How to Human? Don't call people NPCs

I want to reopen the conversation about nonplayable characters for a moment, because if you’re interested in How to Human, using the term NPC might interest you as something you really don’t want to do.

In case your media bubble didn’t cover NPC’s or nonplayable characters, the term originally referred to video game characters wandering around in the background. While playable characters are controlled by a person who moves them through the game, NPCs don’t respond thoughtfully to their surroundings because no human is directing them.

If you’re at all familiar with public discourse in America, you see where this is going.

Source: Miko Vesper

Calling someone an NPC in real life is a way of saying they’re not fully a human being. And the temptation to believe that other humans don’t have the same rich, fully developed inner life that we do is actually a big problem.

Very few of us would call other people vermin, or rodents, or animals. That’s dehumanizing and most normal people don’t want to dehumanize other people. Dehumanization is contrary to the most basic principles of relating to others.

But, suggesting someone is slightly less than human is far more common. We might say someone is robotic. We might think of groups of people as interchangeable with each other or indistinguishable from one another. We might feel that they aren’t really bothered or upset when something bad happens to them.

So when we jokingly call someone an NPC, because it’s funny to imagine that they’re mindlessly drifting through their life with no one in the driver’s seat, what we’re doing is dehumanization-lite. Researchers call this infra-humanization, and it creeps into our thinking about talking about other people.

In fact, in laboratory research, while most participants won’t endorse the idea that another person is actually a cockroach or snake (i.e., dehumanization), they will readily agree that another person doesn’t experience as many emotions as they themselves do (i.e., infra-humanization).

It’s much more common to engage in infra-humanization of people we dislike. And that’s why it’s been so troubling to see the rise of NPC in political conversations. Because it suggests that members of the other political party aren’t fully human like us. And if they’re not fully human, they won’t be bothered by severe and frightening penalties for breaking the law. Harming the other side isn’t a big deal, because it doesn’t really bother them.

Any time we suggest, no matter how subtly, that someone lacks the qualities that make humans uniquely human, it’s a stepping stone to full-on dehumanization. Dehumanization has preceded ethnic violence in countless contexts, including Nazi Germany, Rwanda, Cambodia, and Darfur, just to name a few.And if you think that can’t happen here, I hope you’re right.

But if it becomes easy to dismiss other people’s worries, fears, pain, and outrage, then it’s easy to stand by while they are harmed. And it’s easy to support policies, laws, and executive orders that harm other people as well as the politicians who enact them.

We don’t need full-bore dehumanization to have a problem. We have one already when we’re comfortable treating other people like they’re not quite as human as we are. That’s why NPC has concerned me. It’s not just another meme or a trend. It’s a signpost on the road to a place we don’t want to go.

How to Human? Step one is to treat other people like they are every bit as complex, flawed, multifaced, and emotionally rich as you are. (Yes, even members of Congress.)