Intuitive Conceptions of Dead Persons' Mentality: A Cross-Cultural Replication and More

Abstract

Jesse Bering (2002) investigated how American university students in an interview task conceived of dead persons' mentality immediately after death. He found that different categories of mental states or capacities were conceived differently: psychobiological and perceptual states ceased, whereas emotional, desire, and epistemic states continued. Our Study 1 was a replication of Bering's experiment in a different cultural setting, in which the subjects were Chinese undergraduate students. A similar pattern of results was found. In Study 2, instead of being asked about a dead person's various mental states immediately following the death, participants were asked to judge a dead person's mental states after the person had been dead for 2 days. The overall pattern of participants' responses was not affected by this manipulation, but they did show an increase in attributions of certain mental states to dead agnostics. In addition, a more refined breakdown of responses revealed that individuals tended to judge that, upon death, visual and auditory perception continued, whereas olfactory and gustatory sensation ceased.

Notes

¹We are grateful to Emma Cohen for this suggestion. Cohen, Burdett, Knight, and Barrett (2011) recently conducted a cross-cultural investigation of person–body reasoning in the United Kingdom and northern Brazilian Amazon. Participants were asked to imagine they had left their body, and some were asked to further imagine they had entered a rock or plant. They were then requested to complete a 51-item questionnaire regarding the continuity of various mental and physiological capacities. It was found that participants across the two sample populations parsed a wide range of capacities similarly in terms of the capacities' perceived anchoring to bodily function, though patterns of reasoning concerning the respective roles of physical and biological properties in sustaining various capacities did vary between the two sample populations. The results provide support for the view that the dualistic categories termed “person” and “body” may not be wholly culturally transmitted and are certainly not confined to the West. Moreover, Cohen et al. questioned the validity of the categorizations (e.g., psychobiological, perceptual, epistemic, etc.) adopted in some previous studies (e.g., Astuti & Harris, 2008; Bering, 2002; Bering & Bjorklund, 2004): Does continuity on one item of each category predict continuity of other items in the category, or do participants regard some members of each category as continuous and others as discontinuous?

² Bering (2002) used a Likert-type (1–5) scale for the responses. In our study a binary (0–1) scale was adopted.

³Because participants from Study 1 and Study 2 were drawn from different populations, the comparison of the results should be done with caution.