Abstract not found

This thesis is about common-sense psychology and its role in cognitive science. Put simply, the argument is that common-sense psychology is important because it offers clues to some complex problems in cognitive science, and because common-sense psychology has significant effects on our intuitions, both in science and on an everyday level. The thesis develops a theory of anthropomorphism in common-sense psychology. Anthropomorphism, the natural human tendency to ascribe human characteristics (and especially human mental characteristics) to things that aren't human, is an important theme in the thesis. Anthropomorphism reveals an endemic anthropocentricity that deeply influences our thinking about other minds. The thesis then constructs a descriptive model of anthropomorphism in common-sense psychology, and uses it to analyse two studies of the ascription of mental states. The first, BaronCohen et al.'s (1985) false belief test, shows how cognitive modelling can be used to compare dif...

this paper, motivates McCarthy's attitude (and that taken by us here) of using the notions defined for common sense for intelligence and vice versa. It is important to notice that the two notions are not collapsed. The main difference seems that intelligence requires that the associated capabilities be "good enough" to achieve a goal. Thus the first requirement for having common sense is to know about the surrounding environment, while being intelligent requires that such a representation be adequate (property 1). The second requirement for having common sense is being able to derive consequences from what is known, most often without a strong reasoning capability and possibly without involving any intelligence [2]. Intelligence requires instead the capability of answering "a wide variety of questions," possibly on difficult topics, e.g. mathematics and people's mental processes (property 2). Finally, the third requirement for common sense is the possibility to provide data to the advice taker without knowing of its actual internal state and functioning. An intelligent entity can instead actively use its capabilities to get information from the outside and to act as needed to satisfy a goal (property 3). However, as far as I know, these differences have not played any role in McCarthy's research.

People commonly anthropomorphize nonhuman agents, imbuing everything from computers to pets to gods with humanlike capacities and mental experiences. Although widely observed, the determinants of anthropomorphism are poorly understood and rarely investigated. We propose that people anthropomorphize, in part, to satisfy effectance motivation—the basic and chronic motivation to attain mastery of one’s environment. Five studies demonstrated that increasing effectance motivation by manipulating the perceived unpredictability of a nonhuman agent or by increasing the incentives for mastery increases anthropomorphism. Neuroimaging data demonstrated that the neural correlates of this process are similar to those engaged when mentalizing other humans. A final study demonstrated that anthropomorphizing a stimulus makes it appear more predictable and understandable, suggesting that anthropomorphism satisfies effectance motivation. Anthropomorphizing nonhuman agents seems to satisfy the basic motivation to make sense of an otherwise uncertain environment.