Folk attribution of awareness to artificial systems: functionalist by default, essentialist by contrast

As artificial systems exhibit increasingly sophisticated behaviour, understanding how people attribute mental states to machines has become critical. Do people apply functionalist criteria, where behavioural evidence maps onto mental attribution, or does an essentialist understanding create a ceiling effect where machines can never possess full mental states that are usually attributed to humans? To find out, we systematically varied contextual attunement (low, medium, or high sensitivity to spatial environmental cues) across human and artificial agents. Across four pre-registered studies (N = 719), UK participants read contrastive vignettes and rated either awareness (study 1), consciousness (study 2), awareness alongside consciousness (study 3), or awareness alongside a non-mental anchor (study 4). Both humans and machines received higher awareness ratings as contextual attunement increased, demonstrating a folk functionalist reasoning. However, when awareness was presented alongside consciousness machines encountered a ceiling effect. At high attunement levels, machines were seen as less aware than humans, resembling a folk essentialist reasoning when attributing consciousness. Together, our findings show that, rather than applying uniform criteria, folk psychology deploys construct-specific inferential rules: functionalist by default for awareness, but essentialist by contrast when consciousness is invoked.