‘Our brains dehumanise homeless people’

What happens to us when we walk past someone living rough on the streets?

Well firstly, I'll explain how our brains react when we meet someone who isn't homeless.

When we come across another person, two things usually happen. There is a visual perception; feature mapping, a basic perceptual process, where you figure out what it is you're seeing or encountering, such as 'that's a car, that's a tree' etc. Then, there's a second process that happens which is a consideration of what's on that person's mind. That's happening in a separate network – it's doing the cognitive heavy lifting, because when you think about it, it's not easy. You've never seen another person's thoughts, right?

And when we encounter someone sleeping rough our brains react differently?

That's right. What we have found from brain scans is that when you walk past a homeless person, that second process of trying to figure out what someone's thinking never gets going. We don't consider what is going on inside that person's mind. The network I just talked about is simply less engaged. Our brains dehumanise homeless people and that's a very rare, very unusual thing for our brains to do.

To underline how unusual it is, we humanise things that aren't human. We anthropomorphise our cats for instance and give them human feelings, we even do it with cartoons! 'Oh look, the ball is desperately chasing the square'. It's easy for us to imbue things with minds that don't have human minds. So given the ease and prevalence of this processing, what was really striking was witnessing people seeing a homeless person, and that process never even switching on.

How do you know this?

We've done a ton of research in the lab, with volunteers. If I put you in an fMRI machine, and have you just lying there, your mind will start wandering and what you're doing for the most of it is thinking about other people. We can see this from the parts of the brain that switch on. So, you'll lay there, and you may wonder something like, 'do I really need to meet this colleague for dinner? They're so annoying.'  We can see what part of the brain is working and not working. You'll have all these thoughts about other people because our brains are constantly examining our positions in social hierarchies and what other people might be thinking.

Do our brains continue doing regular brain stuff as we walk on by, past homeless people? Or do we try and figure out if they're friend or foe…

The part of the brain that's there for threat detection would usually trigger some consideration about what's on the other person's mind. But what we have found when people pass a homeless person is that they may have the threat response, but not the consideration about what's on their mind.

A threat response gives you the basic information you need to survive but we don't need to quite figure out what the other is thinking. When we look at the brain's response to a homeless person, we see the regions that detect threat engaged, but we also see those regions associated with disgust and interoception activated. It's uncomfortable to consider how someone on the street might be suffering, so it seems that one of the reasons our brains dehumanise them is an attempt to regulate empathic reactions.

When I was last in London, I was struck by how many more people are living on the streets. But if I was there every day, would my mind eventually switch to self-protection mode?

Yes, if you lived here, it would be impossible for you to be empathic constantly. Being empathic takes a toll on us, right? It requires us to resonate with someone's suffering, and that can be very unpleasant. It would be very difficult for you to get through the day if you didn't somehow regulate that response. So, to regulate it, you shut it down before it gets going.

We've done a lot of work recently looking at this process in other contexts. For instance, medical professionals see a lot of suffering. It turns out, they do something similar so that they don't burn out and they can continue to attend to people's needs. They look at people almost as broken machines rather than humans, because otherwise it triggers an overwhelming empathic response. You see the same thing with military personnel.

In some areas of work, we could say it's useful to be able to shut down the empathic response. With homelessness, is it more of a feeling of helplessness? 'I can't do anything about the situation, so I'll switch off?'

Exactly. We all know about the Bystander Effect; that the more potential helpers there are, the less like any individual is to help. We also know that if you feel like there's nothing you can do to help either financially, or with emotional resources, then you're also going to shut off.

We've been looking at how people's brains make predictions about what encountering someone will be like before they meet them. When you know you'll be in a situation where you may see a lot of homeless people, the brain stops processing these encounters to get by. There's no malicious intent… our brains are doing this for sensible reasons.

Sadly, there is still a narrative around homelessness as a 'lifestyle choice'. Does this play a part in what you're seeing?

Yeah, absolutely. We have a cultural narrative about homelessness, which certain politicians may exacerbate. And that matters, right? It matters for how we consider homeless people. They aren't treated the same way in every culture. I come from the Caribbean, and back there, homeless people are often well known. We know their names, we know their backstories, and they're not viewed in quite the same way.

People are much more likely to help when homeless people are still seen as part of the community. In Japan, it's similar. Japan has had so many natural disasters that most people know someone who was homeless at some point and the view of it is very different. In Western cultures, we tend to have a belief that you get what you work for, this idea that there are all these opportunities available and if you are destitute, you've something to do with it. But homelessness could happen to any of us.

We've also carried out studies where we tell people that someone is homeless because of addiction and looked at their brain reactions compared to when we tell them that they are homeless because of a series of unfortunate events. In the addiction condition, you're much more likely to dehumanise compared to the 'unfortunate events' condition. A belief about why people are homeless has a big part to play in it.

And then there's the extreme of the abuse of homeless people being on the rise in the UK…

Absolutely. Because if you're not considering someone suffering, then there's no suffering when you abuse someone, right? You can beat up an object as much as you like, and if you're seeing people as objects... 
This isn't a case of someone threatening the abuser's views, because again, they're just not considering what the victim is thinking. That's important to remember.

What really allows us to be good moral people is the fact that we consider others. Once I put myself in your shoes and think about what your experience is like, it's going to stop a bunch of behaviours I might engage with towards you. When you think about psychopaths, they're lacking the ability to feel the negative feeling that comes with doing something bad to someone.

How do we change our approach to homeless people?

What's remarkable to me is how easy it is to undo this view. When we first discovered the brain effect, where the social network was less engaged, we looked at how we could change that, and we did it with a very simple task. We showed people pictures of vegetables in a soup kitchen before we showed them pictures of homeless people.

We then asked the participants if they thought the person they were seeing would like the vegetable or not. So, they had to guess their preference. We also took people to soup kitchens and let them have conversations with homeless people. Afterwards, we'd scan their brains, and they didn't show the typical response of shutting off. We also did some work with the Museum of Homelessness where they hired actors to tell stories that homeless people had written about their lives, and once again, the brain's processes would get going again. It's highly flexible and it's remarkably easy.

Simple but effective, but how do you roll this out to the larger population?

The Museum of Homelessness is really changing the narrative. It's not about telling people to start donating, it's about people's real stories. But the museum suffers the same problem that I'm addressing, in that the people who go to that to see this stuff are the ones who are already interested. If you've known someone who has been homeless, or if you work with homeless people, you are much more likely to go. When I worked with the museum, I was amazed because everybody that came through the door was already predisposed towards thinking more positively about homelessness. The real challenge, which we haven't cracked, is how to get the rest of the public to engage.

Which will no doubt be quite a challenge…

Yes, it's difficult because we have these ideas about who people experiencing homelessness are, and we're often afraid, so we're not necessarily going to go out of our way to have a chat. But what really matters is the conversation, some eye contact, smiling and bandwidth, treating them like you would anybody else. Instead of giving money, have a chat, ask them what they would like? Say, 'Can I get you a coffee? How do you have it?' If you ask homeless people about the best part of their day, it's often when people recognise them and talk to them and treat them like humans. Because that's who they are.

Does having a simple answer, but at the same time not having the answer to how to implement this, make you feel powerless?

That's a great question. I tell people all the time, Psychology has figured out how to get rid of prejudice and discrimination, but how do we put it into action? There's not enough attention placed on homeless people and the problems they're experiencing. These are tough questions, and beyond my paygrade to be quite honest, but I do spend a lot of time talking to people that aren't psychologists – policymakers, non-profit organisations, human rights lawyers. That's what we have to do as psychologists, right?  If we have the answers, we must share them.

And if they are aware of the evidence, then potentially they can come up with solutions?

Absolutely. You can talk to people until you go blue in the face, but you can't make them do stuff, because they're not making their decisions necessarily based on what's best for everybody. But I think we have a responsibility as scientists to put our findings out there and not just to keep it for us, because who cares if we put it in a paper? That's why I always try to talk to the press, and I'm considering writing a book.

You started out as a journalism student before you moved into psychology so you should be well placed to write stuff that appeals to everyone!

I'm chatting with a publisher now. I think what I want to write about is how our perception of reality is very different from actual reality, and we don't always realise that. We have these ideas about people that are completely inaccurate, but we think they are correct. And that guides how we treat each other: dehumanisation and prejudice, the social ills that sometimes make us feel like we're slipping backwards and not making any progress. Which leads to all the problems as far as I'm concerned. If we could just find a way to see the world how it actually is, not how we think it is…