Daniel M. Wegner’s research while affiliated with Cambridge and other places

Früher haben wir Freunde und Bekannte gefragt, wenn wir Rat oder Informationen brauchten. Heute suchen wir rasch im Internet und finden Antworten auf so ziemlich alle Lebensfragen. Dieser Kulturwandel wirkt sich auf unser Gedächtnis uns Selbstbild aus.

Robots are starting to be developed for aged care populations and some of these have been made into commercial products that have been well received. However, little is known about the psychological factors that promote acceptance or rejection of robots by older people. Finding out more about these psychological determinants of robot uptake and acceptance is the primary focus of the study described in this paper. A healthcare robot feasibility study was conducted in a retirement village. Older people (n=25) were invited to use a prototype robot with healthcare functions over a two week period. Questionnaires were completed before and after the period. It was found that residents who held significantly more positive attitudes towards robots, and perceived robot minds to have less agency (ability to do things) were more likely to use the robot. It was also found that attitudes towards robots improved over time in robot-users. Our results suggest that the cognitions older people hold about robots may influence their decisions to use robots. The study results also validate participants’ subjective self-reports of attitudes towards robots and perceptions of robot mind, against the objective measure of robot use. Interventions to foster adaptive cognitions could be developed and applied in the design, deployment and marketing of robots to promote their use and acceptance.

For millennia humans have relied on one another to recall the minutiae of our daily goings-on. Now we rely on “the cloud”—and it is changing how we perceive and remember the world around us

People often feel like their minds and their bodies are in different places. Far from an exotic experience, this phenomenon seems to be a ubiquitous facet of human life (e.g., Killingsworth and Gilbert, 2010). Many times, people's minds seem to go "somewhere else"-attention becomes disconnected from perception, and people's minds wander to times and places removed from the current environment (e.g., Schooler et al., 2004). At other times, however, people's minds may seem to go nowhere at all-they simply disappear. This mental state-mind-blanking-may represent an extreme decoupling of perception and attention, one in which attention fails to bring any stimuli into conscious awareness. In the present research, we outline the properties of mind-blanking, differentiating this mental state from other mental states in terms of phenomenological experience, behavioral outcomes, and underlying cognitive processes. Seven experiments suggest that when the mind seems to disappear, there are times when we have simply failed to monitor its whereabouts-and there are times when it is actually gone.

There are many guides on proper psychology, but far fewer on interesting psychology. This article presents six guidelines for interesting research. The first three-Phenomena First, Be Surprising, and Grandmothers, Not Scientists-suggest how to choose your research question; the last three-Be The Participant, Simple Statistics, and Powerful Beginnings-suggest how to answer your research question and offer perspectives on experimental design, statistical analysis, and effective communication. These guidelines serve as reminders that replicability is necessary but not sufficient for compelling psychological science. Interesting research considers subjective experience; it listens to the music of the human condition. © The Author(s) 2013.

It is important for robot designers to know how to make robots that interact effectively with humans. One key dimension is robot appearance and in particular how humanlike the robot should be. Uncanny Valley theory suggests that robots look uncanny when their appearance approaches, but is not absolutely, human. An underlying mechanism may be that appearance affects users' perceptions of the robot's personality and mind. This study aimed to investigate how robot facial appearance affected perceptions of the robot's mind, personality and eeriness. A repeated measures experiment was conducted. 30 participants (14 females and 16 males, mean age 22.5 years) interacted with a Peoplebot healthcare robot under three conditions in a randomized order: the robot had either a humanlike face, silver face, or no-face on its display screen. Each time, the robot assisted the participant to take his/her blood pressure. Participants rated the robot's mind, personality, and eeriness in each condition. The robot with the humanlike face display was most preferred, rated as having most mind, being most humanlike, alive, sociable and amiable. The robot with the silver face display was least preferred, rated most eerie, moderate in mind, humanlikeness and amiability. The robot with the no-face display was rated least sociable and amiable. There was no difference in blood pressure readings between the robots with different face displays. Higher ratings of eeriness were related to impressions of the robot with the humanlike face display being less amiable, less sociable and less trustworthy. These results suggest that the more humanlike a healthcare robot's face display is, the more people attribute mind and positive personality characteristics to it. Eeriness was related to negative impressions of the robot's personality. Designers should be aware that the face on a robot's display screen can affect both the perceived mind and personality of the robot.

People often think that something must have a mind to be part of a moral interaction. However, the present research suggests that minds do not create morality but that morality creates minds. In four experiments, we found that observing intentional harm to an unconscious entity-a vegetative patient, a robot, or a corpse-leads to augmented attribution of mind to that entity. A fifth experiment reconciled these results with extant research on dehumanization by showing that observing the victimization of conscious entities leads to reduced attribution of mind to those entities. Taken together, these experiments suggest that the effects of victimization vary according to victims' preexisting mental status and that people often make an intuitive cognitive error when unconscious entities are placed in harm's way. People assume that if apparent moral harm occurs, then there must be someone there to experience that harm-a harm-made mind. These findings have implications for political policies concerning right-to-life issues.

The uncanny valley-the unnerving nature of humanlike robots-is an intriguing idea, but both its existence and its underlying cause are debated. We propose that humanlike robots are not only unnerving, but are so because their appearance prompts attributions of mind. In particular, we suggest that machines become unnerving when people ascribe to them experience (the capacity to feel and sense), rather than agency (the capacity to act and do). Experiment 1 examined whether a machine's humanlike appearance prompts both ascriptions of experience and feelings of unease. Experiment 2 tested whether a machine capable of experience remains unnerving, even without a humanlike appearance. Experiment 3 investigated whether the perceived lack of experience can also help explain the creepiness of unfeeling humans and philosophical zombies. These experiments demonstrate that feelings of uncanniness are tied to perceptions of experience, and also suggest that experience-but not agency-is seen as fundamental to humans, and fundamentally lacking in machines.

R o b i n R . V a l l a c h e r a n d D a n i e l M . W e g n e r ABSTRACT The theory of action identification is a system of three principles explaining how people's thoughts of what they are doing relate to what they do. In a sense, the principles suggest an "operating system" for a human being – a program linking thought to action. The principles suggest simply that people do what they think they are doing, that when they can think of doing something more, they do that – but that when they can't do what they were thinking of doing, they think of doing less. Stated this way, the principles may seem perhaps too simple, but their interaction and ramifications are remarkably complex and predictive of a rich array of phenomena. The theory has things to say about how people can conceptualize their actions optimally, it offers insights into how people regulate actions through thinking, it provides a template for understanding how action connects to emotion and to self-concept, and it suggests how social influence occurs by changing how actions are understood. These consequences of the theory were discovered early on, but have recently been supplemented by extensions to encompass the dynamics of action and the role of action identification in the understanding of own and others' minds.