The research findings demonstrate people underestimate animal minds by willfully downplaying any new evidence to the contrary, both in terms of the likelihood that animals have mental capacities and that their minds are true.
STEFAN LEACH, ET AL: Our relationships with other animals are governed by how we view their capacity for sentience and suffering. However, there is currently little agreement as to whether people’s beliefs about animal minds are largely accurate or inaccurate. We used an innovative task to examine how people update their beliefs in response to noisy but informative clues about animal minds… Five studies… found that participants shifted their beliefs too far in response to clues that suggested animals do not have minds (i.e., overshooting what a normative participant ought to believe), but not far enough in response to clues that suggested animals have minds (i.e., falling short of what a normative participant ought to believe). A final study demonstrated that this effect was attenuated when humans were the targets of belief. The findings demonstrate that people underestimate animal minds in a way that can be said to be inaccurate and highlight the role of belief updating in downplaying evidence of animal minds…
Participants consistently underestimated animals’ minds, both in terms of the likelihood that they had mental capacities and that evidence of their minds was true. On receiving a noisy but informative clue, participants shifted their beliefs more when it suggested the animal did not have a mind compared to when it suggested the animal did have a mind. This meant that they overshot a normative benchmark in response to clues that suggested animals did not have minds, but undershot the same benchmark when receiving clues that suggested animals did have minds. In other words, on receiving information about the veracity of their beliefs concerning animal minds, participants integrated this information in a way that resulted in them being more skeptical of animal minds than could be justified by normative standards… In this sense, participants’ beliefs were inaccurate in a way that underestimated animals’ minds.
The results also demonstrated that participants underestimated animal minds more than human minds. On judging the same mental capacities and receiving the same clues, participants updated their beliefs more when a clue suggested a human had mental capacities compared to an animal. The opposite was true when they received clues that suggested a human or animal did not have mental capacities. That is, given exactly the same information, participants’ beliefs about animals came to be more inaccurate and more skewed towards believing they did not have minds compared to their beliefs about humans. These findings align with work that documents the tendency to deny animals’ minds… and to represent them as less worthy of moral concern compared to humans. SOURCE…
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