This research, published in Psychological Science<\/em>, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, shows that people attribute minds to entities they perceive as being targets of harm, even when the entity in question is a robot or a corpse.<\/p>\n \u201cPeople seem to believe that having a mind allows an entity to be part of a moral interaction<\/strong> \u2014 to do good and bad things, or to have good and bad things done to them,\u201d says psychological scientist Adrian Ward, who conducted the research at Harvard University.<\/p>\n \u201cThis research suggests that the relationship may actually work the other way around: Minds don\u2019t create morality, morality creates minds.<\/strong>\u201d<\/p>\n Ward, together with Daniel Wegner of Harvard University and Andrew Olsen of the University of Pennsylvania, conducted five studies that investigated the relationship between morality and mind. The results consistently revealed that participants attributed \u2018more\u2019 mind to entities portrayed as targets of intentional harm<\/strong>.<\/p>\n For example, participants who read a story about a nurse who intentionally unplugged the food supply to a patient in a persistent vegetative state attributed more mind to the patient than those who read that the nurse performed her job satisfactorily. Participants also attributed more mind to a corpse when they read that it had been the target of harm<\/strong>.<\/p>\n Participants even attributed more mind to a George, a \u201chighly complex social robot,\u201d when they read that George had been stabbed with a scalpel by a research scientist.<\/p>\n Surprisingly, people attributed \u201cfull\u201d minds to entities when they were the targets of moral harm \u2014 minds capable not just of experiencing harm, but also capable of experiencing emotions, feeling hunger, exerting self-control, and planning for the future.<\/p>\n Ward believes that the findings may help to explain how two people can look at the same entity \u2014 for example, a fetus, a comatose patient, a gorilla, or a lab rat \u2014 and see completely different capacities for thinking, feeling, and general consciousness:<\/p>\n \u201cWhen these entities are thought of in moral terms, they\u2019re attributed more mind \u2014 it seems that people have the sense that something wrong is happening, so someone must be there to receive that wrong<\/strong>.\u201d<\/p>\n Importantly, the results of the final study suggest that the effects of harm may depend on the preexisting mental status of the victim in question<\/strong>.<\/p>\n Participants who read that Sharon, a fully conscious adult human, was physically abused by her boss attributed less<\/em> mind to Sharon than participants who read that her boss behaved normally. They attributed less ability to experience pain and less mind overall to Sharon, falling in line with previous research on dehumanization.<\/p>\n \u201cVictimization may cause people to dehumanize other entities \u2014 but only when these entities have a mind to begin with<\/strong>; entities with absent or liminal minds, in contrast, seem to gain minds as a result of victimization,\u201d the researchers write.<\/p>\n The research may have implications for hot-button issues centered on morality and mind, including issues surrounding animal rights, abortion, and end-of-life decisions<\/strong>. If moral intuitions lead to subjective perceptions of minds, investigating the objective realities of mental capacities is unlikely to resolve moral disagreements over what the \u2018right\u2019 course of action is.<\/p>\n Ward hopes to further explore how the so-called harm-made mind might influence actual decision making:<\/p>\n \u201cExploring this relationship will allow us to understand how different ways of presenting and discussing information about minds and morality may help people see eye-to-eye on contentious issues, and potentially come to a place of mutual understanding<\/strong>.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p><\/blockquote>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" From the Association for Psychological Science press release: As Descartes famously noted, there\u2019s no way to really know that another person has a mind \u2014 every mind we observe is,… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[60],"tags":[75,119,12],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14100"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14100"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14100\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14335,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14100\/revisions\/14335"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14100"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14100"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14100"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"thought](\"http:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/06\/thought-questions.jpg\")
As Descartes famously noted, there\u2019s no way to really know that another person has a mind \u2014 every mind we observe is, in a sense, a mind we create. Now, new research suggests that victimization may be one condition that leads us to perceive minds in others, even in entities we don\u2019t normally think of as having minds<\/strong>.<\/p>\n