Consciousness and emotions in non-human animals: Are laypeople more or less skeptical than experts?

Consciousness and the ability to experience affective states and emotions, such as pain, pleasure, fear, and hunger (i.e., sentience) are widely seen as key determinants of an individual’s moral status, a view that is shared by scientists, philosophers, and laypeople. Whether (and which) animals are believed to possess these capacities can have important consequences for how they are treated. For example, these beliefs can influence people’s support for animal welfare laws, the perceived acceptability of meat consumption, and other important outcomes. It is therefore important to know if people overattribute (as suggested by research on anthropomorphizing) or underattribute these mental capacities to animals (as suggested by research on motivated mind denial). Animal consciousness and emotions are famously challenging to study. In the absence of an unambiguous benchmark against which people’s beliefs could be compared, the present study will test whether laypeople, a nationally representative sample of 444 U.S. participants, are more or less skeptical about animal consciousness and emotions than experts, a sample of 100 behavioral ecologists, evolutionary biologists, and other animal researchers.