Identification With All Humanity as a Moral Concept and Psychological Construct
Abstract
Studies of those who rescued Jews during the Holocaust suggest that their most shared quality was a sense “of belonging to one human family” (Monroe, 1996, p. 205), caring deeply about human beings without regard for their race, religion, or other distinction. In this article, we first note the development of the concept of “one humanity” since the late 15th century, and then we summarize recent work with a new measure of that caring—the Identification With All Humanity Scale (IWAH). Research with the IWAH establishes that identification with all humanity is more than (a) an absence of prejudice and its sources and (b) the sum of positive qualities, such as dispositional empathy and principled moral reasoning. Many people appear to intuit that a mature moral person would identify with all humanity, even when they do not do so themselves. Finally, a brief discussion is offered of how identification with all humanity may develop or could be taught.
