Are You a Closet Dualist? Evidence From Brief Implicit Association Task

Do people tacitly contrast minds and bodies? To find out, here, we gauge Dualism using a brief implicit association task. Participants were asked to determine whether a target word belonged to a category-attribute pair. Categories were either body or mind; attributes captured either physical properties of bodies (e.g., object/solid) or their converse (e.g., stuff/airy). Results from five experiments showed that physical properties selectively facilitated responses only to body (but not mind). In Experiments 3-5, responses to mind were further facilitated by airy (relative to solid). Together, these results suggest that people tacitly view the mind as ethereal, distinct from the physical body. Remarkably, this was the case even in participants who explicitly rejected Dualism. Dualism, then, is an implicit bias that persists despite explicit attitudes to the contrary. These conclusions shed light on why educated Western adults contrast minds and bodies.