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.

人们使用他们一生中获得的信息来形成关于社会和非社会世界如何运作的各种俗套理论，并使用这些信念系统来指导他们在各种情况下的行为。有时，这些信仰与颇具哲理的话题有关。例如，门外汉对心灵如何与身体相关的明确而直观的信念是不同的，这一概念被哲学家称为心灵-身体问题。关于身心关系的外行概念的这种可变性被发现具有重要的认知和行为后果。例如，最近的研究表明，心身关系的二元论是学习推理他人心理状态的准必然发展副产品，这一命题揭示了心身二元论因果地预测了人们从事概念和空间视角选择的倾向。根据这种看似普遍的二元论信仰，最近的研究表明，大多数成年人都有一种直观的理解，即头脑和身体是分开的，而不管他们明确的信仰是什么：在一项思维实验中，他们自发地将对身体属性的保留比对精神属性的保留更多地归因于生物的精确身体复制。此外，这种倾向在认知负荷或直觉思维方式的情况下得到加强，这暗示直觉二元论对大多数成年人来说是默认的。然而，如果它本质上不是物质的，那么问题仍然是，明确或直观地支持心身二元论概念的人如何准确地解读心灵，以及这种解读将对社会认知产生什么后果。拟议的研究旨在解决这两个问题。如果二元论者认为心灵不依赖于肉体，它可能会使心灵更灵活地归属于人类和非人类实体。因此，二元论者应该更容易将头脑归因于没有人脑的生物或非生物实体(拟人化)，以及否认人类的某些精神能力，尽管明显存在人脑(非人性化)。第二条线的研究将调查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，只依附于物理身体。为此，这些研究将采用各种测量方法和实验操作，调查二元论者是否认为精神状态遵循交感魔法中的传染定律，以及他们是否更倾向于理解人们的创造来构成他们的“扩展自我”。这两种现象将在目前的研究方案中分别和联合进行研究，这两种现象都与心身二元论中明确和直观的信念有关。研究将采用相关、实验和冥想设计。

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.