Anthropocentric by Default? Attribution of Familiar and Novel Properties to Living Things

Abstract

Humans naturally and effortlessly use a set of cognitive tools to reason about biological entities and phenomena. Two such tools, essentialist thinking and teleological thinking, appear to be early developmental cognitive defaults, used extensively in childhood and under limited circumstances in adulthood, but prone to reemerge under time pressure or cognitive load. We examine the nature of another such tool: anthropocentric thinking. In four experiments, we examined patterns of property attribution to a wide range of living and non-living objects, manipulating time pressure, response type, and property (either novel or familiar) in a total of 471 participants. Results showed no tendency toward increased similarity-based attribution patterns indicative of anthropocentric thinking under time pressure. However, anthropocentric thinking was consistently observed for unfamiliar properties. These findings suggest that anthropocentric thinking is not a developmentally persistent cognitive default, but rather a cognitive strategy deliberately employed in situations of uncertainty.

Like mother, like daughter: Adults’ judgments about genetic inheritance.

“…In Study 2, we sought to extend these findings to unfamiliar animals. The past research suggests that adults rely on cognitive biases more when thinking about unfamiliar species (French et al, 2018; Shafto & Coley, 2003) or unfamiliar traits (Arenson & Coley, 2018; Eidson & Coley, 2014). Therefore, testing participants with unfamiliar animals could indicate whether the patterns seen in Study 1 are specific to familiar animals or whether they would also be seen in how adults think about eye color inheritance more broadly.…”

Representing Variability: The Case of Life Cycle Diagrams

“…This theory is considered "intuitive," because it is based on personal experience and not on scientific evidence. Although researchers have investigated many biases that influence reasoning in biology (Coley et al, 2017;Arenson and Coley, 2018), with respect to within-species variability, psychological essentialism is of particular importance.…”

“…Although researchers have investigated many biases that influence reasoning in biology ( Coley et al. , 2017 ; Arenson and Coley, 2018 ), with respect to within-species variability, psychological essentialism is of particular importance.…”

Culture, morality and individual differences: comparability and incomparability across species

“…Recent studies of animal behaviour patterns (including 'animal personality') fall on a continuum between these extremes: like the inside-out approach, they might lead to a privileged insight into biological bases of human personality, but as in the outside-in approach they focus on phenotypic characteristics. Those studies that use human-languagederived adjective variables in a top-down manner [13,14] export aspects of the lexical approach to animals, which enhances human -animal comparability though with the danger that this imposes human framings on non-human individuals [15,16]. Those studies that derive categories/ variables in a bottom-up manner from behaviours and situations well fitted to a given non-human species [17] begin more by taking the animal on the animal's own terms, which probably enhances the capacity to provide a perspective divergent from what is found with human language categories and data.…”