From animal cruelty to interspecies social domination and authoritarianism: A theoretical review from social psychology

De la crueldad animal a la dominación social interespecie y el autoritarismo: una revisión teórica desde la psicología social

This article aims to present a contemporary theoretical debate, based on an extensive literature review, in the field of social and political psychology on the configuration of prejudice and interspecies domination —speciesism— and between human social groups, as well as its inevitable analytical overlapping. To this end, this text is divided into three sections. The first, as an introduction, presents pioneering research from the fields of psychology and criminology, which from the 1980s onwards began to study the relationship between cruelty to animals and interpersonal violence. In the second, the most relevant theoretical models for the study of speciesism are outlined, based on the Social Domination Theory, together with other relevant analytical categories such as: perpetration-induced traumatic stress, moral stress, and psychic numbing, which allow explaining psychosocial processes underlying speciesist violence. Finally, the masculinization of this type of violence and the mechanisms of genderization behind social domination are exposed..

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