How Othering Is Manufactured And How To Reverse It

The term "othering" was introduced into social theory by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak in the 1980s, drawing on a lineage that includes Simone de Beauvoir's analysis of how "woman" is constructed as the Other in relation to a masculine norm, and Frantz Fanon's analysis of colonial subject formation. But the underlying dynamic the term describes is as old as human social organization.

Othering is the process by which a category of persons is defined as fundamentally different from, and typically lesser than, the defining group. The critical feature is not merely the recognition of difference — all social categorization involves that — but the implication of hierarchy and the reduction of the other's full humanity. The "other" is defined in relation to a norm that the defining group embodies; the other is the deviation, the exception, the problem case.

John Powell, director of the Othering and Belonging Institute at Berkeley, defines othering as "a set of dynamics, processes, and structures that engender marginality and persistent inequality across any of the full range of human differences based on group identities." Powell's framework is important because it insists that othering is not merely attitudinal — not just a matter of how people feel about each other — but structural. It is embedded in policies, institutions, built environments, and social arrangements that produce systematic inequality without requiring individual malice to operate.

This distinction is crucial. Most people think about othering as a problem of individual prejudice: person A harbors negative feelings toward group B. Individual prejudice is real and matters. But structural othering — the kind that produces differential outcomes across categories of people even in the absence of explicit discriminatory intent — is both more pervasive and more difficult to address. It is the kind that can persist indefinitely, reproduced by institutions and arrangements that few people consciously designed as othering mechanisms, and that many people actively believe are neutral or fair.

Othering is not spontaneous. It is produced and maintained through specific mechanisms, many of which operate invisibly because they are woven into the ordinary fabric of social life.

Categorical visibility. Othering requires that the boundary between the in-group and out-group be perceptible without sustained inquiry. This is why physical markers — skin color, facial features, dress, accent, hair — have historically been so central to othering processes. They make the category available at a glance, enabling the sorting to happen before individual encounter can complicate it. When natural visibility is insufficient, artificial markers are created: mandatory dress codes, legal distinctions, neighborhood segregation, institutional tracking. The visibility of the category is a precondition for the efficiency of the othering.

Essentialism. Othering requires that the differences associated with the out-group be located in the nature of the group rather than in the circumstances the group has encountered. This is the essentialist move — from "this is how things are for this group" to "this is what this group is." Essentialism is what makes othering feel like recognition rather than imposition. If the traits attributed to the out-group are just what that kind of person is, then the categorization is not a choice or a construction — it is an accurate reading of reality.

Susan Gelman's research on psychological essentialism demonstrates that children begin attributing essential, innate properties to social categories very early — before they have the conceptual sophistication to understand that social categories are constructed. The human mind has a strong default assumption that categories correspond to underlying essences. This default is adaptive for natural-kind categories (the category "tiger" really does correspond to an underlying biological reality) but misleading for social categories, which are constructed through history, power, and social practice. Essentialist assumptions about social categories are the cognitive glue that makes othering stick.

Norm asymmetry. Othering involves setting the in-group as the norm and the out-group as the deviation from it. The norm is unmarked — it doesn't need to be named or justified, it simply is the way things are. The deviation is marked — it needs to be explained, accounted for, managed. This shows up in language ("writers and women writers"), in institutional design ("standard" procedures that assume an unmarked subject), in media representation ("diverse" casts versus "regular" casts), and in everyday social interaction (the person who has to explain themselves, their presence, their needs).

Norm asymmetry means that the cost of the category falls asymmetrically. The out-group member is constantly reminded of their category membership — through othering language, through institutional structures that don't fit their needs, through the social experience of being marked. The in-group member can forget about group membership entirely for extended periods; their identity is not salient in the same way. This difference in salience and cost is one of the ways othering produces psychological effects even when it is not violent or dramatically expressed.

Institutional reproduction. The most durable othering is not maintained by individual attitudes but by institutional arrangements that produce differential outcomes across categories of people. Residential segregation, differential school funding, criminal justice disparities, healthcare inequities, hiring discrimination — these processes produce and reproduce the material conditions that the essentialist narrative then explains as natural. The circular logic is difficult to break: the out-group appears in statistics in ways that seem to confirm the essentialist story, and the essentialist story makes the statistics seem natural rather than structurally produced.

Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton's work on American apartheid demonstrates this dynamic with particular clarity in the case of residential segregation. Hypersegregation — the systematic spatial separation of Black Americans from white Americans in metropolitan areas — was produced by explicit policy choices (redlining, restrictive covenants, discriminatory lending), and it reproduces itself through the accumulated disadvantage that follows from decades of exclusion from wealth-building through homeownership, from under-resourced schools, from spatial isolation from employment networks. The segregation that people now often perceive as natural or voluntary is the product of processes that required sustained institutional effort to create and that continue to operate through structural inertia even after the explicit policies that created them were legally prohibited.

Media and narrative infrastructure. The stories circulated about out-groups — in entertainment, news media, political speech, and everyday conversation — maintain and reinforce othering regardless of whether individual consumers intend to perpetuate it. George Gerbner's cultivation theory documented how heavy television viewing shapes viewers' social reality in the direction of television's representations — and television's representations have consistently over-represented certain groups as criminals, as incompetent, as dependent, as other. The effect is cumulative, operating below the threshold of awareness, and it normalizes the othering frame even for people who would explicitly reject it if confronted with it.

Social media has added several new dimensions to the narrative infrastructure of othering. Algorithmic curation creates information environments in which each user is exposed primarily to content that confirms their existing priors, rarely encountering the humanizing counter-information that would complicate their out-group representations. The collapse of shared information environments means that different groups can inhabit radically different factual realities about the same out-group, with no mechanism for the differential to be resolved by shared experience.

Understanding othering requires engaging with the biological underpinnings of group identity and intergroup perception, not because biology excuses othering but because it explains why othering is so automatic and how it can be interrupted.

Henri Tajfel's social identity theory (1981), developed with John Turner, established that categorization into groups — even arbitrary groups with no history or real stakes — reliably produces in-group favoritism and out-group discrimination. The minimal group paradigm studies demonstrated this with striking parsimony: assign people to groups based on trivial criteria, give them no interaction within the groups, and they will still allocate resources more favorably to their in-group. The bias toward one's group is that fundamental.

The neural mechanism underlying this has been clarified by neuroimaging research. The distinction between in-group and out-group is processed rapidly and subcortically — below the level of conscious deliberation. The amygdala responds differently to in-group and out-group faces, and this differential response has been documented across racial categories. The rapidity of the neural distinction — occurring within milliseconds — means that conscious correction is always downstream of an automatic differentiation that has already occurred. This doesn't make othering inevitable — conscious processing can and does override automatic responses — but it does mean that undoing othering requires active effort rather than passive good intention.

David Amodio's research on implicit racial bias and the role of the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) in regulating automatic responses is relevant here. The ACC is involved in conflict monitoring — detecting when automatic responses conflict with conscious intentions — and it is the neural structure that enables deliberate override of automatic bias when the motivation and cognitive resources to do so are present. This means that the ability to counteract automatic othering depends on: (a) awareness that the othering is occurring, (b) motivation to counteract it, and (c) cognitive resources available for the override. Conditions that deplete cognitive resources — stress, time pressure, distraction — therefore increase the likelihood that automatic othering governs behavior.

Oxytocin is worth examining specifically in this context. Often framed as a straightforwardly prosocial molecule, oxytocin's effects on intergroup relations are considerably more complex. Carsten de Dreu's research demonstrated that oxytocin enhances in-group trust and cooperation while simultaneously increasing out-group derogation and defensive aggression. In one study, oxytocin administration made participants more likely to endorse sacrificing out-group members to protect in-group members in moral dilemma scenarios. The molecule optimized for in-group bonding — the same molecule that bonds mothers to infants, partners to each other — may also be a mechanism of intergroup hostility. Belonging and othering are, neurochemically, two sides of the same process.

The most rigorously supported intervention for reducing othering is intergroup contact under appropriate conditions. Gordon Allport's contact hypothesis (1954) proposed that contact between groups reduces prejudice when four conditions are met: equal status between groups in the contact situation, common goals, intergroup cooperation, and support of authorities, law, or custom.

Thomas Pettigrew and Linda Tropp's 2006 meta-analysis of 515 studies comprising 250,000 participants confirmed the basic finding: intergroup contact reliably reduces prejudice. The conditions Allport specified enhance the effect but are not strictly necessary for contact to produce some reduction. Even contact that does not perfectly satisfy all four conditions tends to reduce prejudice relative to no contact.

The mechanisms through which contact works include: reduction in anxiety about contact with out-group members; increased empathy; acquisition of individualizing information that contradicts stereotypes; and development of actual relationships across group lines. The anxiety-reduction mechanism may be primary: many people approach intergroup contact with elevated anxiety, which produces the defensive, guarded behavior that confirms rather than disconfirms negative expectations. Contact that reduces this anxiety — through positive experience, through familiar contexts, through structured cooperation — creates the conditions in which more accurate perception becomes possible.

Extended contact effects — knowing that in-group members have out-group friends, even without direct contact oneself — also reduce prejudice, though to a lesser extent than direct contact. This finding has implications for the role of media representation and social network structure in maintaining or reducing othering.

The limits of the contact hypothesis are also important to name. Contact between individuals does not straightforwardly address structural othering. A person can have warm, genuine relationships across group lines while supporting policies that perpetuate structural inequality affecting those same groups. And contact in unequal conditions — where one group is in a service role, for example — can reinforce rather than reduce hierarchy. The contact hypothesis specifies conditions because contact without those conditions can make things worse, not better.

Complementing contact as a mechanism for reversing othering is the expansion of who is included in one's moral imagination — the range of people whose suffering registers as real and whose interests count as legitimate.

Perspective-taking — the deliberate cognitive attempt to take the viewpoint of another person — has been shown to reduce implicit bias and increase prosocial behavior toward out-group members. Nicholas Epley's work on perspective-taking demonstrates that it is a learnable skill, not simply an innate capacity, and that the friction involved in genuine perspective-taking (as opposed to projection — imagining how you would feel in their situation) is what makes it genuinely de-othering. Real perspective-taking requires suspending your own framework long enough to actually encounter the logic of another person's experience.

Narrative is one of the most powerful vehicles for genuine perspective-taking. Reading fiction — particularly literary fiction that requires inhabiting a character's interior life — has been shown to increase theory of mind (the ability to understand that other people have mental states, experiences, and perspectives that differ from your own) and empathy. Kidd and Castano's research on reading literary fiction demonstrated improvements in theory of mind measures relative to reading non-fiction or popular fiction. The mechanism is the literary demand to inhabit a different consciousness from the inside, over an extended period, without the emotional distancing available in face-to-face contact.

Personal storytelling — testimony, memoir, the direct account of one's experience — is particularly powerful as a de-othering mechanism precisely because it does not permit the essentialist move. A specific person's account of their specific experience cannot be dismissed as generic; it has the texture of particularity that the othering frame depends on suppressing. This is why personal testimony from marginalized groups has historically been resisted, delegitimized, or ignored — and why platforms for such testimony are consistently contested.

John Powell's work frames the antidote to othering not as tolerance or inclusion — which still locate the norm elsewhere and invite the other to accommodate it — but as belonging. Belonging, in Powell's framework, means being recognized as part of the community whose interests and needs are intrinsic to the community's concerns, not conditional on conformity to the norm.

The distinction matters practically. Inclusion can coexist with othering: you can be included in an institution while its structures, culture, and assumptions continue to other you. Your presence is admitted; your full humanity is not. Belonging requires structural change, not just attitudinal adjustment — it requires that the institution or community be genuinely organized around the reality that many different kinds of people belong to it, not that one kind of person grants access to others.

This is a more demanding standard than tolerance, and it is the correct one. Tolerance — "I put up with you being here" — is still a form of hierarchy. It preserves the power of the tolerator and the contingency of the tolerated person's acceptance. Belonging means that the question of whether you're welcome is not open. It means the community has been built with your reality already taken into account.

At the personal level, belonging looks like relationships in which you do not have to manage your group identity — do not have to translate yourself, mask yourself, or brace for the moment when your group membership will be used against you. It looks like environments in which your particular way of being human is treated as a legitimate way of being human rather than a deviation that needs explaining.

Creating conditions for belonging — in families, workplaces, institutions, and communities — is the affirmative project that corresponds to the critical project of identifying and dismantling othering.

Reversing one's own othering is uncomfortable work that proceeds through stages. There is no shortcut.

Naming the categories. The first step is identifying which categories you use that carry hierarchical weight — which of your "us and them" distinctions involve not just difference but implicitly or explicitly ranked difference. This requires honesty that is embarrassing, because the categories are often ones that one would not endorse consciously. The categories are often not even about groups that feel distant; sometimes the most corrosive othering is between adjacent groups — between people of similar backgrounds who have developed different political identities, or between people of similar income who have landed on different sides of a moral line.

Tracing the installation. For each significant us-them division you hold, tracing where it came from is a useful exercise. Not because knowing the origin absolves you of responsibility for it — it doesn't — but because seeing that it was installed (by family dynamics, by media exposure, by neighborhood composition, by a particular experience at a formative moment) makes visible that it is not simple reality perception. It is a lens that was given to you. You can, with effort, choose a different one.

Contact with individuals. The research is consistent here: the most effective intervention is genuine encounter with specific people from the othered category. Not as a project, not as a charity, not as research — but as real contact with real people. This is uncomfortable because the othering has been making predictions about those people that the encounter will tend to disconfirm, and disconfirmation is cognitively and emotionally costly.

Expanding the circle of moral consideration. Exercises in perspective-taking and moral imagination — including deliberate consumption of memoir, testimony, fiction, and journalism that inhabits the interior lives of people from othered categories — expand the range of people whose suffering registers as real. This is different from information about those people. Information doesn't necessarily touch the empathy apparatus; lived-reality narrative often does.

Structural awareness. Moving beyond individual attitude change requires developing a structural lens — the ability to see how institutions and social arrangements produce differential outcomes across categories of people, independent of anyone's individual prejudice. This is harder, slower, and more politically contested than interpersonal work, but it is the level at which othering is most durable and most consequential.

The belonging commitment. The most demanding step is the commitment to building or contributing to environments where the people you have othered actually belong — not just are tolerated, not just are included when they fit — but belong in the sense that their humanity is not a question the environment is still working out. This requires changing something about the environment, not just about yourself.

Law 1 is "We Are Human." The entire premise is that recognizing our shared humanity — really recognizing it, not as a platitude but as a lived reality — is the foundation of everything. The manufacturing of othering is the primary mechanism by which that recognition is prevented. It does not matter that we share 99.9% of our DNA if we have built social, psychological, and institutional infrastructure that makes that fact invisible.

The promise of Law 1 is not naive. It does not say that if everyone just tried to see each other's humanity, all structural problems would dissolve. Structural problems are structural. They require structural solutions. But structural solutions require political will, and political will requires the kind of moral imagination that cannot survive systematic othering. You cannot sustain the effort required to dismantle unjust structures for people you have placed outside your circle of moral concern.

This is why understanding and reversing othering is not an optional personal-growth project. It is the prerequisite for any serious engagement with the project that Law 1 describes. The recognition of shared humanity has to precede and sustain everything else — the hard political work, the long institutional fights, the compromises and setbacks and grind.

If every person on this planet genuinely received this and said yes — yes, this person across from me is fully human, their suffering is real, their children matter as much as mine — the logic of world hunger breaks. The logic of preventable mass death from treatable disease breaks. Not because the resources suddenly appear, but because the will to do what has always been technically possible finally catches up to the possibility.

Othering is what stands between the world that is and the world that could be. Understanding how it is manufactured is the first step toward refusing to let it run on you.

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