Poor Mojo's Two Minute Hate

Long before pop culture turned "bitchin" into a synonym for cool, "bitch" was one of the more derogatory epithets you could hurl at a woman. Indeed, man’s best friend doesn’t fare well in the human vocabulary of hate: mongrel, cur, dog itself—they’re all common insults. And it’s not just canines: Pig, rat, cow, mule, ape—if you want to malign your enemy, borrow freely from the animal kingdom.
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Scientists are very interested in the ways we deny humanity to others, because this common tendency is the source of so much hate and violence in the world....sychologists Stephen Loughnan and Nick Haslam of the University of Melbourne decided to look behind overt insults to see if we do in fact malign others in a variety of ways, some more subtle than others. They hypothesized that, while animals and machines are both less than human, they are less than human in very different ways. That is, dogs and cows lack traits that are unique to humans, like high intelligence and moral sensibility, while androids and robots lack traits that form the foundation of “human nature”: warmth, flexibility, animation. They further predicted that some humans—like children and artists—tend to be associated with animals, lacking traits like civility and self-control. Others—say, businessmen—more typically lack openness and emotion; in our minds, they are more like robots.