A/75/179 disability-, age-, gender- or sexual orientation-related, religious or any other grounds related to discrimination of any kind. 67. Group-based psychological processes can lead in-group members to consciously or unconsciously exclude out-group members from the boundaries of their usual moral conduct (“circle of moral regard”). That process of dis -identification enables individuals to inflict suffering on out-group members without experiencing the moral dilemma associated with the same conduct directed against in-group members. Group-based discrimination and related moral disengagement can manifest on the micro level, with individuals being isolated, bullied or mobbed within tribes, families, professional teams, school classes and military units, and can extend up to the macro level of mass atrocities, such as race-based slavery, ethnic cleansing and genocide. 60 (a) Out-group dehumanization, denigration and indifference 68. One unconscious psychological mechanism of discriminatory infliction of harm is reduced empathy, such that the empathy-related brain activity of observers has been found to be reduced or even absent when witnessing the infliction of pain on members of other social groups. That neuro-emotional phenomenon is known as the “empathy gap” and has been demonstrated across a variety of social groupings, including race and nationality, and different varieties of pain, including electric shocks, facial expressions of pain, needles to the face or hands, being cut by broken glass or having genitals slashed by razor blades. 61 69. Reduced empathy for out-groups is associated with group-based dehumanization, involving a perception of the “other” as subhuman and less capable of human suffering. Group-based dehumanization has been linked to supporting torture of prisoners of war, perceiving torture as less morally wrong when perpetrated by one’s own versus another nation’s security forces and supporting impunity for the torture and killing of out-group civilians during war. Among men, sexual aggression and a proclivity for rape has been linked to associating women with animals and with dehumanizing women as spoils of war. 62 70. Out-group dehumanization is also employed as a defensive strategy, along with out-group victim-blaming, against the acknowledgement of collective wrongdoing. Citizens in settler-colonial nations, for example, have been found to dehumanize indigenous people after reading reminders of historical mass killings, and readers have been found to blame out-group torture victims and victims of hate crimes for their suffering. Victim-blaming appears to be particularly pronounced when crimes against minority groups go unpunished, driven partly by system -justifying motives to rationalize group-based injustices. 63 __________________ 60 61 62 63 20-09728 Susan Opotow, “Moral exclusion and injustice: an introduction”, Journal of Social Issues, vol. 46, No. 1 (1990), pp. 1–20; Susan Opotow, “How this was possible: interpreting the Holocaust”, Journal of Social Issues, vol. 67, No. 1 (March 2011), pp. 205–224. Matt Richins and others, “Empathic responses are reduced to competitive but not non-competitive outgroups”, Social Neuroscience, vol. 14, No. 3 (2019), pp. 345–358; Mark Tarrant and others, “Social identity and perceptions of torture: it’s moral when we do it”, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, vol. 48, No. 2 (March 2012), pp. 513–518. Nick Haslam, “Dehumanization: an integrative review”, Personality and Social Psychology Review, vol. 10, No. 3 (August 2006), pp. 252–264; G. Tendayi Viki, Daniel Osgood and Sabine Phillips, “Dehumanization and self-reported proclivity to torture prisoners of war”, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, vol. 49, No. 3 (May 2013), pp. 325–328; Adam Waytz and Juliana Schroeder, “Overlooking others: dehumanization by commission and omission”, Testing, Psychometrics, Methodology in Applied Psychology, vol. 21, No. 3 (September 2014), pp. 251–266. Emanuele Castano and Roger Giner-Sorolla, “Not quite human: infrahumanization in response to collective responsibility for intergroup killing”, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol. 90, No. 5 (June 2006), pp. 804–818; Alison Sullivan and others, “The impact of unpunished hate crimes: when derogating the victim extends into derogating the group”, Social Justice Research, vol. 29, No. 3 (September 2016), pp. 310–330. 21/25