptions of the homelessness without even coming into contact with any of them.
The link to the full work of Harris and Fiske can be found at the following link: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2006.01793.x
- Zinedine
The scholar I refer to in my post "Time for Re-Humanization", Perry Firth, analyzed the work of Harris and Fiske "Dehumanizing the Lowest of the Low" and came out with very significant conclusions. It is interesting to see how the two post are related.
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