Don’t worry, they get the idea: instructions have no impact on dehumanization ratings on the Ascent of Human Scale

Abstract

A common method for assessing blatant dehumanization asks participants to rate "how evolved" they think members of various social groups are using the Ascent of Human scale (AOH) that transitions in stages from a crawling ape to a fully upright modern human. However, little is known about how task instructions affect participant ratings. In this pre-registered study, participants saw alternative forms of instruction including the traditional instructions emphasizing “evolution”, a prompt without any reference to evolution, and a prompt that clearly explained that the scale assesses dehumanization. Instruction type had no effect on dehumanization ratings on the AOH scale. These results support the idea that the AOH scale is a robust means of assessing blatant dehumanization.

Keywords:

• Ascent of Human Scale
• blatant dehumanization
• instructions

Data availability statement

Data available on request due to privacy/ethical restrictions.

The data that support the findings of this study are available on request from the corresponding author, Devin L Johnson. The data are not publicly available due to the initial conditions of the ethics application for the studies in this article. Participants did not consent for their anonymous data to be publicly available.

Notes

1 The authors acknowledge a brief typo on the pre-registration for this study which mentions a 3 × 2 interaction term which is not accurate. The power analysis and subsequent model was based on a 3 × 6 Mixed ANOVA.

2 Furthermore, it is worth noting that we performed our primary analysis on a dataset that excluded participants who identified with an out-group on the AOH scale. Results reveal a similar pattern of results in terms of non-significant results presented in the results section.

3 Curiously we note from the results displayed in Figure 2 in our study that there exists variations in the distributions for ratings of the social groups across our prompt conditions. Specifically, there is a notable reduction in variance within the non-evolution prompt condition, in stark contrast to the substantial variances observed in the direct and regular prompt conditions. This disparity implies a potential scenario where individuals may not be utilizing the full extent of the 0-100 slider but, rather, appear to be anchored by the presence of the five silhouette images. Markowitz and Slovic (2021) have partially addressed this issue by restricting the range of numerical options to an 8-point slider. Nevertheless, further research is warranted to thoroughly investigate the extent to which respondents prioritize the visual aspect of the silhouettes over the granularity provided by the 0-100 slider.

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.