Payne, Bird, & Catmur (2024, p. Figure 2)
These are the results of Study 1.
in- vs out-group = trial-by-trial closer or further away on the answers to the starting statement items.
(closer = 0-1 scale points)
Payne et al. (2024, p. Figure 3)
These are the results of Study 1.
(iii) confidence scores are unrelated to accuracy for out-group members,
indicating no awareness of when they are right and when they are wrong.
confident local agreement
+
variation between groups and experts
for
- agency attributions
- mental state attributions
How to explain both agreement and variation?
confident local agreement
+
variation between groups and experts
for
- agency attributions
- mental state attributions
How to explain both agreement and variation?
Stress that it’s not just people being broader or narrower in their attributions.
[use Strange Agents]
Ethnographers describe a range of contemporary views concerning individual and shared agency.
Among the Northern Ojibwa,
% stones that merely move are not attributed agency, but
certain stones are regarded as acting voluntarily and may even talk (Hallowell, 2019), and some
guides in the Alps regard mountains as living communicators who send signals the guides learn to understand
(Chamel, 2023).
% also: ‘it’s horrible because the mountain is suffering a lot’ (Chamel, 2023, p. 245).
Improvising musicians in the Netherlands
report that music gains a life of its own, and becomes something that provides direction and requires service.[^obey-the-music]
Of the things that to me seem to be inanimate objects and nothing more,
some are regarded by *donso* hunters in Burkina Faso as agents.
These *jo* can act in the world.
If correct procedures are followed and appropriate moral conditions met, they may respond to human actions (Ferrarini, 2025, p. 235).
Indeed, Ferrarini reports not merely using a *jo* as a tool but cooperating with it (Ferrarini, 2025, p. 235), and interprets sacrifice as sharing the results of a successful hunt (Ferrarini, 2025, p. 239).
Or, to take another example, certain plants
appear to Makushi people in Guyana as helpers to be called on.
When approached in the right way, these special plants can become voluntary partners in actions such as diagnosis and healing (Whitaker, Tamboli, Daly, & Lewy, 2024, p. 353).
And for a Pemon *kanaima* in Venezuela, a plant may be regarded as the dominant partner in a relationship (Whitaker et al., 2024, p. 355).
ojalehto, Medin, & García (2017) drawn from Experiment 2 (part)
One reason I find this puzzling is that
differences in which things a group regards as agents are
not typically explained by one group being more permissive
than another.
NOT A FIGURE FROM THEIR PAPER!
This illustrates that neither group is simply more generous.
agency-inclusion rate combines rankings for entities across capacities.
It's the average proportion of entity × capacity judgments in which the entity
was treated as having at least some of the relevant capacity.
In Exp 2: six agency capacities:
cognition: communication, memory, morality
experience: fear, pain, hunger
plant category includes two plants; complex artefacts combines robot and computer.
The true picture is a bit more complicated ...
ojalehto et al. (2017) redrawn from Figure 1 (part)
If you make the attributions relational (shift from whether it can feel to whether it can feel pain,say),
then the pattern is a bit different; roughly, the Ngobe attributions increase in most cases.
But the overall picture I just offered is roughly right.
confident local agreement
+
variation between groups and experts
for
- agency attributions
- mental state attributions
How to explain both agreement and variation?
Perez-Zapata, Slaughter, & Henry (2016, p. Figure 3)
Perez-Zapata et al. (2016) gave Australian and Chilean adults two sets of
‘strange stories’ mindreading tasks (Happé, 1994; White, Hill, Happé, & Frith, 2009).
One set was adapted to Chilean cultural context (names, places, pictures were changed)
while keeping the mindreading demands as similiar as possible.
They found an interaction: each group of participants did slightly better on the
strange stories adapted to their cultural group.
Control shows that, in non-mindreading, the cultural adaptation does not affect performance.
there are also expertise effects ...
Starmans & Friedman (2020, p. Figure 3)
?? Personal anecdote about reviewing Starmans & Friedman (2012),
not believing it and demanding an control explanation,
and over time ending up totally persuaded they are right.
‘“skeptical pressure”—a simple reminder that a person might easily have
been deceived about any number of things’
(Starmans & Friedman, 2020)
Starmans & Friedman (2020, p. Figure 2)
∞todo there’s more research that I need to review; see `k8Qp3Vr7Lm2Nx5Ht9Ds4Aw.md`;
more recent research does not contradict these findings.
confident local agreement
+
variation between groups and experts
for
- agency attributions
- mental state attributions
How to explain both agreement and variation?