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precedent found in courts around the world dating back to the Middle Ages. In times past and cultures in which people did not so naturally restrict intentional capacities to other humans, animals (such as rats) and objects (such as “possessed” statues) were common targets of criminal prosecution16,17.
Increasing the extent to which other agents seem mindful also increases the praise or blame that they receive for their actions. And even diminishing the extent to which people feel in mindful control of their own behavior (e.g., by undermining people’s belief in free will), leads people to behave in ways that are consistent with diminished self-control (such as by cheating on an exam when tempted to do so).18

Second, other minds are capable of thinking, and may therefore be thinking about you. Being under scrutiny by mindful agents has two basic effects on human behavior. One is that mindful agents become sources of social influence, increasing the extent to which people behave in socially desirable ways20. Imagine, for instance, how you might behave if you found a magic ring that made you invisible… and you’ll get the point. This ability for mindful surveillance to control behavior has been proposed as one of the reasons, if not the primary reason, why religious systems that posit an omnipresent deity are able to maintain such large-scale cooperative societies. The other effect of mindful surveillance is that it is mentally taxing to monitor others’ thoughts. This effortful monitoring can diminish a person’s performance on other cognitively demanding tasks21. And while waiting for a stressful event, such as giving a speech, people show less stress-related responses when in the presence of their relatively mindless pet than when in the presence of their relatively more mindful spouse22.

Finally, other minds matter because mindful agents become moral agents worthy of care and compassion7. The principle of autonomy captures this most basic of human rights—that because all people have the same minimal capacity to suffer, deliberate, and choose, no person can compromise the body, life, or freedom of another person. Agents with mindful experience, the capacity to suffer, deliberate, and choose, become those that evoke empathy and concern for well being, whereas agents without mindful experience can be treated simply as mindless objects. From debates about abortion to animal rights to euthanasia, the mindful experience of the agents in question is often either the explicit or implicit focus of debate. Making invisible minds visible, and hence more like one’s own, enables people to more readily follow the most famous of all ethical dictates—to treat others as you would have others treat you.

Conclusion

It is impossible for scientists to examine whether God was looking out for the passengers of flight 1549 or punishing the residents of New Orleans with Hurricane Katrina, but it is very possible to examine why people might make such inferences. These examinations have revealed a remarkable capacity to look beyond the visible behavior that the environment provides to reason about a completely invisible world of intentions and goals, of motives and beliefs, of attitudes and preferences—an invisible world of other minds. Understanding when people are likely to recognize other minds (and see into them) and when they are not is the

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