Skip to main content
Kent Academic Repository

Changing minds about minds: Evidence that people are too sceptical about animal sentience

Leach, Stefan, Sutton, Robbie M., Dhont, Kristof, Douglas, Karen, Bergström, Zara M (2023) Changing minds about minds: Evidence that people are too sceptical about animal sentience. Cognition, 230 . Article Number 105263. ISSN 0010-0277. E-ISSN 1873-7838. (doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2022.105263) (KAR id:97554)

PDF Publisher pdf
Language: English


Download this file
(PDF/3MB)
[thumbnail of 1-s2.0-S0010027722002517-main.pdf]
Preview
Request a format suitable for use with assistive technology e.g. a screenreader
PDF Author's Accepted Manuscript
Language: English

Restricted to Repository staff only

Contact us about this Publication
[thumbnail of belief_updating_animals_MANU.pdf]
Official URL:
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2022.105263

Abstract

Our relationships with other animals are governed by how we view their capacity for sentience and suffering. However, there is currently little agreement as to whether people's beliefs about animal minds are largely accurate or inaccurate. We used an innovative task to examine how people update their beliefs in response to noisy but informative clues about animal minds. This allowed us to compare participants' posterior beliefs to what a normative participant ought to believe if they conform to Bayes' theorem. Five studies (four pre-registered; n = 2417) found that participants shifted their beliefs too far in response to clues that suggested animals do not have minds (i.e., overshooting what a normative participant ought to believe), but not far enough in response to clues that suggested animals have minds (i.e., falling short of what a normative participant ought to believe). A final study demonstrated that this effect was attenuated when humans were the targets of belief. The findings demonstrate that people underestimate animal minds in a way that can be said to be inaccurate and highlight the role of belief updating in downplaying evidence of animal minds. The findings are discussed in relation to speciesist beliefs about the supremacy of humans over animals.

Item Type: Article
DOI/Identification number: 10.1016/j.cognition.2022.105263
Additional information: For the purpose of open access, the author(s) has applied a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence to any Author Accepted Manuscript version arising.
Uncontrolled keywords: Mind attribution Speciesism Animals Bayesian updating
Subjects: B Philosophy. Psychology. Religion > BF Psychology
Divisions: Divisions > Division of Human and Social Sciences > School of Psychology
Funders: Leverhulme Trust (https://ror.org/012mzw131)
Depositing User: Robbie Sutton
Date Deposited: 23 Oct 2022 14:04 UTC
Last Modified: 06 Sep 2024 14:56 UTC
Resource URI: https://kar.kent.ac.uk/id/eprint/97554 (The current URI for this page, for reference purposes)

University of Kent Author Information

  • Depositors only (login required):

Total unique views for this document in KAR since July 2020. For more details click on the image.