Forensic Research Archive of Manipulation and Exploitation
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Techniques · Classical

Name-calling

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Also called Ad hominem labeling, Loaded label

Attach a loaded label so the audience rejects the target without checking the claim.

The tell

The insult does the work; evidence is optional or arrives later as decoration.

Not this

Accurate naming of a documented crime or office.

History and effect

One of the seven devices the Institute for Propaganda Analysis named in 1937 to teach American students to recognize domestic and Axis propaganda alike. The move itself is far older — Roman political invective ran on the same logic — but the IPA gave it a teachable name.

It triggers immediate social rejection of the target: the audience discharges contempt or disgust before it ever gets to the underlying claim.

Lineage: IPA 1937

How it works

Name-calling starts with a choice of word. The sender picks a label that already carries a strong verdict in the audience's vocabulary ("traitor", "enemy of the people", "vermin", "criminal", a wartime epithet for a nation) and attaches it to a person, group or idea. The label does not describe a specific act that can be checked. It assigns the target to a category the audience has already learned to reject, so the verdict arrives with the word.

The second step is substitution. Where an argument would normally set out what the target did and why it matters, the label stands in for that whole chain. A poster that calls an army "the Hun" does not need to show what that army did in a particular town; a hashtag that calls a party "criminals" does not need to name a charge. If evidence appears at all, it tends to arrive afterwards and is selected to fit the label that has already been applied. The Institute for Propaganda Analysis described the device in exactly these terms: a bad name is given so that the audience condemns without examining the evidence (Lee and Lee 1939).

The third step is repetition and spread. A label becomes most effective once it is short enough to be repeated by people other than the sender: a slogan, a nickname, a chant, a hashtag. Each repetition makes the category feel more established, and the people repeating it do much of the distribution. The Matryoshka clips described in Matryoshka's midterm clips: borrowed faces and a borrowed logo show the modern version: a single hashtag sorting a whole party into a criminal category, pushed across many short videos, with no specific charge attached to any of the people named.

What the message depends on is a shared vocabulary of contempt. The label only works if the audience already treats the category as bad. That is why name-calling often borrows from existing fears (disease, dirt, animals, betrayal) and why the same word can be ineffective or even flattering with a different audience.

Why it works

The first mechanism is categorization. Gordon Allport, in The Nature of Prejudice (1954), argued that some labels act as "labels of primary potency": once a person is named by a category word, that word crowds out every other thing that is true about them. Social identity theory (Tajfel and Turner 1979) adds the group dimension. People sort others into in-groups and out-groups quickly and favor their own group even on trivial grounds, so a label that places the target in an out-group lets the audience reject them as a matter of group loyalty rather than judgment. FRAME's Learn library covers this in Social identity and In-group favoritism.

The second mechanism is dehumanization. Nick Haslam's review (2006) distinguishes labels that deny people uniquely human traits (likening them to animals) from labels that deny them warmth and feeling (likening them to machines or objects). Kteily and colleagues (2015) found that people willing to rate an out-group as less "evolved" on a simple scale were also more likely to support hostile policies toward that group. This research is correlational at its core, and whether dehumanizing language causes hostility or mainly expresses hostility that already exists is still debated. Yanagizawa-Drott (2014) estimated that reception of Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines (RTLM) in Rwanda increased participation in the 1994 killings, but estimates of that kind depend on modeling assumptions about radio coverage and should be read as an estimate, not a settled count.

The third mechanism is repetition. Hasher, Goldstein and Toppino (1977) showed that statements heard more than once are rated as more likely to be true, and Fazio and colleagues (2015) found that the effect persists even when people know the correct answer. A label repeated often enough starts to feel like a description. FRAME's Learn library covers this in Illusory truth effect.

Finally, name-calling works because it is fast. A label asks for no effort, while checking what it implies asks for a lot. The Elaboration Likelihood Model (Petty and Cacioppo 1986) predicts that when attention or motivation is low, people lean on simple cues rather than weighing arguments, and a label is one of the simplest cues there is.

Examples across eras and sides

  • "The Hun" (United States and Allied powers, 1914 to 1918). Allied propaganda in the First World War used "the Hun" as the standard epithet for German forces, an echo of Kaiser Wilhelm II's 1900 speech urging troops bound for China to fight like the Huns of old. The U.S. Treasury poster Beat Back the Hun with Liberty Bonds puts the single label over a bloodied, ape-like figure and asks for bond purchases on the strength of the name alone. Lasswell's study of wartime propaganda treated this kind of enemy labeling as a central tool of all the belligerents, not one side (Sources: Lasswell 1927).
  • "Enemy of the people" (Soviet Union, 1930s). During the purges of 1936 to 1938 the phrase vrag naroda was applied to officials, officers and ordinary citizens before and during their trials, and families of those labeled could be punished in turn. In his 1956 closed speech to the Twentieth Party Congress, Nikita Khrushchev criticized the term, saying it had made proof unnecessary (Sources: Conquest 1990).
  • "Ox demons and snake spirits" (China, 1966). On 1 June 1966 the People's Daily published an editorial calling for a sweep against "ox demons and snake spirits", a phrase from Buddhist and folk imagery that became a catch-all label for people targeted in the early Cultural Revolution. Teachers, officials and others were paraded under such labels at struggle sessions (Sources: MacFarquhar and Schoenhals 2006).
  • "Inyenzi" (Rwanda, 1990 to 1994). The extremist paper Kangura and the station RTLM repeatedly called Tutsi "inyenzi" (cockroaches) and linked them to the rebel Rwandan Patriotic Front. The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda examined this broadcasting and publishing in the "Media case" (Prosecutor v. Nahimana, Barayagwiza and Ngeze, judgment 2003). This is genocide-scale use of the technique and is not comparable in scale or consequence to the electoral examples below (Sources: Des Forges 1999; ICTR 2003).
  • GOPAC's word list (United States, Republican, 1990). A memo distributed by GOPAC, the political action committee then associated with Newt Gingrich, titled Language: A Key Mechanism of Control, advised Republican candidates to describe opponents with a list of "contrasting words" that included terms such as "sick", "pathetic", "corrupt" and "traitors". The memo treated these words as tools to be applied regardless of the specific opponent (Sources: GOPAC 1990).
  • "Basket of deplorables" (United States, Democratic, 2016). At a New York fundraiser on 9 September 2016, Hillary Clinton said that half of Donald Trump's supporters could be put in "the basket of deplorables", listing traits such as racism and sexism. She expressed regret for the "half" the next day and later wrote about the remark as a mistake. The phrase assigned a large group of voters to a single disqualifying category (Sources: Clinton 2017).
  • "Traitors abroad" (Iran, 2026). Iranian state media promoted the Alaj portal, which asked citizens to send in names of Iranians abroad it described as "anti-homeland", "separatist" and traitors, with penalties attached. The labels came before any named act or charge (see Alaj: the portal Iranian state media promoted for reporting 'traitors abroad').

How to spot it

  • The strongest word in the message is a category label, and it arrives before any specific act, date or document.
  • You cannot state what the target is accused of doing without repeating the label itself.
  • The label compares people to animals, vermin, disease or dirt, or places them outside the nation ("traitor", "enemy", "foreign").
  • The same label is applied to many different people with very different conduct.
  • The label is short enough to chant, print on a sign or use as a hashtag, and it is repeated far more often than any supporting evidence.
  • Evidence, if it appears, is thin compared with the size of the label, or turns up only after the audience has been asked to reject the target.

Where it ends: edge cases and legitimate persuasion

Named variants include the wartime epithet ("the Hun"), the political nickname, the dehumanizing metaphor (vermin, cockroaches, disease), the hashtag label, and guilt by association, where the target is labeled through a group they are said to resemble. Name-calling is the mirror image of Glittering generalities: one attaches a vague bad word, the other a vague good word, and both skip the evidence. It often opens the way for Scapegoating, which assigns blame for a complex problem to a labeled group, and for Accusation in a mirror, where the label describes what the sender plans to do. Euphemism / doublespeak runs the other way, softening a label for one's own side. When a label quietly changes the meaning of an established word, it overlaps with Semantic hijacking.

Not every negative word is name-calling. Calling a person convicted of fraud a "convicted fraudster" is accurate naming of a documented fact. Calling a military force by its legal name while describing documented actions is reporting. Strong language in opinion writing is also not automatically propaganda when the writer sets out the specific conduct being condemned.

The test a reader can apply has two parts. First, strip the label out and ask what specific, checkable claim remains; if nothing is left, the label was doing the work. Second, ask whether the sender would use the same word for someone on their own side who did the same thing. A label that is applied consistently to documented conduct is a description. A label that is applied to a category of people, before or instead of any evidence, is name-calling.

Sources

  • Allport, Gordon W. 1954. The Nature of Prejudice. Cambridge, MA: Addison-Wesley.
  • Clinton, Hillary Rodham. 2017. What Happened. New York: Simon & Schuster.
  • Conquest, Robert. 1990. The Great Terror: A Reassessment. New York: Oxford University Press.
  • Des Forges, Alison. 1999. Leave None to Tell the Story: Genocide in Rwanda. New York: Human Rights Watch.
  • Fazio, Lisa K., Nadia M. Brashier, B. Keith Payne, and Elizabeth J. Marsh. 2015. "Knowledge Does Not Protect Against Illusory Truth." Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 144(5): 993–1002.
  • GOPAC. 1990. Language: A Key Mechanism of Control. Memo distributed to Republican candidates.
  • Haslam, Nick. 2006. "Dehumanization: An Integrative Review." Personality and Social Psychology Review 10(3): 252–264.
  • Hasher, Lynn, David Goldstein, and Thomas Toppino. 1977. "Frequency and the Conference of Referential Validity." Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 16(1): 107–112.
  • International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. 2003. The Prosecutor v. Ferdinand Nahimana, Jean-Bosco Barayagwiza and Hassan Ngeze, Case No. ICTR-99-52-T, Judgement and Sentence, 3 December 2003.
  • Kteily, Nour, Emile Bruneau, Adam Waytz, and Sarah Cotterill. 2015. "The Ascent of Man: Theoretical and Empirical Evidence for Blatant Dehumanization." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 109(5): 901–931.
  • Lasswell, Harold D. 1927. Propaganda Technique in the World War. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
  • Lee, Alfred McClung, and Elizabeth Briant Lee, eds. 1939. The Fine Art of Propaganda: A Study of Father Coughlin's Speeches. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company (for the Institute for Propaganda Analysis).
  • MacFarquhar, Roderick, and Michael Schoenhals. 2006. Mao's Last Revolution. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
  • Petty, Richard E., and John T. Cacioppo. 1986. Communication and Persuasion: Central and Peripheral Routes to Attitude Change. New York: Springer-Verlag.
  • Tajfel, Henri, and John C. Turner. 1979. "An Integrative Theory of Intergroup Conflict." In The Social Psychology of Intergroup Relations, edited by William G. Austin and Stephen Worchel, 33–47. Monterey, CA: Brooks/Cole.
  • Yanagizawa-Drott, David. 2014. "Propaganda and Conflict: Evidence from the Rwandan Genocide." Quarterly Journal of Economics 129(4): 1947–1994.

Case studies

Then and now

In the collection

All 93 name-calling examples
"The British Lion's Vengeance on the Bengal Tiger" (Punch, 1857)"The British Lion's Vengeance on the Bengal Tiger" (Punch, 1857)Aug 22, 1857 · Name-calling"School Begins" (Puck, 1899)"School Begins" (Puck, 1899)Jan 25, 1899 · Name-calling, Glittering generalitiesContent noteGuerra Vaccino-Obrigateza! (Compulsory-Vaccination War!), O Malho cartoonGuerra Vaccino-Obrigateza! (Compulsory-Vaccination War!), O Malho cartoonOct 29, 1904 · Name-calling, TransferCold-Blooded Murder! Remember Germany's Crowning InfamyCold-Blooded Murder! Remember Germany's Crowning Infamy1915 · Card stacking, Name-calling, Fear appealZa naši samostatnost! Hrr na vraha! Za demokracii! Československá armáda (For our independence! Charge at the murderer! For democracy! Czechoslovak Army)Za naši samostatnost! Hrr na vraha! Za demokracii! Československá armáda (For our independence! Charge at the murderer! For democracy! Czechoslovak Army)1918 · Name-calling, Glittering generalitiesContent noteCalaveras: revelación de ultra tumba del espíritu de Francisco Villa (Skulls: Revelation from Beyond the Grave of the Spirit of Francisco Villa)Calaveras: revelación de ultra tumba del espíritu de Francisco Villa (Skulls: Revelation from Beyond the Grave of the Spirit of Francisco Villa)1923 · Name-calling, Card stackingAll the Ear-Marks of a Sneaky Jap!All the Ear-Marks of a Sneaky Jap!1943 · Name-calling, ScapegoatingContent note"Der Schutzpatron der Westberliner Spionageorganisation Lemmer": ADN photomontage"Der Schutzpatron der Westberliner Spionageorganisation Lemmer": ADN photomontageFeb 9, 1962 · Name-calling

In the watch briefs

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In campaigns

Related techniques

Glittering generalitiesTransferScapegoating