Mind perception is the tendency to attribute mental capacities such as thinking or feelings to another entity.

Research found that after exposure to a chatbot, people tended to attribute more mind to it.

Understanding the psychology of mind perception may become a key part of responsibly managing AI technologies.

When people first encounter systems like ChatGPT, Claude, or other AI chatbots, they usually think of them as tools; sophisticated ones, perhaps, but still just software. Yet after interacting with these systems, many people begin to experience something subtly different: the chatbot can start to feel a little less like a machine and a little more like something with a mind.

This reaction reflects a psychological process known as mind perception—the tendency to attribute mental capacities such as thinking, intentions, or feelings to another entity. Humans naturally do this with other people and animals, but we can also extend it to robots, computers, and even abstract things like corporations or nature.

In our recent research, we examined whether exposure to modern AI systems changes the degree to which people attribute minds to them. Across four experiments involving large language models (LLMs) such........

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