Occurrences such as the Nazi Genocide during World War II and the African slave trade have led researchers to question whether or not human beings have the tendency to deem others as worthy or unworthy of moral treatment.
This is the type of thinking that spurred Morton Deutsch, Susan Opotow and Ervin Staub to investigate the processes of dehumanization and moral exclusion.
[citation needed] Susan Sutherland Isaacs, and other members of the object-relations school of psychoanalysis, set the stage for moral exclusion research with the theory that perceiving certain people as allies and others as enemies is intrinsic to human nature.
[7] This categorization of persons creates a marked distinction between good and bad, leading to the exclusion of those who are negatively perceived from the moral community.
[13] Moreover, Tajfel reported that individuals can be placed in an outgroup for any number of reasons, including (but not limited to), "ideology, skin color, age, and cognitive capacity.
These factors made it difficult to find conclusive results regarding research administrators as being negatively marked due to moral exclusion.
Leets' discussion in 2001 regarding moral exclusion and social justice was limited by the restricted population that was being sampled and the possibility for biases occurring within the self-report measures.
Initially, elevating ingroup and diminishing outgroup may occur in inconsequential ways, as demonstrated by Tajifel's minimal group paradigm.
Ordinary behaviors function as dynamic processes that shift cultural norms all the time; for example, American men used to wear top hats as part of everyday dress, but John F. Kennedy changed that.
[19] People change through their own actions; practicing new habits, seemingly trivial acts, gradually alter both an individual and a collective psyche.
Yet scholars now perceive adoption of this greeting as a seminal turning point in the most commonly known system of nefarious acts against a group of people.
Because individuals hold positions at various levels of corporate and governmental structures, the institutionalization of particular modes of thinking and behaving happens gradually.
When cultural norms shift toward exclusion of certain groups they can be rationalized; thereby granting legitimization of behavior into the collective consciousness.
In the middle of the model is the social cultural, informal group level interaction where behavior is either ignored or applauded which normalizes it or condemned and eradicates it.
At the top is the social structure, governments, corporations, and institutions that solidify and reify cultural norms through legislation and policy decisions.
Zionism is an ethno-nationalist ideology predicated on the belief that an extra-territorial population of Jews has a greater claim to the land than indigenous Palestinians.
Islamist and Palestinian nationalist organizations such as Hamas have also employed eliminationist rhetoric in reaction to the Nakba, Naksa, and continuing ethnic cleansing in Gaza.
In the central African states of Rwanda, Burundi and the Democratic Republic of Congo another territorial dispute over resources, land, and ethnic superiority is that of the Tutsi and Hutu peoples.
These students are actual U.S. citizens, but have been in danger of exportation or being denied the opportunity to go to school in the United States because they lack appropriate documentation.
Since the inmate uprising at Attica in 1971, prison reform has improved conditions, making this 1971 quote from The Nation, seem implausible to have happened in America.
According to them, pairing moral exclusion with these key areas provides a larger scope for and situates peace education as a grave topic warranting study and understanding by students of all ages.
Furthermore, Opotow and coauthors asserted that moral exclusion should be seen as a human factor, a capacity of every person, rather than its limited scope as malicious actions of certain aberrant people.
Citizens in the scope of the moral community have a responsibility to extend the circle of humanity and effect change through deliberately modifying norms.
Informal group level interaction, including undesirable labeling, marginalizing, or dehumanizing behavior can be redirected.
At the top is the social scaffolding of governments, corporations, and institutions that have the power to redistribute more equitable ideas, thereby solidifying nonviolence as a cultural norm.
Thirteen types of activism described by Roland Watson in 2005 are detailed by @lissnup (Anita Hunt) on her blog, with links to Twitter.