Consciousness and emotions in non-human animals: Are laypeople more or less skeptical than experts?

Abstract

Consciousness and the capacity to experience affective states, such as pain, pleasure, fear, and hunger (i.e., sentience) are seen as key determinants of an individual’s moral status, a view that is shared by scientists, philosophers, and laypeople. Whether (and which) non-human animals are believed to possess these capacities can therefore have important consequences for how they are treated. In this registered report (study design registration: https://doi.org/10.71240/lcyc.238674), we measured people’s attributions of consciousness and emotions to a diverse set of animals, testing whether laypeople overattribute (as suggested by research on anthropomorphizing) or underattribute these mental capacities to animals (as suggested by research on motivated mind denial). Animal consciousness and emotions are famously challenging to study. In the absence of an unambiguous benchmark against which people’s beliefs could be compared, we tested whether laypeople, a nationally representative sample of 600 U.S. participants, are more or less skeptical about animal consciousness and emotions than scientific experts, a sample of 100 behavioral ecologists, evolutionary biologists, and other animal researchers. We find that, compared to scientific experts, laypeople were less likely to attribute consciousness (-8 percentage points), and substantially less likely to attribute emotions (-21 percentage points) to non-human animals. Laypeople were on average more confident in their beliefs than scientific experts.