| Summary: | At a superficial look, polarizing and even hateful types of discourse have grown more pronounced as of late, but scholars know little about the mechanisms that lead individuals to engage in such behavior or thinking. This dissertation project seeks to shed new light on the effects one such mechanism - dehumanization - has on a myriad of policy attitudes, both individual and immediate, and more systemic and long-term. Defined as the act of perceiving or treating people as if
they are less than fully human as a means of denying them a sense of individuality, autonomy, or dignity, dehumanization has significant implications for race relations, national identity, public opinion, polarization, and welfare, criminal justice and immigration policy, yet it remains an understudied phenomenon in political science, especially in the American political context. When it is studied, the focus is overwhelmingly on a. race and b. a specific subtype - animalistic
dehumanization. The first article of this dissertation offers some historical and political context and explores dehumanization's role in shaping narratives surrounding national identity and citizenship. The other two articles rely on original survey experiment data to find that animalistic dehumanization, as well as dehumanization by way of pathogen-threat and natural disaster metaphors have a significant and negative impact on policy attitudes surrounding immigration
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