How people see animals: They think and feel - but not like us

Study documents similar assessments across cultures

To the point

• Cross-cultural consensus: In 33 communities across 15 countries, both children and adults generally agree that animals can think and feel, but that their thought processes are fundamentally different to those of humans.
• Belief in human uniqueness: The conviction that human thinking is unique emerges early in life and remains stable throughout adulthood. However, there is less agreement as to whether animals experience emotions in a way that is similar to humans.
• Urban–rural contrast: Urban children and adolescents are more likely to attribute thoughts and feelings to animals than their rural peers, probably due to greater exposure to anthropomorphic media rather than livestock and potentially dangerous animals.
• Ethical implications: Attributed mental capacities influence the moral status of animals, resulting in greater protection and support for 'sentient' mammals, while insects, despite significant biodiversity loss, receive comparatively less attention.

Do animals think and feel? How this question is answered has a direct bearing on how empathetically and considerately people treat animals. An international team led by researchers in Leipzig has now found that people from different cultural contexts are surprisingly consistent in their views: while many adults and children assume that animals are generally capable of thinking and feeling, they do not attribute human-like thoughts to them.

Much of the existing psychological research on human perceptions of animals has focused on people from Western societies. For their large-scale study, the scientists from the “Children and Nature” research group at Leipzig University’s LeipzigLab and at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology adopted a cross-cultural approach, involving people of different ages from a wide range of social and socio-cultural contexts. For the study, they surveyed more than 1,000 children aged 4 to 17 and almost 200 adults from 33 communities in 15 countries, asking them to what extent they believed animals could feel and think.

Belief in the uniqueness of human thinking

The largely similar assessments came as a surprise to the researchers, explains Katja Liebal of Leipzig University, who led the study together with first author Karri Neldner and Daniel Haun, director of the Department of Comparative Cultural Psychology at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. Most respondents were convinced that animals are generally capable of thoughts and feelings, but that their thinking fundamentally differs from human thinking. Views were less uniform when it came to whether animals can have human-like emotions.

Even though the sample size is not sufficient to generalise the findings to all people, the researchers see the data as pointing to a fundamental human belief: what people primarily regard as separating them from other animals is thinking. Humans see themselves as mentally unique.

Implications for how people treat animals

“The belief in the uniqueness of human thinking emerges early in life and remains stable across the entire lifespan,” explains Neldner. This assessment has important implications for how other living beings are treated: “The mental capacities attributed to animals also determine their moral status. In this way, people can justify using animals for food, medicine or entertainment.”

At the same time, animal species perceived as sentient or human-like receive disproportionately high levels of protection, donations and political support. “This is particularly problematic in the context of species extinction and biodiversity loss: insects, which are heavily affected by these developments, receive far less attention and interest than mammals, even though mammals make up only a fraction of overall biodiversity,” says Liebal.

In addition, the researchers found that the children and adolescents surveyed in urban communities were more likely to attribute thoughts and feelings to animals than their peers in rural areas. Possible reasons include the fact that children in cities are more frequently exposed to human-like representations of animals, or that children in rural areas more often encounter animals that are dangerous, harmful or kept as livestock, which may foster emotional distance.

The research team chose an unusual survey method for their study: unlike in many psychological studies, the interviews were not conducted by researchers, but by people from the respective cultural contexts and communities. These interviewers had previously been trained in interview techniques and evaluation. The interviews were subsequently translated, transcribed and analysed by the researchers using both qualitative and quantitative methods. “Even though the study process was far less controlled than it would have been if we had invited participants into a laboratory, we are convinced that the data obtained in this way are far more valuable, as they were generated within the respective cultural contexts,” says Liebal.