Similarities and differences in concepts of mental life among adults and children in five cultures

Dimensions of wisdom perception across twelve countries on five continents

Wisdom is the hallmark of social judgment, but how people across cultures recognize wisdom remains unclear-distinct philosophical traditions suggest different views of wisdom's cardinal features. We explore perception of wise minds across 16 socio-economically and culturally diverse convenience samples from 12 countries. Participants assessed wisdom exemplars, non-exemplars, and themselves on 19 socio-cognitive characteristics, subsequently rating targets' wisdom, knowledge, and understanding. Analyses reveal two positively related dimensions-Reflective Orientation and Socio-Emotional Awareness. These dimensions are consistent across the studied cultural regions and interact when informing wisdom ratings: wisest targets-as perceived by participants-score high on both dimensions, whereas the least wise are not reflective but moderately socio-emotional. Additionally, individuals view themselves as less reflective but more socio-emotionally aware than most wisdom exemplars. Our findings expand folk psychology and social judgment research beyond the Global North, showing how individuals perceive desirable cognitive and socio-emotional qualities, and contribute to an understanding of mind perception.

Applicability of the Hebrew Bible to Post-traumatic Stress Disorder and Post-traumatic Growth

Since the new millennium, biblical scholars have begun to reread certain writings in the Hebrew Bible through the concepts of post-traumatic stress disorder and post-traumatic growth. Some scholars believe such a reading is legitimate, whereas others think it problematic, and still, others hold a midway perspective. This article argues for the midway, the position that accepts the applicability of the Hebrew Bible to today's psychological concepts but calls for caution. Because ancient Israelites reacted to traumatic events and distinguished the human mind from the body like modern people, it is reasonable to approach their thoughts and emotions in the Hebrew Bible through today's psychological concepts. However, the cultural differences between today's society and ancient Israelites in understanding and reacting to traumatic events should be considered.

Social-cognitive biases underlying the development of ableism

Disabled people are the largest minority group in the world. Like members of many minority groups, they face considerable prejudice and discrimination-known as ableism. Ableism reflects entrenched beliefs about what human bodies and minds should be like and a devaluation of individuals who deviate from that ideal. There is surprisingly little psychological science about ableism, and even less about its development. This chapter considers how social-cognitive biases evident in early childhood could contribute to its development. The chapter is structured around four biases: Prescriptive reasoning, promiscuous teleology, psychological essentialism, and the positivity bias. For each bias, we review foundational research about how it manifests in early childhood, speculate about its connection to ableism, and outline avenues for additional research. Understanding how social-cognitive biases contribute to the development of ableism is an important first step in efforts to equip children (and adults) with the tools to reject it.

Consciousness isn't "hard"-it's human psychology that makes it so!

Consciousness arguably presents a "hard problem" for scholars. An influential position asserts that the "problem" is rooted in ontology-it arises because consciousness "is" distinct from the physical. "Problem intuitions" are routinely taken as evidence for this view. In so doing, it is assumed that (i) people do not consider consciousness as physical and (ii) their intuitions faithfully reflect what exists (or else, intuitions would not constitute evidence). New experimental results challenge both claims. First, in some scenarios, people demonstrably view consciousness as a physical affair that registers in the body (brain). Second, "problem intuitions" are linked to psychological biases, so they cannot be trusted to reflect what consciousness is. I conclude that the roots of the "hard problem" are partly psychological. Accordingly, its resolution requires careful characterization of the psychological mechanisms that engender "problem intuitions."

Davinci the Dualist: The Mind-Body Divide in Large Language Models and in Human Learners

A large literature suggests that people are intuitive Dualists-they consider the mind ethereal, distinct from the body. Furthermore, Dualism emerges, in part, via learning (e.g., Barlev & Shtulman, 2021). Human learners, however, are also endowed with innate systems of core knowledge, and recent results suggest that core knowledge begets Dualism (Berent, 2023a; Berent et al., 2022). The resulting question, then, is whether the acquisition of Dualism requires core knowledge, or whether Dualism is learnable from experience alone, via domain-general mechanism. Since human learners are equipped with both systems, the evidence from humans cannot decide this question. Accordingly, here, we probe for a mind-body divide in Davinci-a large language model (LLM) that is devoid of core knowledge. We show that Davinci still leans towards Dualism, and that this bias increases systematically with the learner's inductive potential. Thus, davinci (which forms part of the GPT-3 suite) exhibits mild Dualist tendencies, whereas its descendent, text-davinci-003 (a GPT-3.5 model), shows a stronger bias. It selectively considers thoughts (epistemic states) as disembodied-as unlikely to show up in the body (in the brain). Unlike humans, GPT 3.5 categorically rejected the persistence of the psyche after death. Still, when probed about life, GPT 3.5 showed robust Dualist tendencies. These results demonstrate that the mind-body divide is partly learnable from experience. While results from LLMs cannot fully determine how humans acquire Dualism, they do place a higher burden of proof on nativist theories that trace Dualism to innate core cognition (Berent, 2023a; Berent et al., 2022).

What We Can Learn About Emotion by Talking With the Hadza

Emotions are often thought of as internal mental states centering on individuals' subjective feelings and evaluations. This understanding is consistent with studies of emotion narratives, or the descriptions people give for experienced events that they regard as emotions. Yet these studies, and contemporary psychology more generally, often rely on observations of educated Europeans and European Americans, constraining psychological theory and methods. In this article, we present observations from an inductive, qualitative analysis of interviews conducted with the Hadza, a community of small-scale hunter-gatherers in Tanzania, and juxtapose them with a set of interviews conducted with Americans from North Carolina. Although North Carolina event descriptions largely conformed to the assumptions of eurocentric psychological theory, Hadza descriptions foregrounded action and bodily sensations, the physical environment, immediate needs, and the experiences of social others. These observations suggest that subjective feelings and internal mental states may not be the organizing principle of emotion the world around. Qualitative analysis of emotion narratives from outside of a U.S. (and western) cultural context has the potential to uncover additional diversity in meaning-making, offering a descriptive foundation on which to build a more robust and inclusive science of emotion.

How to Tell a Dualist?

People exhibit conflicting intuitions concerning the mind/body links. Here, I explore a novel explanation for these inconsistencies: Dualism is a violable constraint that interacts with Essentialism. Two experiments probe these interactions. In Experiment 1, participants evaluated the emergence of psychological traits in either a replica of one's body, or in the afterlife-after the body's demise. In line with Dualism, epistemic (i.e., disembodied) traits (e.g., knowing the contrast between good/bad) were considered more likely to emerge (relative to sensorimotor/affective traits) only in the afterlife. However, so were innate traits (in line with Essentialism). To further gauge Essentialism, Experiment 2 presented the same traits to innateness judgments. Here, sensorimotor/affective (i.e., embodied) traits were considered more likely to be innate, suggesting that innateness intuitions are informed by embodiment. Moreover, innateness judgments (in Experiment 2) and embodiment intuitions (in Experiment 1) correlated. These results suggest that Dualism tacitly constrains reasoning about one's innate origins and its persistence after death. But since Dualism is "soft" and interacts with Essentialism, supernatural intuitions are chimeric, not purely ethereal.

Biology, Society, or Choice: How Do Non-Experts Interpret Explanations of Behaviour?

Explanations for human behaviour can be framed in many different ways, from the social-structural context to the individual motivation down to the neurobiological implementation. We know comparatively little about how people interpret these explanatory framings, and what they infer when one kind of explanation rather than another is made salient. In four experiments, UK general-population volunteers read vignettes describing the same behaviour, but providing explanations framed in different ways. In Study 1, we found that participants grouped explanations into 'biological', 'psychological' and 'sociocultural' clusters. Explanations with different framings were often seen as incompatible with one another, especially when one belonged to the 'biological' cluster and the other did not. In Study 2, we found that exposure to a particular explanatory framing triggered inferences beyond the information given. Specifically, psychological explanations led participants to assume the behaviour was malleable, and biological framings led them to assume it was not. In Studies 3A and 3B, we found that the choice of explanatory framing can affect people's assumptions about effective interventions. For example, presenting a biological explanation increased people's conviction that interventions like drugs would be effective, and decreased their conviction that psychological or socio-political interventions would be effective. These results illuminate the intuitive psychology of explanations, and also potential pitfalls in scientific communication. Framing an explanation in a particular way will often generate inferences in the audience-about what other factors are not causally important, how easy it is to change the behaviour, and what kinds of remedies are worth considering-that the communicator may not have anticipated and might not intend.

The "Hard Problem of Consciousness" Arises from Human Psychology

Consciousness presents a "hard problem" to scholars. At stake is how the physical body gives rise to subjective experience. Why consciousness is "hard", however, is uncertain. One possibility is that the challenge arises from ontology-because consciousness is a special property/substance that is irreducible to the physical. Here, I show how the "hard problem" emerges from two intuitive biases that lie deep within human psychology: Essentialism and Dualism. To determine whether a subjective experience is transformative, people judge whether the experience pertains to one's essence, and per Essentialism, one's essence lies within one's body. Psychological states that seem embodied (e.g., "color vision" ∼ eyes) can thus give rise to transformative experience. Per intuitive Dualism, however, the mind is distinct from the body, and epistemic states (knowledge and beliefs) seem particularly ethereal. It follows that conscious perception (e.g., "seeing color") ought to seem more transformative than conscious knowledge (e.g., knowledge of how color vision works). Critically, the transformation arises precisely because the conscious perceptual experience seems readily embodied (rather than distinct from the physical body, as the ontological account suggests). In line with this proposal, five experiments show that, in laypeople's view (a) experience is transformative only when it seems anchored in the human body; (b) gaining a transformative experience effects a bodily change; and (c) the magnitude of the transformation correlates with both (i) the perceived embodiment of that experience, and (ii) with Dualist intuitions, generally. These results cannot solve the ontological question of whether consciousness is distinct from the physical. But they do suggest that the roots of the "hard problem" are partly psychological.

Socially intelligent machines that learn from humans and help humans learn

A hallmark of human intelligence is the ability to understand and influence other minds. Humans engage in inferential social learning (ISL) by using commonsense psychology to learn from others and help others learn. Recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) are raising new questions about the feasibility of human-machine interactions that support such powerful modes of social learning. Here, we envision what it means to develop socially intelligent machines that can learn, teach, and communicate in ways that are characteristic of ISL. Rather than machines that simply predict human behaviours or recapitulate superficial aspects of human sociality (e.g. smiling, imitating), we should aim to build machines that can learn from human inputs and generate outputs for humans by proactively considering human values, intentions and beliefs. While such machines can inspire next-generation AI systems that learn more effectively from humans (as learners) and even help humans acquire new knowledge (as teachers), achieving these goals will also require scientific studies of its counterpart: how humans reason about machine minds and behaviours. We close by discussing the need for closer collaborations between the AI/ML and cognitive science communities to advance a science of both natural and artificial intelligence. This article is part of a discussion meeting issue 'Cognitive artificial intelligence'.

The Affective Domain, Safety Attitude, and COVID-19 Prevention of Employees in the Petrochemical Industry

The petrochemical industry is relatively strict regarding safety rules in the workplace. The workplace involves high-risk categories that are intolerant of human error. Especially in the current situation with COVID-19, concerns regarding prevention and safety in the workplace have increased. In light of this pandemic, the company must know whether all employees recognize the implementation of COVID-19 prevention. In addition, employee awareness of safety grounded in the affective domain of human thought is lacking. This study investigates the safety attitudes and COVID-19 prevention in the workplace based on the affective domain of employees. A survey questionnaire based on the Likert scale was utilized to collect data from 618 employees in the petrochemical industry. Descriptive analysis and analysis of variance were used to examine the data. The results reveal that employees in the petrochemical industry have a positive degree of responses to COVID-19 prevention, safety attitudes, and the affective domain, regardless of employment characteristics such as gender, age, position, and work experience. This study concludes that a positive affective domain of employees is followed by a positive safety attitude; thus, effective COVID-19 prevention was established in the workplace based on the perspectives and attitudes of the employees.

The illusion of the mind-body divide is attenuated in males

A large literature suggests that people are intuitive Dualists-they tend to perceive the mind as ethereal, distinct from the body. Here, we ask whether Dualism emanates from within the human psyche, guided, in part, by theory of mind (ToM). Past research has shown that males are poorer mind-readers than females. If ToM begets Dualism, then males should exhibit weaker Dualism, and instead, lean towards Physicalism (i.e., they should view bodies and minds alike). Experiments 1-2 show that males indeed perceive the psyche as more embodied-as more likely to emerge in a replica of one's body, and less likely to persist in its absence (after life). Experiment 3 further shows that males are less inclined towards Empiricism-a putative byproduct of Dualism. A final analysis confirms that males' ToM scores are lower, and ToM scores further correlate with embodiment intuitions (in Experiments 1-2). These observations (from Western participants) cannot establish universality, but the association of Dualism with ToM suggests its roots are psychological. Thus, the illusory mind-body divide may arise from the very workings of the human mind.

Belief changes associated with psychedelic use

BACKGROUND

Psychedelic use is anecdotally associated with belief changes, although few studies have tested these claims.

AIM

Characterize a broad range of psychedelic occasioned belief changes.

SURVEY

A survey was conducted in 2374 respondents who endorsed having had a belief changing psychedelic experience. Participants rated their agreement with belief statements Before and After the psychedelic experience as well as at the time of survey administration.

RESULTS

Factor analysis of 45 belief statements revealed five factors: "Dualism," "Paranormal/Spirituality," "Non-mammal consciousness," "Mammal consciousness," and "Superstition." Medium to large effect sizes from Before to After the experience were observed for increases in beliefs in "Dualism" (β = 0.72), "Paranormal/Spirituality" (β = 0.90), "Non-mammal consciousness" (β = 0.72), and "Mammal consciousness" (β = 0.74). In contrast, negligible changes were observed for "Superstition" (β = -0.18).). At the individual item level, increases in non-physicalist beliefs included belief in reincarnation, communication with the dead, existence of consciousness after death, telepathy, and consciousness of inanimate natural objects (e.g., rocks). The percentage of participants who identified as a "Believer (e.g., in Ultimate Reality, Higher Power, and/or God, etc.)" increased from 29% Before to 59% After." At both the factor and individual item level, higher ratings of mystical experience were associated with greater changes in beliefs. Belief changes assessed after the experience (an average 8.4 years) remained largely unchanged at the time of survey.

CONCLUSIONS

A single psychedelic experience increased a range of non-physicalist beliefs as well as beliefs about consciousness, meaning, and purpose. Further, the magnitude of belief change is associated with qualitative features of the experience.

Socially evaluative contexts facilitate mentalizing

Our ability to understand others' minds stands at the foundation of human learning, communication, cooperation, and social life more broadly. Although humans' ability to mentalize has been well-studied throughout the cognitive sciences, little attention has been paid to whether and how mentalizing differs across contexts. Classic developmental studies have examined mentalizing within minimally social contexts, in which a single agent seeks a neutral inanimate object. Such object-directed acts may be common, but they are typically consequential only to the object-seeking agent themselves. Here, we review a host of indirect evidence suggesting that contexts providing the opportunity to evaluate prospective social partners may facilitate mentalizing across development. Our article calls on cognitive scientists to study mentalizing in contexts where it counts.

Over-reliance on English hinders cognitive science

English is the dominant language in the study of human cognition and behavior: the individuals studied by cognitive scientists, as well as most of the scientists themselves, are frequently English speakers. However, English differs from other languages in ways that have consequences for the whole of the cognitive sciences, reaching far beyond the study of language itself. Here, we review an emerging body of evidence that highlights how the particular characteristics of English and the linguistic habits of English speakers bias the field by both warping research programs (e.g., overemphasizing features and mechanisms present in English over others) and overgeneralizing observations from English speakers' behaviors, brains, and cognition to our entire species. We propose mitigating strategies that could help avoid some of these pitfalls.

Evidence of the unidimensional structure of mind perception

The last decade has witnessed intense interest in how people perceive the minds of other entities (humans, non-human animals, and non-living objects and forces) and how this perception impacts behavior. Despite the attention paid to the topic, the psychological structure of mind perception-that is, the underlying properties that account for variance across judgements of entities-is not clear and extant reports conflict in terms of how to understand the structure. In the present research, we evaluated the psychological structure of mind perception by having participants evaluate a wide array of human, non-human animal, and non-animal entities. Using an entirely within-participants design, varied measurement approaches, and data-driven analyses, four studies demonstrated that mind perception is best conceptualized along a single dimension.

Porosity Is the Heart of Religion

When scholars and scientists set out to understand religious commitment, the sensation that gods and spirits are real may be at least as important a target of inquiry as the belief that they are real. The sensory and quasisensory events that people take to be the presence of spirit—the voice of an invisible being, a feeling that a person who is dead is nonetheless in the room—are found both in the foundational stories of faith and surprisingly often in the lives of the faithful. These events become evidence that gods and spirits are there. We argue that at the heart of such spiritual experiences is the concept of a porous boundary between mind and world, and that people in all human societies have conflicting intuitions about this boundary. We have found that spiritual experiences are facilitated when people engage their more porous modes of understanding and that such experiences are easier for individuals who cultivate an immersive orientation toward experience ( absorption) and engage in practices that enhance inner experience (e.g., prayer, meditation). To understand religion, one needs to explore not just how people come to believe in gods and spirits, but how they come to understand and relate to the mind.

Ethics and the 2018 Practice Guideline on Disorders of Consciousness: A Framework for Responsible Implementation

The 2018 practice guideline on disorders of consciousness marks an important turning point in the care of patients with severe brain injury. As clinicians and health systems implement the guideline in practice, several ethical challenges will arise in assessing the benefits, harms, feasibility, and cost of recommended interventions. We provide guidance for clinicians when interpreting these recommendations and call on professional societies to develop an ethical framework to complement the guideline as it is implemented in clinical practice.

Can we get human nature right?

Few questions in science are as controversial as human nature. At stake is whether our basic concepts and emotions are all learned from experience, or whether some are innate. Here, I demonstrate that reasoning about innateness is biased by the basic workings of the human mind. Psychological science suggests that newborns possess core concepts of "object" and "number." Laypeople, however, believe that newborns are devoid of such notions but that they can recognize emotions. Moreover, people presume that concepts are learned, whereas emotions (along with sensations and actions) are innate. I trace these beliefs to two tacit psychological principles: intuitive dualism and essentialism. Essentialism guides tacit reasoning about biological inheritance and suggests that innate traits reside in the body; per intuitive dualism, however, the mind seems ethereal, distinct from the body. It thus follows that, in our intuitive psychology, concepts (which people falsely consider as disembodied) must be learned, whereas emotions, sensations, and emotions (which are considered embodied) are likely innate; these predictions are in line with the experimental results. These conclusions do not speak to the question of whether concepts and emotions are innate, but they suggest caution in its scientific evaluation.