Competing Explanations of Competing Explanations: Accounting for Conflict Between Scientific and Folk ExplanationsThis paper focuses on the level of people’s explanatory reasoning. It examines why laypeople prefer folk explanations of various physical or biological phenomena to alternative, well‐understood scientific explanations. Shtulman and Legare call this psychological phenomenon “explanatory co‐existence.” On the basis of new experimental data, they evaluate two possible accounts of explanatory co‐existence, a theory‐based and an associative account, and argue that a theory‐based account is the better supported.

The author introduces and critically analyzes two recent, curious findings and their accompanying explanations regarding how the folk intuits the capabilities of the dead and those in a persistent vegetative state. The dead are intuited to survive death, whereas PVS patients are intuited as more dead than the dead. Current explanations of these curious findings rely on how the folk is said to conceive of death and the dead: either as the annihilation of the person, or that person’s continuation as (...) a disembodied being. The author argues that these two conceptions are incompatible and inconsistent with each other and the evidence. Contrariwise, the author argues that the folk intuition about dead-survivors and the living dead are more easily explained by appealing to cross-culturally established concepts: the folk biological concept of death the existential concept of death, and the concept of social death. (shrink)

Examining variation in reasoning about sustainability between diverse populations provides unique insight into how group norms surrounding resource conservation develop. Cultural institutions, such as religious organizations and formal schools, can mobilize communities to solve collective challenges associated with resource depletion. This study examined conservation beliefs in a Western industrialized (Austin, Texas, USA) and a non‐Western, subsistence agricultural community (Tanna, Vanuatu) among children, adolescents, and adults (N = 171; n = 58 7–12‐year‐olds, n = 53 13–17‐year‐olds, and n = 60 18–68‐year‐olds). (...) Participants endorsed or rejected four types of justifications for engaging in land and animal conservation: sustainability, moral, religious, or permissible. In both populations, participants endorsed sustainability justifications most frequently. Religious justifications increased with age in Tanna and decreased with age in Austin. Tannese participants were also more likely to endorse multiple justifications for conservation than Austin participants. Data across all justification types show a main effect of age in both communities; endorsement of conservation decreased with age in Austin, but increased with age in Tanna. Across age groups, participants were more likely to endorse the conservation of animals than land in Austin, yet equally as likely to endorse the conservation of land and animals in Tanna. Overall, these results reveal similarities and differences in the beliefs that support the conservation of natural resources across populations. (shrink)

People naturally intuit that an agent's ethereal thoughts can cause its body to move. Per intuitive physics; however, one body can only interact with another. Are people, then, covertly puzzled by the capacity of thoughts to command the body? Experiment 1 first confirms that thoughts (e.g., thinking about a cup) are indeed perceived as ethereal—as less detectible in the body (brain), and more likely to exist in the afterlife relative to matched percepts (e.g., seeing a cup). Experiments 2–5 show that (...) thoughts are considered less likely to cause behavior than percepts (e.g., thinking of a cup vs. seeing one). Furthermore, mind–body causation is more remarkable when its bodily consequences are salient (e.g., moving an arm vs. brain activation). Finally, epistemic causes are remarkable only when they are ascribed to mental‐ (e.g., “thinking”) but not to physical states (“activation”). Together, these results suggest that mind–body interactions elicit a latent dualist dissonance. (shrink)

It is widely held that intuitive dualism—an implicit default mode of thought that takes minds to be separable from bodies and capable of independent existence—is a human universal. Among the findings taken to support universal intuitive dualism is a pattern of evidence in which “psychological” traits (knowledge, desires) are judged more likely to continue after death than bodily or “biological” traits (perceptual, physiological, and bodily states). Here, we present cross-cultural evidence from six study populations, including non-Western societies with diverse belief (...) systems, that shows that while this pattern exists, the overall pattern of responses nonetheless does not support intuitive dualism in afterlife beliefs. Most responses of most participants across all cultures tested were not dualist. While our sample is in no way intended to capture the full range of human societies and afterlife beliefs, it captures a far broader range of cultures than in any prior study, and thus puts the case for afterlife beliefs as evidence for universal intuitive dualism to a strong test. Based on these findings, we suggest that while dualist thinking is a possible mode of thought enabled by evolved human psychology, such thinking does not constitute a default mode of thought. Rather, our data support what we will call intuitive materialism—the view that the underlying intuitive systems for reasoning about minds and death produce as a default judgment that mental states cease to exist with bodily death. (shrink)