The DOI matches its Crossref record; 3 of the 3 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
The Nature of Humans
Open accessPublished version of a preprint
Abstract
This chapter outlines how humans conceive of other humans and looks at the interacting roles of cognitive biases and cultural processes in the development of these conceptions. Extant prior research has argued that conceptions of other humans rely on folk theories of physics, biology, and psychology. Evidence from developmental psychology also indicates that children and adults have intuitions that individuals have a quintessence that confers a unique identity. The social and environmental context of an individual, as well as the cultural practices, become part of that individual’s quintessence. The chapter concludes by proposing that in addition to relying on folk physics, biology, and psychology, humans also employ a folk anthropology in reasoning about other humans. This folk anthropology system is dedicated to processing inferences about how an individual’s essence is maintained or altered by social, environmental, and cultural contexts and practices.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cites
Psychological reasoning in infancy
Baillargeon, R., Scott, R. M., & Bian, L. (2016) · Annual Review of Psychology · doi:10.1146/annurev-psych-010213-115033 · Cited by 263
The prevalence of mind–body dualism in early China
Slingerland, E., & Chudek, M. (2011) · Cognitive science · doi:10.1111/j.1551-6709.2011.01186.x · Cited by 125
Dualism Revisited: Body vs. Mind vs. Soul
Richert, R., & Harris, P. (2008) · Journal of Cognition and Culture · doi:10.1163/156770908x289224 · Cited by 83
Self-citation
Flagged first, then by citations
Research works printed but not linked: 69
- 2008, Understanding mortality and the life of the ancestors in rural Madagascar., Cognitive Science
- 2008, Innate ideas revisited: For a principle of persistence in infants’ physical reasoning., Perspectives on Psychological Science
- 2011, Biological motion preference in humans at birth: Role of dynamic and configural properties., Developmental Science
- 2011, Afterlife beliefs: Category specificity and sensitivity to biological priming., Religion, Brain & Behavior
- 2002, Intuitive conceptions of dead agents’ minds: The natural foundations of afterlife beliefs as phenomenological boundary., Journal of Cognition and Culture
- 2006, The folk psychology of souls., Behavioral and Brain Sciences
- 2004, The natural emergence of reasoning about the afterlife as a developmental regularity., Developmental Psychology
- 2005, The development of “afterlife” beliefs in religiously and secularly schooled children., British Journal of Developmental Psychology
- 2004, Descartes’ baby: How child development explains what makes us human
- 2018, Do minds switch bodies? Dualist interpretations across ages and societies., Religion, Brain & Behavior
- 1981, Eliminative materialism and the propositional attitudes., Journal of Philosophy
- 2008, When minds migrate: Conceptualizing spirit possession., Journal of Cognition and Culture
- 2011, Cross-cultural similarities in person-body reasoning: Experimental evidence from the United Kingdom and Brazilian Amazon., Cognitive Science
- 2005, “If it’s in your mind it’s in your knowledge”: Children’s developing anatomy of identity., Cognitive Development
- 2014, The development of children’s prelife reasoning: Evidence from two cultures., Child Development
- 2014, Adults are intuitive mind-body dualists., Journal of Experimental Psychology: General
- 2018, A free will needs a free mind: Belief in substance dualism and reductive physicalism differentially predict free will and determinism., Consciousness and Cognition
- 2009, Learning from others: Children’s construction of concepts., Annual Review of Psychology
- Gelman, S. A., Coley, J. D., & Gottfried, G. M. (1994). Essentialist beliefs in children: The acquisition of concepts and theories. In L. A. Hirschfeld & S. A. Gelman (Eds.), Mapping the mind: Domain specificity in cognition and culture (pp. 341–366). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. · DOI
- Gelman, S. A., & Diesendruck, G. (1999). What’s in a concept? Context, variability, and psychological essentialism. In I. E. Sigel (Ed.), Development of mental representation: Theories and applications (pp. 87–111). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
- 1996, Children’s causal explanations of animate and inanimate motion., Child Development
- 2011, Concepts and folk theories., Annual Review of Anthropology
- 1999, Children’s understanding of the brain from early essentialism to biological theory., Cognitive Development
- 2003, “I just talk with my heart”: The mind–body problem, linguistic input, and the acquisition of folk psychological beliefs., Cognitive Development
- 2005, Children’s acceptance of conflicting testimony: the case of death., Journal of Cognition and Culture
- 1994, Young children’s naïve theory of biology., Cognition
- 1995, How does your garden grow? Early conceptualization of seeds and their place in plant growth cycle., Child Development
- Hirschfeld, L. A. (2013). The myth of mentalizing and the primacy of folk sociology. In M. R. Banaji & S. A. Gelman (Eds.), Navigating the social world: What infants, children, and other species can teach us (pp. 101–106). Oxford Scholarship Online. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199890712.003.0019 · DOI
- 2007, Can autistic children predict behavior by social stereotypes?, Current Biology
- 2008, Descartes’ mistake: How afterlife beliefs challenge the assumption that humans are intuitive Cartesian substance dualists., Journal of Cognition and Culture
- 2012, Do children think that duplicating the body also duplicates the mind?, Cognition
- 1996, Young children’s recognition of commonalities between animals and plants., Child Development
- 2002, Young children’s naïve thinking about the biological world
- 1990, If you had my brain, where would I be? Children’s understanding of the brain and identity., Child Development
- 1982, Children’s developing conceptions of the mind and brain., Child Development
- 1989, On the development of biologically specific beliefs: The case of inheritance., Child Development
- Keil, F. C. (1995). The growth of causal understandings of natural kinds: Modes of construal and the emergence of biological thought. In. D. Sperber, D. Premack, & A. Premack (Eds.), Causal cognition: A multidisciplinary debate (pp. 234–267). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- 2004, Do 5-month-old infants see humans as material objects?, Cognition
- 2012, Evaluating ritual efficacy: Evidence from the supernatural., Cognition,
- 2015, Individual differences in conceptions of soul, mind, and brain., Journal of Individual Differences
- 2007, Essentialism, power, and the representation of social categories: A folk sociology perspective., Human Development
- 2006, Culture, brain transplants, and implicit theories of identity., Journal of Cognition and Culture
- 1989, Concepts and conceptual structure., American Psychologist
- 2015, Development of afterlife beliefs in childhood: Relationship to parent beliefs and testimony., Journal of Developmental Psychology
- 2015, Reasoning about cultural and genetic transmission: Developmental and cross-cultural evidence from Peru, Fiji, and the United States on how people make inferences about trait transmission., Topics in Cognitive Science
- 1999, The role of shape in 4-month-old infants’ segregation of adjacent objects., Infant Behavior and Development
- 2015, The perpetuation of ritualistic actions as revealed by young children’s transmission of normative behavior., Evolution and Human Behavior
- 1992, Infants’ coding of location in continuous space., Infant Behavior and Development
- 2012, Cultural transmission of social essentialism., PNAS
- 2006, The ghost in my body: Children’s developing concept of the soul., Journal of Cognition and Culture
- 2012, The essence of soul concepts: How soul concepts influence ethical reasoning across religious affiliation., Religion, Brain & Behavior
- 2013, Mind, soul, and spirit: Conceptions of immaterial identity in different cultures., International Journal for the Psychology of Religion
- 1991, As time goes by: Children’s early understanding of growth in animals., Child Development
- 2010, Goal attribution to schematic animals: Do 6-month-olds perceive biological motion as animate?, Developmental Science
- 2017, Scienceblind: Why our intuitive theories about the world are so often wrong
- 2018, Mind and body in early China: Beyond orientalism and the myth of holism
- 2005, Action experience alters 3-month-old infants’ perception of others’ actions., Cognition
- 2002, Essentialism and folkbiology: Further evidence from Brazil., Journal of Cognition and Culture
- 1992, Origins of knowledge., Psychological Review
- 2003, Journal of Applied Social Psychology
- 2016, The social functions of group rituals., Current Directions in Psychological Science
- 2014, Task-specific effects of ostracism on imitative fidelity in early childhood., Evolution and Human Behavior
- 2016, In-group ostracism increases high fidelity imitation in early childhood., Psychological Science
- 2001, Meta-analysis of theory-of-mind development: The truth about false beliefs., Child Development
- 1992, Cognitive development: Foundational theories of core domains., Annual Review of Psychology,
- Wellman, H. M., & Gelman, S. A. (1998). Knowledge acquisition in foundational domains. In W. Damon (Ed.), Handbook of child psychology (Vol. 2). New York: Wiley.
- 2004, Scaling of theory-of-mind tasks., Child Development
- 2016, Ritual increases children’s affiliation with in-group members., Evolution and Human Behavior
- 2002, Infants’ understanding of the point gesture as an object-directed action., Cognitive Development
Metadata
- Authors
- Richert, R. A., & Lesage, K. A.
- Affiliations
- University of California, Riverside (US)
- Venue
- The Oxford Handbook of the Cognitive Science of Religion
- Publisher
- Oxford University Press
- Published
- 2022-04-20
- Pages
- 90-109
- OpenAlex
- W4224311651
- Cited by
- 3
- References
- 3
- Citations by year
- 2026: 1 · 2023: 1 · 2022: 1
- FWCI
- 2.26
- Type
- book chapter
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- doi.org
- Licence
- public-domain
- Locations
- Oxford University Press eBooks (publishedVersion)
- PsyArXiv (OSF Preprints) (submittedVersion, public-domain)
- PsyArXiv (OSF Preprints) (submittedVersion)
- Funders
- John Templeton Foundation
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Developmental and Educational Psychology › Child and Animal Learning Development
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Social and Intergroup Psychology
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Experimental and Cognitive Psychology › Categorization, perception, and language
- Keywords
- folk theories, folk physics, folk biology, folk psychology, cognitive biases, cultural processes, personal identity, quintessence, social environment, cultural practices
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
