Skip to main content

Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript.

  • Article
  • Published:

Similarities and differences in concepts of mental life among adults and children in five cultures

Nature Human Behaviour volume 5, pages 1358–1368 (2021)Cite this article

Subjects

Abstract

How do concepts of mental life vary across cultures? By asking simple questions about humans, animals and other entities – for example, ‘Do beetles get hungry? Remember things? Feel love?’ – we reconstructed concepts of mental life from the bottom up among adults (N = 711) and children (ages 6–12 years, N = 693) in the USA, Ghana, Thailand, China and Vanuatu. This revealed a cross-cultural and developmental continuity: in all sites, among both adults and children, cognitive abilities travelled separately from bodily sensations, suggesting that a mind–body distinction is common across diverse cultures and present by middle childhood. Yet there were substantial cultural and developmental differences in the status of social–emotional abilities – as part of the body, part of the mind or a third category unto themselves. Such differences may have far-reaching social consequences, whereas the similarities identify aspects of human understanding that may be universal.

This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution

Access options

Buy this article

  • Purchase on Springer Link
  • Instant access to full article PDF
Buy now

Prices may be subject to local taxes which are calculated during checkout

Fig. 1: Factor loadings from EFAs among adults and children in five field sites, organized by similarity to the ‘body’, ‘heart’ and ‘mind’ factors among US adults.
Fig. 2: Vector cosines (rc) between all pairs of factors in the EFA solutions presented in Fig. 1, indicating how similar each factor is to every other factor.
Fig. 3: Cultural comparisons of adults across sites.
Fig. 4: Developmental comparisons within each site.

Similar content being viewed by others

Data availability

The behavioural data that support the findings of this study, along with analysis code and study materials, have been deposited in Open Science Framework with the identifier https://doi.org/10.17605/osf.io/8s36e (https://osf.io/8s36e)81.

Code availability

The analysis code that generated the results and visualizations that support the findings of this study is available on GitHub at https://github.com/kgweisman/mental-life-culture-development (and linked to the OSF project provided in the previous section).

References

  1. Heelas, P. & Lock, A. Indigenous Psychologies: The Anthropology of the Self (Academic Press, 1981).

    Google Scholar 

  2. Lillard, A. Ethnopsychologies: cultural variations in theories of mind. Psychol. Bull. 123, 3–32 (1998).

    CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  3. Luhrmann, T. M. et al. Toward an anthropological theory of mind. Suom. Antropol. J. Finnish Anthropol. Soc. 36, 5–69 (2011).

    Google Scholar 

  4. Majid, A. et al. Differential coding of perception in the world’s languages. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 115, 11369–11376 (2018).

    CAS  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  5. Lienhardt, G. Divinity and Experience: The Religion of the Dinka (Oxford Univ. Press, 1961).

  6. Ingold, T. Becoming persons: consciousness and sociality in human evolution. Cult. Dyn. 4, 355–378 (1991).

    Google Scholar 

  7. Astuti, R. Are we all natural dualists? A cognitive development approach. The Malinowski Memorial Lecture, 2000. J. R. Anthropol. Inst. 7, 429–447 (2001).

    Google Scholar 

  8. Astuti, R. Are we all natural dualists? A cognitive developmental approach. J. R. Anthropol. Inst. 7, 429–447 (2001).

    Google Scholar 

  9. Bloom, P. Descartes’ Baby: How the Science of Child Development Explains What Makes Us Human (Basic Books, 2004).

    Google Scholar 

  10. Spelke, E. S. in Core Knowledge and Conceptual Change (eds Barner, D. & Baron, A. S.) 279–300 (Oxford Univ. Press, 2016). https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190467630.003.0016

  11. Wellman, H. M. in Navigating the Social World: What Infants, Children and Other Species Can Tell Us (eds Banaji, M. R. & Gelman, S. A.) 69–74 (Oxford Univ. Press, 2013). https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199890712.003.0014

  12. Wynn, K. Some innate foundations of social and moral cognition. Innate Mind 3, 330–347 (2008).

    Google Scholar 

  13. Emmons, N. A. & Kelemen, D. The development of children’s prelife reasoning: evidence from two cultures. Child Dev. 85, 1617–1633 (2014).

    PubMed  Google Scholar 

  14. Emmons, N. A. & Kelemen, D. A. I’ve got a feeling: urban and rural indigenous children’s beliefs about early life mentality. J. Exp. Child Psychol. 138, 106–125 (2015).

    PubMed  Google Scholar 

  15. Bering, J. M. & Bjorklund, D. F. The natural emergence of reasoning about the afterlife as a developmental regularity. Dev. Psychol. 40, 217–233 (2004).

    PubMed  Google Scholar 

  16. Bering, J. M., Blasi, C. H. & Bjorklund, D. F. The development of ‘afterlife’ beliefs in religiously and secularly schooled children. Br. J. Dev. Psychol. 23, 587–607 (2005).

    PubMed  Google Scholar 

  17. Harris, P. L. & Giménez, M. Children’s acceptance of conflicting testimony: the case of death. J. Cogn. Cult. 5, 143–164 (2005).

    Google Scholar 

  18. Astuti, R. & Harris, P. L. Understanding mortality and the life of the ancestors in rural Madagascar. Cogn. Sci. 32, 713–740 (2008).

    PubMed  Google Scholar 

  19. Lane, J. D., Zhu, L., Evans, E. M. & Wellman, H. M. Developing concepts of the mind, body, and afterlife: exploring the roles of narrative context and culture. J. Cogn. Cult. 16, 50–82 (2016).

    Google Scholar 

  20. Watson-Jones, R. E., Busch, J. T. A., Harris, P. L. & Legare, C. H. Does the body survive death? Cultural variation in beliefs about life everlasting. Cogn. Sci. 41, 455–476 (2017).

    PubMed  Google Scholar 

  21. Richert, R. A. & Harris, P. The ghost in my body: children’s developing concept of the soul. J. Cogn. Cult. 6, 409–427 (2006).

    Google Scholar 

  22. Richert, R. A., Harris, P. L. & Richert, R. A. Dualism revisited: body vs. mind vs. soul. J. Cogn. Cult. 8, 99–115 (2008).

    Google Scholar 

  23. Cohen, E. & Barrett, J. When minds migrate: conceptualizing spirit possession. J. Cogn. Cult. 8, 23–48 (2008).

    Google Scholar 

  24. Cohen, E., Burdett, E., Knight, N. & Barrett, J. Cross-cultural similarities and differences in person–body reasoning: experimental evidence from the United Kingdom and Brazilian Amazon. Cogn. Sci. 35, 1282–1304 (2011).

    PubMed  Google Scholar 

  25. Gray, H. M., Gray, K. & Wegner, D. M. Dimensions of mind perception. Science 315, 619 (2007).

    CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  26. Weisman, K., Dweck, C. S. & Markman, E. M. Rethinking people’s conceptions of mental life. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 114, 11374–11379 (2017).

    CAS  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  27. Malle, B. F. How many dimensions of mind perception really are there? Proc. 41st Annuual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society 2268–2274 (2019).

  28. Willard, A. K. & McNamara, R. A. The minds of God(s) and humans: differences in mind perception in Fiji and North America. Cogn. Sci. 43, (2019).

  29. Takahashi, H., Ban, M. & Asada, M. Semantic differential scale method can reveal multi-dimensional aspects of mind perception. Front. Psychol. 7, 1717 (2016).

  30. Ojalehto, B. L., Medin, D. L. & García, S. G. Grounding principles for inferring agency: two cultural perspectives. Cogn. Psychol. 95, 50–78 (2017).

    PubMed  Google Scholar 

  31. Haslam, N., Kashima, Y., Loughnan, S., Shi, J. & Suitner, C. Subhuman, inhuman, and superhuman: contrasting humans with nonhumans in three cultures. Soc. Cogn. 26, 248–258 (2008).

    Google Scholar 

  32. Luhrmann, T. Mind and Spirit: a comparative theory. J. R. Anthropol. Inst. 26, 9–27 (2020).

    Google Scholar 

  33. Luhrmann, T. M. et al. Sensing the presence of gods and spirits across cultures and faiths. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 118, e2016649118 (2021).

    CAS  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  34. Aulino, F. From karma to sin: a kaleidoscopic theory of mind and Christian experience in northern Thailand. J. R. Anthropol. Inst. 26, 28–44 (2020).

    Google Scholar 

  35. Brahinsky, J. Crossing the buffer: ontological anxiety among US evangelicals and an anthropological theory of mind. J. R. Anthropol. Inst. 26, 45–60 (2020).

    Google Scholar 

  36. Dulin, J. Vulnerable minds, bodily thoughts, and sensory spirits: local theory of mind and spiritual experience in Ghana. J. R. Anthropol. Inst. 26, 61–76 (2020).

    Google Scholar 

  37. Dzokoto, V. A. Adwenhoasem: an Akan theory of mind. J. R. Anthropol. Inst. 26, 77–94 (2020).

    Google Scholar 

  38. Ng, E. The mind and the devil: porosity and discernment in two Chinese charismatic-style churches. J. R. Anthropol. Inst. 26, 95–113 (2020).

    CAS  Google Scholar 

  39. Smith, R. E. Empowered imagination and mental vulnerability: local theory of mind and spiritual experience in Vanuatu. J. R. Anthropol. Inst. 26, 114–130 (2020).

    Google Scholar 

  40. Weisman, K., Dweck, C. S. & Markman, E. M. Children’s intuitions about the structure of mental life. in Proc. 39th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (2017).

  41. Weisman, K., Dweck, C. S. & Markman, E. M. Folk philosophy of mind: changes in conceptual structure between 4–9y of age. in Proc. 40th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (2018).

  42. Lorenzo-Seva, U. & ten Berge, J. M. F. Tucker’s congruence coefficient as a meaningful index of factor similarity. Methodology 2, 57–64 (2006).

    Google Scholar 

  43. Taylor, C. A Secular Age (Belknap Press, 2007).

  44. Heim, M. The Forerunner of All Things: Buddhaghosa on Mind, Intention, and Agency (Oxford Univ. Press, 2014).

    Google Scholar 

  45. Virág, C. The Emotions in Early Chinese Philosophy (Oxford Univ. Press, 2017).

    Google Scholar 

  46. Tsai, J. L., Knutson, B. & Fung, H. H. Cultural variation in affect valuation. J. Pers. Soc. Psychol. 90, 288–307 (2006).

    PubMed  Google Scholar 

  47. Tsai, J. L., Miao, F. F. & Seppala, E. Good feelings in Christianity and Buddhism: religious differences in ideal affect. Pers. Soc. Psychol. Bull. 33, 409–421 (2007).

    PubMed  Google Scholar 

  48. Adams, G. The cultural grounding of personal relationship: enemyship in North American and West African worlds. J. Pers. Soc. Psychol. 88, 948–968 (2005).

    PubMed  Google Scholar 

  49. Asamoah-Gyadu, K African Charismatics (Brill, 2004).

    Google Scholar 

  50. Meyer, B Translating the Devil (African World Press, 1999).

    Google Scholar 

  51. Eriksen, A. Gender, Christianity and Change in Vanuatu (Ashgate, 2008).

  52. Clegg, J. M., Wen, N. J. & Legare, C. H. Is non-conformity WEIRD? Cultural variation in adults’ beliefs about children’s competency and conformity. J. Exp. Psychol. Gen. 146, 428–441 (2017).

    PubMed  Google Scholar 

  53. Forsyth, M. in A Bird That Flies With Two Wings: Kastom and State Justice Systems in Vanuatu 95–137 (Australian National Univ., 2009).

  54. Curtin, C. M. et al. Kinship intensity and the use of mental states in moral judgment across societies. Evol. Hum. Behav. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2020.07.002 (2020).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  55. Enke, B. Kinship, cooperation, and the evolution of moral systems. Q. J. Econ. 134, 953–1019 (2019).

    Google Scholar 

  56. Legare, C. H. The development of cumulative cultural learning. Annu. Rev. Dev. Psychol. 1, 119–147 (2019).

    Google Scholar 

  57. Nook, E. C., Sasse, S. F., Lambert, H. K., McLaughlin, K. A. & Somerville, L. H. Increasing verbal knowledge mediates development of multidimensional emotion representations. Nat. Hum. Behav. 1, 881–889 (2017).

    PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  58. Widen, S. C. Children’s interpretation of facial expressions: the long path from valence-based to specific discrete categories. Emot. Rev. 5, 72–77 (2013).

    Google Scholar 

  59. Stenhaug, B. A., Frank, M. C. & Way, J. S. The latent factor structure of developmental change in early childhood. Proc. 42nd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society 323–328 (2020).

  60. Saxe, A. M., McClelland, J. L. & Ganguli, S. A mathematical theory of semantic development in deep neural networks. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 166, 11537–11546 (2019).

    Google Scholar 

  61. Heyes, C. Submentalizing: I am not really reading your mind. Perspect. Psychol. Sci. 9, 131–143 (2014).

    PubMed  Google Scholar 

  62. Chudek, M., McNamara, R. A., Birch, S., Bloom, P. & Henrich, J. Do minds switch bodies? Dualist interpretations across ages and societies. Relig. Brain Behav. 8, 354–368 (2018).

    Google Scholar 

  63. Slingerland, E. & Chudek, M. The prevalence of mind–body dualism in early China. Cogn. Sci. 35, 997–1007 (2011).

    PubMed  Google Scholar 

  64. Forstmann, M. & Burgmer, P. Adults are intuitive mind–body dualists. J. Exp. Psychol. Gen. 144, 222–235 (2015).

    PubMed  Google Scholar 

  65. Stanovich, K. E. Implicit philosophies of mind: the dualism scale and its relation to religiosity and belief in extrasensory perception. J. Psychol. 123, 5–23 (1989).

    Google Scholar 

  66. Gray, K., Knickman, T. A. & Wegner, D. M. More dead than dead: perceptions of persons in the persistent vegetative state. Cognition 121, 275–280 (2011).

    PubMed  Google Scholar 

  67. Gray, K., Knobe, J., Sheskin, M., Bloom, P. & Barrett, L. F. More than a body: mind perception and the nature of objectification. J. Pers. Soc. Psychol. 101, 1207–1220 (2011).

    PubMed  Google Scholar 

  68. Hood, B., Gjersoe, N. L. & Bloom, P. Do children think that duplicating the body also duplicates the mind? Cognition 125, 466–474 (2012).

    PubMed  Google Scholar 

  69. Barrett, H. C. et al. Small-scale societies exhibit fundamental variation in the role of intentions in moral judgment. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 113, 4688–4693 (2016).

    CAS  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  70. Levisen, C. & Jogie, M. R. The Trinidadian ‘Theory of Mind’: personhood and postcolonial semantics. Int. J. Lang. Cult. 2, 169–193 (2015).

    Google Scholar 

  71. Wierzbicka, A. Soul and mind: linguistic evidence for ethnopsychology and cultural history. Am. Anthropol. 91, 41–58 (1989).

    Google Scholar 

  72. Markus, H. R. & Kitayama, S. Culture and the self: implications for cognition, emotion, and motivation. Psychol. Rev. 98, 224–253 (1991).

    Google Scholar 

  73. & Aulino, F. Rituals of Care: Karmic Politics in an Aging Thailand (Cornell Univ. Press, 2019).

    Google Scholar 

  74. Chudek, M. & Henrich, J. Culture–gene coevolution, norm-psychology and the emergence of human prosociality. Trends Cogn. Sci. 15, 218–226 (2011).

    PubMed  Google Scholar 

  75. Brink, K. A., Gray, K. & Wellman, H. M. Creepiness creeps in: uncanny valley feelings are acquired in childhood. Child Dev. https://doi.org/10.1111/cdev.12999 (2017).

  76. Lane, J. D., Wellman, H. M. & Evans, E. M. Children’s understanding of ordinary and extraordinary minds. Child Dev. 81, 1475–1489 (2010).

    PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  77. Norenzayan, A Big Gods: How Religion Transformed Cooperation and Conflict (Princeton Univ. Press, 2013).

    Google Scholar 

  78. R Core Team. R: A language and environment for statistical computing (2013).

  79. Revelle, W. psych: Procedures for personality and psychological research (v1.8.4) (2018).

  80. Wild, F. lsa: Latent sematic analysis (v0.73.2) (2020).

  81. Weisman, K., Legare, C. H. & Luhrmann, T. M. Similarities and differences in concepts of mental life among adults and children in five cultures. Open Sci. Found. https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/8S36E (2020).

Download references

Acknowledgements

Thanks to the research teams in each field site; to Ellen Markman and Carol Dweck for wise advice on these studies; and to Bertram Malle and two anonymous reviewers for thoughtful feedback on an earlier version of this manuscript. See Supplementary Information for extended acknowledgements. This material is based on work supported by the John Templeton Foundation under Grant No. 55427 to T.M.L., by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program under Grant No. DGE-114747 to K.W., and by a William R. & Sara Hart Kimball Stanford Graduate Fellowship to K.W. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish or preparation of the manuscript.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA

    Kara Weisman

  2. Department of Anthropology, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA

    Kara Weisman, Nicole Ross-Zehnder, Joshua D. Brahinsky & Tanya Marie Luhrmann

  3. Department of Psychology, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA

    Cristine H. Legare

  4. Department of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

    Rachel E. Smith

  5. Department of African and African American Studies, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA, USA

    Vivian A. Dzokoto

  6. Department of Anthropology, University of Massachusetts Amherst, Amherst, MA, USA

    Felicity Aulino

  7. Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, the Netherlands

    Emily Ng

  8. Department of Behavioral Science, Utah Valley University, Orem, UT, USA

    John C. Dulin

Authors
  1. Kara Weisman
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Cristine H. Legare
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Rachel E. Smith
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  4. Vivian A. Dzokoto
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  5. Felicity Aulino
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  6. Emily Ng
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  7. John C. Dulin
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  8. Nicole Ross-Zehnder
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  9. Joshua D. Brahinsky
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  10. Tanya Marie Luhrmann
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Contributions

K.W. developed the study concept. K.W. and N.R.-Z. curated the data. K.W. carried out formal analysis of the data. T.M.L. and C.H.L. acquired funding for the study. F.A., J.D.B., J.C.D., E.N., N.R.-Z. and R.E.S. undertook the study investigation. K.W., C.H.L., T.M.L., F.A., J.D.B., J.C.D., V.A.D., E.N., N.R.-Z. and R.E.S. developed the study methodology. T.M.L. and N.R.-Z. administered the project. T.M.L., K.W., F.A., J.C.D., E.N., N.R.-Z. and R.E.S. supervised the study. K.W. undertook data validation and visualization. K.W. wrote the original draft of the manuscript. All authors reviewed and edited the manuscript.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Kara Weisman.

Ethics declarations

Competing interests

The authors declare no competing financial interests.

Additional information

Peer review information Nature Human Behaviour thanks Bertram Malle and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work. Peer reviewer reports are available.

Publisher’s note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

Supplementary methods and results, extended acknowledgements, Supplementary Figures 1–18, Tables 1–6, and captions for Supplementary Data 1–10.

Reporting Summary

Peer Review File

Supplementary Data 1–10

Data from all samples of adults and all samples of children.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Weisman, K., Legare, C.H., Smith, R.E. et al. Similarities and differences in concepts of mental life among adults and children in five cultures. Nat Hum Behav 5, 1358–1368 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-021-01184-8

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-021-01184-8

This article is cited by

Search

Advanced search

Quick links

Nature Briefing

Sign up for the Nature Briefing newsletter — what matters in science, free to your inbox daily.

Get the most important science stories of the day, free in your inbox. Sign up for Nature Briefing