The essence of mind: A belief in mind-body dualism enables flexible mind-attribution to human and non-human entities, promoting both anthropomorphism and infrahumanization.

• Applicant: Dr. Matthias Forstmann
• Subject Area: Social Psychology, Industrial and Organisational Psychology
• Term: from 2016 to 2018
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 324325588

People use the information they acquire throughout their lives to form various lay theories about how the social and non-social world operate, and use these belief systems to guide their behaviors across a wide range of situations. Sometimes, these beliefs pertain to rather philosophical topics. For example, lay people differ in their explicit and intuitive beliefs about how minds relate to bodies, a notion that philosophers refer to as the mind-body problem. This variability in lay conceptions of mind-body relations was found to have important cognitive and behavioural consequences. For instance, drawing on the proposition that a dualistic view of mind-body relations is a quasi-necessary developmental by-product of learning to reason about others' mental states, recent work revealed that mind-body dualism causally predicts people's inclination to engage in conceptual and spatial perspective taking. In accordance with this seemingly universal nature of dualistic beliefs, recent work revealed that most adults share an intuitive understanding of minds being separate from bodies, regardless of their explicit beliefs: In a thought experiment, they spontaneously ascribed a greater retention of physical than of mental properties to an exact physical duplicate of a living being. Moreover, this tendency was strengthened under conditions of cognitive load or when primed with an intuitive thinking style, hinting at intuitive dualism being a default for most adults. However, if it is not physical in nature, the question remains how precisely people who explicitly or intuitively endorse the concept of mind-body dualism construe the mind, and what consequences this construal would have for social perception. The proposed research was designed to address these two questions. If a dualist perceives the mind to be non-contingent on a physical body, it may enable a more flexible ascription of minds to human and non-human entities. As a consequence, it should come easier to dualists to ascribe a mind to living or non-living entities that do not possess a human brain (anthropomorphism), as well as to deny human beings certain mental capacities despite the obvious presence of a human brain (infrahumanization). A second line of research will investigate whether people who endorse mind-body dualism indeed perceive the mind to be an immaterial substance or essence that is only attached to a physical body. To that end, employing a variety of measures and experimental manipulations, the studies will investigate whether dualists perceive mental states to adhere to the law of contagion in sympathetic magic, and whether they are more inclined to understand people's creations to constitute their 'extended self'. Both phenomena will be investigated separately and jointly in the present research proposal, both with regard to their relation to explicit and intuitive beliefs in mind-body dualism. Studies will employ correlational, experimental, and meditational designs.

• DFG Programme: Research Fellowships
• International Connection: USA
• Host: Dr. Paul Bloom