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Two dimensions persist in social cognition when people are making sense of individuals or groups. The stereotype content model (SCM) terms these two basic dimensions perceived warmth (trustworthiness, friendliness) and competence (capability, assertiveness). Measured reliably and validly, these Big Two dimensions converge across survey, cultural, laboratory, and biobehavioral approaches. Generality across place, levels, and time further support the framework. Similar dimensions have emerged repeatedly over the history of psychology and in current theories. The SCM proposes and tests a comprehensive causal theory: Perceived social structure (cooperation, status) predicts stereotypes (warmth, competence), which in turn predict emotional prejudices (pride, pity, contempt, envy), and finally, the emotions predict discrimination (active and passive help and harm). The SCM uncovers systematic content and dynamics of stereotypes, which has practical implications.

To split these up over two very meagre issues of about 50 to 60 pages each would have been a pity, we thought. [...] in agreement with Cambridge University Press, we opted for one more substantial issue 17.3/4, containing yet again almost 200 pages, rather than two very thin separate issues.

This paper stakes out a space for a critical global disability anthropology that considers disability not as a medicalized classification of impairment but as a relational category. Disability expertise, I argue, is the particular knowledge that disabled people develop and enact about unorthodox configurations of agency, cultural norms, and relationships between selves, bodies, and the designed world. Disability expertise is a descriptive domain, that is, a container into which ethnographers might enumerate observations about how disabled people enact personhood and moral agency in diverse cultural settings. To illustrate what I mean by disability expertise, I draw examples from one interlocutor’s experiences, described in interviews conducted during broader ethnographic research in Russia. I elaborate one particular domain of disability expertise: managing perceptions of disability, especially the tendency of nondisabled people to view disability through the tropes of suffering and pity. I call for anthropologists to claim disability anthropology as a space for critical, interdisciplinary knowledge production.

PurposeSickle cell disease (SCD) is an inherited blood disorder characterized by unpredictable episodes of acute pain and numerous health complications. Individuals with SCD often face stigma from the public, including perceptions that they are lazy or weak tending to exaggerate their pain crisis, which can profoundly impact their quality of life (QoL).MethodsIn a qualitative phenomenological study conducted in Cameroon, Ghana, and Tanzania, we explored stakeholders’ perceptions of SCD-related stigma using three analytical frameworks: Bronfenbrenner’s Ecological Systems Theory; The Health Stigma and Discriminatory Framework; and A Public Health Framework for Reducing Stigma.ResultsThe study reveals that SCD-related stigma is marked by prejudice, negative labelling and social discrimination, with derogatory terms such as sickler, ogbanje (one who comes and goes), sika besa (money will finish), ene mewu (I can die today, I can die tomorrow), vampire (one who consumes human blood), and Efiewura (landlord-of the hospital), commonly used to refer to individuals living with SCD. Drivers of stigma include frequent crises and hospitalizations, distinct physical features of individuals living with SCD, cultural misconceptions about SCD and its association with early mortality. Proposed strategies for mitigating stigma include public health education campaigns about SCD, integrating SCD into school curricula, healthcare worker training and community engagement.ConclusionThe results highlight the importance of challenging stigmatizing narratives on SCD and recognizing that stigmatization represents a social injustice that significantly diminishes the QoL of individuals living with SCD.

The title of this article alludes to the famous novel by Stefan Zweig Ungeduld des Herzens (translated into English as “Beware of Pity”). The novel illustrates the destructive role that pity plays in our private life, but, as will be argued in the article, the role of pity can be equally destructive in public life. The first part of the article has a conceptual character – the distinction is made therein between two types of pity: (1) as “the heart’s impatience (Ungeduld des Herzens)” to “rid itself as quickly as possible of the painful experience of being moved by another person’s suffering (Stefan Zweig, Beware of Pity, p. 19)”; and (2) as a mixture of contempt towards the sufferer and increased sense of one’s own power. What these two types of pity have in common is that they are self-regarding, that is, not having as its ultimate aim the well-being of the suffering person, and in fact preserving distance to the sufferer. This feature distinguishes them from compassion – a truly other-regarding fellow-feeling with the sufferer. The second part of the article, inspired by Zweig’s novel, will trace the negative consequences of pity in our private lives. The third part will strive, first, to reconstruct Hannah Arendt’s argumentation (presented in her book On Revolution) for her critical evaluation of pity as a political emotion, and secondly, to develop it in some new directions (inter alia, drawing on the above distinction between two types of pity, which is absent in Arendt’s analysis). Finally, it will be argued that even though in private life empathy (broadly understood) does not have to take the form of pity (it often assumes the laudable form of compassion), it is almost bound to take the form of pity in political life. If this claim is true, it means that one needs to treat with much caution the oft-made postulates of increasing the role of ‘empathy’ in public life.

Several aspects of social psychological science shed light on how unexamined racial/ethnic biases contribute to health care disparities. Biases are complex but systematic, differing by racial/ethnic group and not limited to love–hate polarities. Group images on the universal social cognitive dimensions of competence and warmth determine the content of each group's overall stereotype, distinct emotional prejudices (pity, envy, disgust, pride), and discriminatory tendencies. These biases are often unconscious and occur despite the best intentions. Such ambivalent and automatic biases can influence medical decisions and interactions, systematically producing discrimination in health care and ultimately disparities in health. Understanding how these processes may contribute to bias in health care can help guide interventions to address racial and ethnic disparities in health.

In the Rhétorique de l’éloge L. Pernot elucidates the purposes of ekphrasis in speeches of praise, identifying them in the evocation of pleasant sensations or strong emotions (pity or indignation). In both circumstances the contribution of vividness (ἐνάρ-γεια) is important. This paper draws inspiration from the words of L. Pernot to link ἔκφρασις and διατύπωσις, often wrongly considered synonymous, to different purposes of description and to explain the word-image relationship in the rhetoric of social media.

Traditionally, prejudice has been conceptualized as simple animosity. The stereotype content model (SCM) shows that some prejudice is worse. The SCM previously demonstrated separate stereotype dimensions of warmth (low-high) and competence (low-high), identifying four distinct out-group clusters. The SCM predicts that only extreme out-groups, groups that are both stereotypically hostile and stereotypically incompetent (low warmth, low competence), such as addicts and the homeless, will be dehumanized. Prior studies show that the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) is necessary for social cognition. Functional magnetic resonance imaging provided data for examining brain activations in 10 participants viewing 48 photographs of social groups and 12 participants viewing objects; each picture dependably represented one SCM quadrant. Analyses revealed mPFC activation to all social groups except extreme (low-low) out-groups, who especially activated insula and amygdala, a pattern consistent with disgust, the emotion predicted by the SCM. No objects, though rated with the same emotions, activated the mPFC. This neural evidence supports the prediction that extreme out-groups may be perceived as less than human, or dehumanized.

In this paper we examine the contexts in which Thucydides uses the Greek terms οἶκτος and ἔλεος, commonly translated with ‘pity’ or ‘compassion’. The lexical analysis aims at identifying the role, both positive and negative, that compassion plays within the historical work. Through also a comparison with the contemporary tradition to the History of the Peloponnesian War, historiographical information about Thucydides’ thinking on Athenian imperialism will be provided. I will also highlight the logic used in war by the Athenian and Spartan armies.

Despite productive research on stigma and its impact on people’s lives in the past 20 years, stigmatization of people with pedophilia has received little attention. We conducted two surveys estimating public stigma and determining predictors of social distance from this group. In both studies, pedophilia was defined as a “dominant sexual interest in children.” The survey was comprised of items measuring agreement with stereotypes, emotions, and social distance (among others). Responses were compared with identical items referring to either people who abuse alcohol (Study 1), sexual sadists or people with antisocial tendencies (Study 2). Study 1 was conducted in two German cities ( N  = 854) and Study 2 sampled 201 English-speaking online participants. Both studies revealed that nearly all reactions to people with pedophilia were more negative than those to the other groups, including social distance. Fourteen percent (Study 1) and 28 % (Study 2) of the participants agreed that people with pedophilia should better be dead, even if they never had committed criminal acts. The strongest predictors of social distance towards people with pedophilia were affective reactions to this group (anger and, inversely, associated, pity) and the political attitude of right-wing authoritarianism (Study 1). Results strongly indicate that people with pedophilia are a stigmatized group who risk being the target of fierce discrimination. We discuss this particular form of stigmatization with respect to social isolation of persons with pedophilia and indirect negative consequences for child abuse prevention.