Team Including UMass Amherst Anthropologist Felicity Aulino Finds How Concepts of ‘Mental Life’ Vary Across a Range of Cultures

AMHERST, Mass. – Do beetles get hungry, remember things or feel love? By asking such simple questions about humans, animals and other entities, University of Massachusetts Amherst anthropologist Felicity Aulino and an international team of fellow anthropologists and psychologists have reconstructed concepts of how concepts of mental life vary across a range of cultures in a new paper published by the journal Nature Human Behaviour.

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In field sites including the U.S., Ghana, Thailand, China and Vanuatu, Aulino and her colleagues asked adults and children a series of these questions about a wide range of objects, technologies, animals and spiritual beings, such as a rock, a cell phone, a beetle, a child and a ghost.

Using a sophisticated statistical technique known as exploratory factor analysis, they found that in all sites, among both adults and children, people imagined that cognitive abilities such as memory and thought traveled separately from bodily sensations like hunger and pain. They say these findings suggest that a mind-body distinction is common across diverse cultures and present by mid-childhood.

However, the researchers found that there were substantial cultural differences in how participants in their studies understood social-emotional abilities to fit into this mind-body distinction – as part of the body, part of the mind or a third category unto themselves. The team was especially interested to see that the same pattern of cultural differences also characterized differences between children and adults within each field site: Children were most like local adults in their mind-body distinction, and least like local adults in their understanding of emotions.

The researchers say that these differences may have far-reaching social consequences.

“Cultural and developmental differences in understandings of happiness, sadness, guilt, love and the like are a testament to the many ways that humans can learn to think about ourselves and the world,” they write. Different understandings of these emotions might lead different groups of people to different conclusions about human nature – about why humans do bad things, how society should treat the rest of the natural world, whether to fear or embrace artificial intelligence (Are robots deserving of moral treatment?), and how to interact with any supernatural beings we believe to exist (Do ghosts get hungry? How good is God’s memory?).

At the same time, the researchers emphasized that the continuities they observed across cultural settings speak to aspects of human thought that may be universal – parts of our experience that unite us.

Aulino, associate Five College professor of anthropology at UMass Amherst, and her colleagues concluded that while children may be predisposed to distinguish cognition from bodily experience, they must learn the social and moral value of different aspects of mental life in their social world. Across history and geography, most humans have viewed mental life through the lens of good and bad rather than through neutral categories like “cognition” and “emotion.” In Ghana, for example, they found that ideas about the mind reflected the need to protect the private inner sphere from malevolent others, and in Vanuatu, those ideas reflected the need to promote social harmony.

Led by Kara Weisman, then a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University and now at the University of California, Riverside, the research team was part of the Mind and Spirit Project, a multi-year, multi-site collaboration between anthropologists and psychologists funded by the John Templeton Foundation and led by Stanford anthropologist Tanya Marie Luhrmann. Other members of the team included Cristine H. Legare of the University of Texas at Austin, Rachel E. Smith of the University of Cambridge, Vivian A. Dzokoto of Virginia Commonwealth University, Emily Ng of the University of Amsterdam, John C. Dulin of Utah Valley University and Nicole Ross-Zehnder and Joshua D. Brahinsky of Stanford University.

The new paper, “Similarities and differences in concepts of mental life among adults and children in five cultures,” is available online now from Nature Human Behaviour.

Previous research by Aulino and the Mind and Spirit Project, published in February 2021, identified two factors that make individuals more likely to experience otherworldly phenomena. That paper, “Sensing the presence of gods and spirits across cultures and faiths,” is available online from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.