1 Miami University, Oxford, OH, USA.
2 Baruch College, City University of New York, New York City, USA.
Pers Soc Psychol Bull. 2018 Feb;44(2):143-157. doi: 10.1177/0146167217733070. Epub 2017 Nov 2.
In six studies, we investigated how ascribing humanlike versus animallike minds to targets influences how easily targets are individuated. Across the studies, participants learned to discriminate among a variety of "aliens" (actually Greebles). Our initial study showed that participants' ability to learn to individuate targets was related to beliefs that targets had sophisticated minds. Investigating the directionality of this relationship, we found that learning to better recognize the targets did not affect perceptions of mind (Study 2). However, when targets were described as having sophisticated humanlike (relative to simplistic animallike) mental faculties, perceivers indicated more motivation to individuate (Study 3) and were more successful individuating them (Studies 4 and 5). Finally, we showed that increased self-similarity mediated the relationship between targets' mental sophistication and perceivers' motivation to individuate (Study 6). These findings indicate ascribing sophisticated mental faculties to others has implications for how we individuate them.
在六项研究中，我们调查了将人类或动物思维归因于目标如何影响目标的可区分性。在所有研究中，参与者都学习了区分各种“外星人”（实际上是 Greebles）。我们的初步研究表明，参与者区分目标的能力与他们认为目标具有复杂思维的信念有关。研究这种关系的方向性，我们发现学习更好地识别目标不会影响对思维的感知（研究 2）。然而，当目标被描述为具有复杂的人类（相对于简单的动物）心理能力时，感知者表示更有动力去区分（研究 3），并且更成功地将它们区分开来（研究 4 和 5）。最后，我们表明，目标的心理复杂性与感知者区分他们的动机之间的关系是通过自我相似性增加来介导的（研究 6）。这些发现表明，将复杂的心理能力归因于他人会影响我们对他们的区分方式。
