If people favor their ingroup, are especially concerned with their own group, and attribute different essences to different groups, it follows that their essence must be superior to the essence of other groups. Intelligence, language, and certain emotions are all considered to be distinctive elements of human nature or essence. The role of inteligence and language in discrimination, prejudice, and racism has already been largely investigated, and this article focuses on attributed emotions. Specifically, we investigate the idea that secondary emotions are typically human characteristics, and as such, they should be especially associated with and attributed to the ingroup. Seondary emotions may even be denied to outgroups. These differential associations and attributions of specifically human emotions to ingroups versus outgroups should affect intergroup relations. Results from several initial experiments are summarized that support our reasoning. This emotional approach to prejudice and racism is contrasted with more classic, cognitive perspectives.

Emotion scientists often distinguish those emotions that are encountered universally, even among animals ( “primary emotions”), from those experienced by human beings ( “secondary emotions”). No attempt, however, has ever been made to capture the lay conception about this distinction and to find the criteria on which the distinction is based. The first study presented in this paper was conducted in three countries involving four languages, so as to allow for cross‐cultural comparisons. Results showed a remarkable convergence. People from all samples not only differentiated between “uniquely human” and “non‐uniquely human” emotions on a continuum, but they did so on the same basis as the one used by emotion scientists to distinguish between “primary” and “secondary” emotions. Study 2 focused on the implicit use of such a distinction. When confronted with a human (animal) context, participants reacted faster to secondary (vs primary) emotions. The implications of the human uniqueness of some emotions within the social and interpersonal contexts are discussed.

People tend to infra‐humanize by attributing more human essence to their in‐group than to out‐groups. In the present article, we focus on the attribution of primary and secondary emotions to operationalize the human essence. We propose that, in order to infra‐humanize, people need to be categorized in meaningful groups. In addition, we argue that what differentiates meaningful from nonmeaningful groups is that the people essentialize, perceiving members of the group as sharing an underlying, common essence. Also, we hypothesize that participants will identify more with their in‐group in the case of meaningful groups. Three types of groups were created to manipulate the meaningfulness of the categorization. Participants were either randomly assigned to a group or they chose their group as a function of their preferences for a colour or the type of career they wished to pursue. As expected, infra‐humanization occurred only where the categorization's criterion was meaningful. In addition, in‐group identification, but not essentialism, mediated the impact of the categorization criteria on the tendency to infra‐humanize. Data also showed that infra‐humanization is different from classic in‐group favouritism. This is because in‐group favouritism, but not infra‐humanization, was observed in the situation where group membership was based on random assignment. In other words, for infra‐humanization to occur mere categorization is not enough; meaningfulness is also needed. For in‐group favouritism to arise, the knowledge of being part of a group is a sufficient prerequisite. The discussion focuses on conditions for reducing infra‐humanization and on the relationship between in‐group favouritism and out‐group derogation.