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.

心灵的本质：对心身二元论的信仰使得能够灵活地将心灵归因于人类和非人类实体，从而促进拟人化和非人化。

• 批准号: 324325588
• 负责人: Dr. Matthias Forstmann
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: Department of Psychology
• 依托单位国家: 德国
• 项目类别: Research Fellowships
• 财政年份: 2016
• 资助国家: 德国
• 起止时间: 2015-12-31 至 2017-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://gepris.dfg.de/gepris/projekt/324325588?language=en
• 关键词: essence; mind; belief; body; dualism

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.

人们利用他们一生中获得的信息来形成各种关于社会和非社会世界如何运作的非专业理论，并利用这些信念体系来指导他们在各种情况下的行为。有时候，这些信念涉及到相当哲学的话题。例如，外行人对心灵如何与身体联系的明确和直观的信念不同，哲学家将这一概念称为身心问题。这种变化在外行的概念，身心关系被发现有重要的认知和行为后果。例如，根据身心关系的二元论观点是学习推理他人心理状态的准必要发展副产品的命题，最近的工作表明，身心二元论因果地预测了人们参与概念和空间视角的倾向。根据二元论信仰的这种看似普遍的性质，最近的研究表明，大多数成年人都有一种直觉上的理解，即心灵与身体分离，而不管他们的明确信仰如何：在一个思想实验中，他们自发地将身体属性的保留比精神属性的保留更大，归因于一个生物的精确物理复制品。此外，这种倾向在认知负荷或直觉思维方式的条件下得到加强，暗示直觉二元论是大多数成年人的默认。然而，如果它在本质上不是物理的，那么问题仍然是那些明确或直观地赞同身心二元论概念的人是如何精确地理解心灵的，以及这种理解会对社会感知产生什么后果。拟议的研究旨在解决这两个问题。如果一个二元论者认为心灵不依赖于一个物质身体，它可能会使一个更灵活的归属心灵的人类和非人类实体。因此，二元论者应该更容易将心灵归于不拥有人类大脑的生物或非生物实体（拟人论），以及否认人类的某些精神能力，尽管人类大脑明显存在（非人性化）。第二条研究路线将调查那些支持身心二元论的人是否真的认为心灵是一种非物质的物质或本质，只依附于一个物质的身体。为此，采用各种措施和实验操作，研究将调查二元论者是否认为精神状态遵守交感魔法的传染定律，以及他们是否更倾向于理解人们的创造物，以构成他们的“扩展自我”。在本研究提案中，这两种现象将分别或联合进行研究，两者都涉及它们与心身二元论中明确和直觉信仰的关系。研究将采用相关性，实验和冥想设计。