Dehumanization has been trending for decades. Here’s how. | Adam Waytz

This trend toward dehumanization over the past four or five decades manifests in four different pillars.

One is political polarization, where people from the left and the right ideologically are more pulled apart than ever before. They're more fractured, less likely to agree. We see this not only in the general populace, but amongst political representatives and the media as well. So there's more social distance between people from differing political parties.

The second pillar of dehumanization is simply income inequality, where there's a greater divide than ever before between the haves and the have nots, those from low socioeconomic status and those from higher socioeconomic status.

The third pillar is simply automation, whereby advanced technology means that we're fundamentally experiencing more mediated interactions, mediated conversations, that technology gets in between us or replaces tasks that humans used to perform. Things as simple as restaurant recommendations that you used to ask a friend for can now be outsourced online.

And the fourth component is marketization. What I mean by marketization is simply the idea that whereas in previous times, a lot of our interactions used to be built on simply norms of being a good citizen, now I think because there's a market for everything—Michael Sandel talks about this in his book—a market for even getting paying someone to stand in line for you to get Shakespeare in the Park tickets, or paying to get access to your doctor's home phone number, or paying, if you're a single occupancy vehicle, to get access to the carpool lane.

This means we fundamentally view each other in more market-based terms, more as commodities than as co-citizens...