School of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Arizona State University, United States.
Department of Psychology, New York University, United States.
Cognition. 2019 Oct;191:103981. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2019.05.018. Epub 2019 Jul 10.
What aspects of a person determine whether they are the same person they were in the past? This is one of the fundamental questions of research on personal identity. To date, this literature has focused on identifying the psychological states (e.g., moral beliefs, memories) that people rely on when making identity judgments. But the notion of personal identity depends on more than just psychological states. Most people also believe that the physical matter that makes up an individual is an important criterion for judging identity; changes to the physical stuff in a person's body, even if they are not accompanied by any psychological changes, are judged to change who the person is at some level. Here, we investigate the sources of these beliefs and propose that they stem from the broader cognitive tendency to assume that unseen physical essences make things what they are-psychological essentialism. Four studies provided support for this claim. In Studies 1 and 2, exposing participants to essentialist reasoning led to stronger endorsement of physical continuity as a criterion for personal identity. Similarly, individual differences in participants' essentialist thinking predicted the extent of their reliance on physical continuity (Study 3), and this relationship was observed even among 6- to 9-year-old children (Study 4). These studies advance theory on the psychology of personal identity by identifying a reason why people assign a central role to physical composition when judging identity.
一个人的哪些方面决定了他们是否与过去的自己相同？这是个人身份认同研究的基本问题之一。迄今为止，该文献主要集中在确定人们在进行身份判断时所依赖的心理状态（例如道德信仰、记忆）。但个人身份的概念不仅仅取决于心理状态。大多数人还认为，构成个人的物质是判断身份的重要标准；一个人身体中的物质即使没有任何心理变化，只要发生变化，就会被认为在某种程度上改变了这个人的身份。在这里，我们研究了这些信念的来源，并提出它们源于更广泛的认知倾向，即假设看不见的物理本质使事物具有其特性——心理本质主义。四项研究支持了这一观点。在研究 1 和 2 中，让参与者接触本质主义推理会导致他们更加强烈地认同身体连续性是个人身份的标准。同样，参与者本质主义思维的个体差异预测了他们对身体连续性的依赖程度（研究 3），即使在 6 至 9 岁的儿童中也观察到了这种关系（研究 4）。这些研究通过确定人们在判断身份时为何将身体构成置于核心地位的原因，推进了个人身份认同心理学的理论。
