The annual SXSW Festival was marred by controversy this week when a marketing company affixed wireless routers to homeless people to provide internet access to festival-goers. Critics said the plan—labeled a "charitable innovation experiment" by organizers—exploited the homeless and dehumanized them. Deplorable as the plan sounds, there is a deeper problem in the way people tend to perceive the homeless. As Nathan Hefleck of Psychology Today reports, neurological research conducted by RSF author Susan Fiske and other social psychologists has shown that people often view social "out-groups" as less than human:

[An] area of the brain called the Medial Prefrontal Cortex (mPFC) activates when people do things that involve perceiving and relating to other people, such as recognizing and distinguishing between faces and empathizing. These researchers hypothesized, however, that like objects such as tables, images of certain groups of people—the homeless—would fail to activate the mPFC.

This is exactly what they found. Images of all other groups besides the homeless activated the mPFC. This suggests that the homeless are not recognized as human relative to other groups. They actually are perceived, at least in this area of the brain, more like objects, such as tables.

Fiske elaborated on this finding in an interview with RSF Review last year:

Scorn is simply not paying attention and wishing the other away. Groups are scorned especially if they are low-status and not-us, such as homeless people and drug addicts. Poor people (regardless of ethnicity) and Latino immigrants are also seen this way. Scorn dehumanizes them and makes us neglect them.

What does it mean to 'dehumanize,' or perceive someone as less than human? In her RSF book Envy Up, Scorn Down, Fiske explained:

An article released by Social Forces indicates that voter identification requirements have a substantially negative impact on the voting of all groups except for Asians. Particularly strong negative effects are seen for Blacks and Hispanics: a decrease in voting by 18 percent and 22 percent respectively. Even Whites show dampened turnout associated with voter ID policies. Yet for Asians, strikingly, voter ID has the opposite effect, boosting turnout by nearly 30 percent. This is an intriguing instance in which Asian participation patterns markedly differ from that of other groups.

For More Information
• Press Contact: Courtney Coelho, Brown University
• Article Abstract

The authors of the article, Brown University Professor of Sociology, John R. Logan, Jennifer Darrah and Sookhee Oh, use national survey data in federal election years from 1996 through 2004 for this study to examine voter registration and voting. It shows that racial/ethnic disparities in socio-economic resources and rootedness in the community do not explain overall group differences in electoral participation. It contradicts the expectation from an assimilation perspective that low levels of Latino participation are partly attributable to the large share of immigrants among Latinos. In fact net differences show higher average Latino participation than previously reported. This research was sponsored by the Russell Sage Foundation.

More from RSF's U.S. 2010 Project
• Unauthorized Immigrant Parents: Do Their Migration Histories Limit Their Children's Education?
• Separate and Unequal: The Neighborhood Gap for Blacks, Hispanics and Asians in Metropolitan America
• How Changes in Employment, Earnings and Public Transfers Make the First Two Years of the Great Recession (2007-2009) Different from Previous Recessions and Why It Matters

The Foundation's U.S. 2010 project has released a new report on the major structural changes in the American economy between 1979 and 2010. Written by Harry Holzer and Marek Hlavac, the study includes data on labor market trends for the past decade and the Great Recession. Here are some of the report's main findings:

• In general, between 1979 and 2010, women and/or more-educated workers gained the most in earnings and employment while men and/or less-educated workers gained the least (or actually lost groundin some cases). Within these groups, workers at the top of the earnings distribution gained the most compared to those at the middle or bottom, reflecting dramatic increases in inequality.

• Dramatic decreases in employment in manufacturing and in production and clerical jobs, relative to higher and lower-paying categories, further reflect important structural shifts in the demand for labor. But significant employment growth in other industries (such as construction and health services) and occupations (such as technicians) indicate a still substantial middle of the job market exists for those with appropriate skills.

• Of the four recessions that occurred during these three decades, two were quite mild while the other two were quite severe – especially the Great Recession of 2008 and beyond. Very large increases in unemployment rates and durations have occurred in the recent downturn, and were experienced primarily by less-educated, younger and/or minority workers – who had already experienced relative declines in their earnings and employment over the past three decades.