Conceptualizing agency: Folkpsychological and folkcommunicative perspectives on plants

Abstract

The present research addresses cultural variation in concepts of agency. Across two experiments, we investigate how Indigenous Ngöbe of Panama and US college students interpret and make inferences about nonhuman agency, focusing on plants as a critical test case. In Experiment 1, participants predicted goal-directed actions for plants and other nonhuman kinds and judged their capacities for intentional agency. Goal-directed action is pervasive among living kinds and as such we expected cultural agreement on these predictions. However, we expected that interpretation of the capacities involved would differ based on cultural folktheories. As expected, Ngöbe and US participants both inferred that plants would engage in goal-directed action but Ngöbe were more likely to attribute intentional agency capacities to plants. Experiment 2 extends these findings by investigating action predictions and capacity attributions linked to complex forms of plant social agency recently discovered in botanical sciences (communication, kin altruism). We hypothesized that the Ngöbe view of plants as active agents would productively guide inferences for plant social interaction. Indeed, Ngöbe were more likely than US participants to infer that plants can engage in social behaviors and they also attributed more social agency capacities to plants. We consolidate these findings by using bottom-up consensus modeling to show that these cultural differences reflect two distinct conceptual models of agency rather than variations on a single (universal) model. We consider these findings in light of current theories of domain-specificity and animism, and offer an alternative account based on a folktheory of communication that infers agency on the basis of relational interactions rather than having a mind.

Cognition Beyond the Human: Cognitive Psychology and the New Animism

“…Our initial analyses took a broad look by collapsing across the specific capacities (thought, desire, etc.) for an overall measure of “agency.” As predicted, results from several experiments have shown that Ngöbe are more likely than US participants to attribute agency to plants and abiotic kinds based on their capacity to interact with the environment, as compared to US participants who are relatively more likely to attribute agency to complex artifacts due to their human‐designed information processing capacities (Ojalehto, Medin, and Garcia 2017a; Ojalehto, Medin, and Garcia 2017b) (see Figure 1). 3 Looking within the Ngöbe results more closely, we see that plants are ascribed agency at levels closer to that of animals than artifacts, suggesting that agency is seen as a shared property of vegetal and animal kinds.…”

“…Our account of folkcommunication predicts instead that animism may scaffold productive inferences about ecological behavior. To test this, we designed an experiment to assess intuitive expectations for plant behavior in novel reasoning scenarios (Ojalehto, Medin, and Garcia 2017a). The logic behind using novel reasoning scenarios (rather than familiar topics such as one's own gardening practices) is that they demand using conceptual knowledge productively to generate inferences about new problems rather than fact retrieval based on prior knowledge, making visible inferential principles.…”

The Minds of God(s) and Humans: Differences in Mind Perception in Fiji and North America

“…There are some existing psychological studies that show that both culture and religious beliefs can affect how individuals reason about minds. Work with the Ngöbe people of Panama has found that the Ngöbe use ecological and social relationships, rather than animacy and consciousness, as a basis for agency (ojalehto et al., ,b). This is illustrated by the finding that the Ngöbe include plants and abiotic entities in their category of things that have agency and a capacity for intentional actions along with animals or humans.…”

“…These abilities, and the ability to socially learn and transmit knowledge that comes with them, are part of the foundation of our remarkable ability to create the myriad of different cultures we live in (Chudek & Henrich, ; Chudek, Zhao, & Henrich, ; Henrich, ). These cultural differences can, in turn, affect how we conceive of and reason about minds (e.g., ojalehto, Medin, & García, ,b). Some of the most striking examples of how culture can influence mind concepts are in how we understand the minds of gods and spirits (Astuti & Harris, ; D'Andrade, ; Knight, ; Knight, Sousa, Barrett, & Atran, ; Lane, Wellman, & Evans, ).…”

Ethnoontology: Ways of world‐building across cultures

“…In addition to these ethnographic observations, there are intriguing cross-cultural similarities in animist ontologies. Indigenous communities around the world tend to be much more permissive in their ascription of intentionality than Western participants (Ojalehto, Douglas, & García, 2017).…”