Humanizing the dehumanized: A test of strategies

Abstract Homelessness affects approximately 13.5 million individuals in the United States across their lifetime and is strongly associated with debilitating health outcomes, including premature mortality. Despite these risks, unhoused individuals experience social stigma and reduced moral concern. In this study, we tested whether negative perceptions toward unhoused individuals can be modified, or erased, through a targeted intervention during functional neuroimaging. On 40 participants, our intervention increased prosocial attitudes toward the unhoused, corresponding to brain activity changes in regions involved in somato-affective processing, including the insula and opercular regions. Greatest intervention-related neural change in these regions was observed in individuals who showed the least prosocial inclinations at baseline. Among five tested strategies, emphasizing an individual’s similarity with the unhoused (self-similarity strategy) produced the strongest effect. Our findings reveal a plausible neural basis for humanization, identifying self-similarity as a scalable strategy to enhance societal cohesion.