People attribute minds to robots, corpses that are targets of harm
Monday, June 17, 2013 - 12:30
in Psychology & Sociology
As Descartes famously noted, there's no way to really know that another person has a mind -- every mind we observe is, in a sense, a mind we create. Now, new research suggests that victimization may be one condition that leads us to perceive minds in others, even in entities we don't normally think of as having minds, such as a corpse or a robot.