Dehumanization without antipathy: Subtle and blatant measures reveal a shared regulatory function.

Dehumanization, the perception of others as less than fully human, is widely invoked in discourse on ethnopolitical conflict. Yet its validity as a psychological construct has come under growing scrutiny. Critics have questioned its divergent validity, arguing it may merely reflect interpersonal and intergroup bias, and its convergent validity, given the proliferation of diverse and potentially unrelated measures. The present research speaks to both concerns by leveraging the context of contagious disease, which introduces motivational conflict between recognizing others' humanity and managing personal risk. Because contagious disease threatens friends and family as much as strangers, this context provides a stringent test of whether dehumanization operates independently of prejudice. It also enables a test of functional convergence: whether diverse dehumanization measures respond in parallel to a shared motivational input. Findings from six studies (N = 5,253) assessing four common operationalizations-blatant dehumanization, animalization, mechanization, and mind denial-support the construct's distinctiveness and its coherence. Contagion cues reliably elicited dehumanization, and this effect was not moderated by relational closeness: Perceived disease risk increased dehumanization equally for friends and family. Findings also support the construct's coherence: All four measures responded similarly to disease threat. Multilevel models treating the measure as a random effect revealed substantial shared variance across operationalizations. Together, these findings support the distinctiveness and coherence of psychological conceptions of dehumanization as a flexible regulatory mechanism. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).