I’ve got a feeling: Urban and rural indigenous children’s beliefs about early life mentality

•Urban and indigenous children’s beliefs about early life mentality were examined.•Fetuses and infants were ascribed minds, with more mentality ascribed to infants.•Emotions and desires were treated as more essential than thought and memory.•Cross-cultural similarities suggest a bias to treat feelings as core mental aspects.•This cognitive bias yields insight into why debates about fetal rights endure.

This cross-cultural investigation explored children’s reasoning about their mental capacities during the earliest period of human physical existence—the prenatal period. For comparison, children’s reasoning about the observable period of infancy was also examined. A total of 283 5- to 12-year-olds from two distinct cultures (urban Ecuador and rural indigenous Shuar) participated. Across cultures, children distinguished the fetal period from infancy, attributing fewer capacities to fetuses. However, for both the infancy and fetal periods, children from both cultures privileged the functioning of emotions and desires over epistemic states (i.e., abilities for thought and memory). Children’s justifications to questions about fetal mentality revealed that although epistemic states were generally regarded as requiring physical maturation to function, emotions and desires were seen as functioning as a de facto result of prenatal existence and in response to the prospect of future birth and being part of a social group. These results show that from early in development, children across cultures possess nuanced beliefs about the presence and functioning of mental capacities. Findings converge with recent results to suggest that there is an early arising bias to view emotions and desires as the essential inviolable core of human mentality. The current findings have implications for understanding the role that emerging cognitive biases play in shaping conceptions of human mentality across different cultures. They also speak to the cognitive foundations of moral beliefs about fetal rights.