Rethinking people's conceptions of mental life

Abstract

How do people make sense of the emotions, sensations, and cognitive abilities that make up mental life? Pioneering work on the dimensions of mind perception has been interpreted as evidence that people consider mental life to have two core components-experience (e.g., hunger, joy) and agency (e.g., planning, self-control) [Gray HM, et al. (2007) Science 315:619]. We argue that this conclusion is premature: The experience-agency framework may capture people's understanding of the differences among different beings (e.g., dogs, humans, robots, God) but not how people parse mental life itself. Inspired by Gray et al.'s bottom-up approach, we conducted four large-scale studies designed to assess people's conceptions of mental life more directly. This led to the discovery of an organization that differs strikingly from the experience-agency framework: Instead of a broad distinction between experience and agency, our studies consistently revealed three fundamental components of mental life-suites of capacities related to the body, the heart, and the mind-with each component encompassing related aspects of both experience and agency. This body-heart-mind framework distinguishes itself from Gray et al.'s experience-agency framework by its clear and importantly different implications for dehumanization, moral reasoning, and other important social phenomena.

Keywords: agency; animacy; folk theories; mind perception; social cognition.

Fig. S2.

Mean ratings of the 40 mental capacities for the two entities in studies 1–3. Participants responded on a scale from 0 (not at all capable) to 6 (highly capable). Error bars are nonparametric bootstrapped 95% CIs. Mental capacities are grouped according to their dominant factor loading in study 1: Items that loaded most strongly on factor 1 (body) are in red, on factor 2 (heart) are in blue, and on factor 3 (mind) are in green.

Fig. S3.

Mean ratings of the 40 mental capacities for all 21 entities in study 4. Participants responded on a scale from 0 (not at all capable) to 6 (highly capable). Error bars are nonparametric bootstrapped 95% CIs. Mental capacities are grouped according to their dominant factor loading in study 4: Items that loaded most strongly on factor 1 (body) are in red, on factor 2 (heart) are in blue, and on factor 3 (mind) are in green.

Fig. S1.

Factor loadings for the 40 mental capacities on the three rotated factors in study 1. Items that loaded most strongly on the body factor are in red; items that loaded most strongly on the heart factor are in blue; and items that loaded most strongly on the mind factor are in green. An interactive version is available online at rpubs.com/kgweisman/bodyheartmind_figureS1.

Fig. 1.

Mean ratings of the 40 mental capacities for a subset of the 21 entities in study 4. (Figs. S2 and S3 for mean ratings for the full set of entities in all studies.) Participants responded on a scale from 0 (not at all capable) to 6 (highly capable). Error bars are nonparametric bootstrapped 95% CIs. Mental capacities are grouped according to their dominant factor loading in study 1 (red: body; blue: heart; green: mind). Doing computations was the only item to load negatively on its dominant factor in any study (studies 1–3); in study 4, it loaded positively on its dominant factor (heart).