The Medusa Effect: We Ascribe Less “Mind” To People We See In Pictures

By Emma Young Much has been written about the downsides of home-working. “Zoom fatigue”, in particular, is now a term, and an experience, that many of us are familiar with. But the tiring effect of video chat could represent only one of its dangers, according to new work in PNAS. It finds that we ascribe less “mind” to people we see in image form, vs in the flesh, and even less again to images of images of people. There could be serious implications, write Paris Will at the University of British Columbia and colleagues: “Given that mind perception underpins moral judgement, our findings suggest that depicted persons will receive greater or lesser ethical consideration, depending on the level of abstraction.” When we assess the extent to which a creature or thing has a mind, we judge it on on two factors: “Experience” and “Agency”. Mental experience relates to conscious feelings — to feeling pain or happiness, for example; an animal judged to rank higher for Experience is generally judged to have more intrinsic moral worth as well. Agency, meanwhile, refers to the ability to actively do something — to act, to influence the course of events. In a series of online and lab-based experiments, Will and colleagues explored how seeing a person in the flesh, versus in photo, versus in an image of a photo might affect participants’ judgements of that person’s levels of Experience and Agency as well as how “...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Cognition Source Type: blogs