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Rethinking people’s conceptions of mental life
Open accessAbstract
Significance: How do ordinary people make sense of mental life? Pioneering work on the dimensions of mind perception has been widely interpreted as evidence that lay people perceive two fundamental components of mental life: experience and agency. However, using a method better suited to addressing this question, we discovered a very different conceptual structure. Our four studies consistently revealed three components of mental life—suites of capacities related to the body, the heart, and the mind—with each component encompassing related aspects of both experience and agency. This body–heart–mind framework distinguishes itself from the experience–agency framework by its clear and importantly different implications for dehumanization, moral reasoning, and other important social phenomena.
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“However, the correspondence between these dimensions and phenomenality is not clear (Sytsma 2014) and more recent work has found evidence for alternative structures that cut across this distinction (e.g. Weisman et al. 2017, Malle 2019).”
From Folk psychological attributions of consciousness to large language models (2024) · cites this paper as Weisman et al. 2017
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Metadata
- Authors
- Weisman, K., Dweck, C. S., & Markman, E. M.
- Affiliations
- Stanford University (US)
- Venue
- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
- Publisher
- National Academy of Sciences
- Published
- 2017-10-11
- Volume
- 114
- Issue
- 43
- Pages
- 11374-11379
- ISSN
- 0027-8424 (ISSN-L)
- 1091-6490
- PMC
- PMC5664492
- OpenAlex
- W2764192991
- Cited by
- 182
- References
- 20
- Citations by year
- 2026: 17 · 2025: 30 · 2024: 21 · 2023: 34 · 2022: 28 · 2021: 20 · 2020: 9 · 2019: 17 · 2018: 6
- FWCI
- 22.41
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- bronze
- doi.org
- Locations
- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (publishedVersion)
- Europe PMC (PubMed Central) (publishedVersion)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- OSF Preprints (OSF Preprints) (submittedVersion)
- Funders
- National Science Foundation
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Social and Intergroup Psychology
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Psychology of Moral and Emotional Judgment
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Developmental and Educational Psychology › Child and Animal Learning Development
- Keywords
- human uniqueness, dehumanization, moral reasoning, decision-making capacity, human-animal differences
- MeSH terms
- Adult, Aged, Cognition, Emotions, Female, Humans, Male, Mental Processes, Middle Aged, Morals, Social Perception, Nontherapeutic Human Experimentation
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