Summary:
A new study from Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (LMU) shows that humans draw a strict psychological line between intelligent behavior and true subjective experience in artificial intelligence. Published in Cognition, the study found that even when an AI system behaves identically to a human under the exact same conditions, people refuse to attribute consciousness to it. In contrast, participants readily described AI as “aware” or responsive, highlighting how public perception decouples sensory responsiveness from internal mental life.
Key Facts:
- The Consciousness Gap: Even the most highly responsive AI was judged to be less conscious than the least responsive human, regardless of identical actions and context.
- Awareness vs. Consciousness: People readily assign functional terms like “awareness” to AI based on responsiveness, but strictly withhold “consciousness,” viewing it as uniquely biological or subjective.
- Nuanced Public Intuition: Countering widespread fears that human-like generative AI will fool the public into treating machines like feeling entities, everyday users maintain sharp boundaries between behavioral simulation and genuine inner experience.
Source: LMU Munich
As modern artificial intelligence models increasingly converse, negotiate, solve complex reasoning tasks, and mimic human emotional nuances, public discourse has grown fraught with concern over anthropomorphism. Headlights frequently warn that users will mistake persuasive conversational algorithms for sentient beings possessing subjective thoughts, intentionality, and feelings.
While humans regularly employ psychological shorthand, describing a chatbot as “confused,” “helpful,” or “refusing” a prompt, do people genuinely believe these digital systems possess minds?
An experimental philosophy and cognitive science study led by researchers at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (LMU) reveals that the human intuition separating mind from machine remains remarkably resilient.
Published in the journal Cognition, the research demonstrates that people draw an unyielding psychological boundary between intelligent responsiveness and true consciousness, even when an artificial agent exhibits behavior completely indistinguishable from that of a human being.
“Whereas previous studies have typically asked general questions about whether AI actually has mental states, our study is the first to directly compare how people attribute the same mental states to AI and humans behaving in exactly the same way, under identical circumstances,” said lead author Louis Longin, Ph.D., from LMU’s Chair of Philosophy of Mind.
“We may be using mental terms to refer to AI, but this may only be because we lack better words,” added co-senior author Ophelia Deroy, Ph.D., Chair of Philosophy of Mind at LMU. “After all, AI is trained to act and speak like a human, so these descriptions seem natural.”
Identical Behaviors, Radically Divergent Judgments
To eliminate confounding variables, the research team conducted controlled experiments with nearly 1,100 participants. Subjects evaluated short vignettes detailing agents that demonstrated varying levels of situational responsiveness, such as reacting to acoustic changes in their environment or responding to the emotional states of nearby individuals.
One cohort read scenarios featuring an artificial agent, while a second group read verbatim identical scenarios in which the protagonist was human. Participants were then tasked with evaluating how “aware” or “conscious” the agent was of its surrounding environment.
The findings uncovered a distinct split between two closely related cognitive concepts:
- Attributions of Awareness: For the term “awareness,” judgments closely mirrored functional behavior. The more an agent (human or AI) reacted to its surroundings, the more awareness was attributed to it, with the distinction between biological and artificial agents largely dissolving.
- Attributions of Consciousness: For “consciousness,” a vast chasm emerged. Participants consistently refused to describe the AI as conscious. In fact, an AI displaying maximum behavioral sensitivity was still rated as possessing less consciousness than a human displaying the bare minimum level of responsiveness.
“There is a growing worry in public discussion that people will see AI behaving in a human-like way and start treating these systems as if they had human-like mental states,” Dr. Longin explained.
“We found something much more nuanced: People are quite willing to say that an AI notices things and is aware of its surroundings. But they clearly draw a line when it comes to the term ‘consciousness’. People consistently attribute less consciousness to AI than humans, even when their behaviour is identical.”
The Vocabulary of Machine Intelligence
The study suggests that ordinary human intuition reserves “consciousness” for entities perceived to have a subjective inner world, sentience, or phenomenal experience, while regarding “awareness” as an objective, computational capacity to register environmental inputs.
Because less-loaded descriptors like “awareness” match what an algorithm mechanically performs, people feel comfortable applying them to software without endorsing machine sentience.
This linguistic distinction has profound implications for tech communications, corporate messaging, and AI regulation.
“Our study teaches us lessons for how we communicate about AI,” said co-senior author Bahador Bahrami, Ph.D., professor of social neuroscience at LMU.
“Companies and journalists often reach for hyped descriptions of AI models, and credit them with intentions, plans, or even moral conscience and hesitation. What our study shows is that everyday judgments are much more discriminating: People do not simply put AI and humans on the same mental scale. But the boundary also depends on which terms we use. For more neutral descriptors such as ‘awareness’, the distinction can largely disappear. That makes our choice of language important.”
Rather than being easily misled by surface-level human mimicry, human psychology appears to instinctively separate functional output from inner life, reserving the status of conscious awareness for living beings.
Editorial Notes:
- This article was edited by a Neuroscience News editor.
- Journal paper reviewed in full.
- Additional context added by our staff.
About this AI and Consciousness Research:
- Media Contact: Dominic Anders
- Source: LMU
- Image Credit: Image credited to Neuroscience News
- Original Research is Open Access: Cognition (Sept 22, 2026). “AI is not as conscious as humans: Essentialism in mental state attributions to artificial systems.” Authors: Louis Longin, Jurgis Karpus, Nadine Meertens, Bahador Bahrami, and Ophelia Deroy.
- DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2026.106733
Abstract
AI is not as conscious as humans: Essentialism in mental state attributions to artificial systems
Artificial systems increasingly behave in ways that resemble humans. But is that sufficient to make us see them as conscious, or as having related mental states?
We contrast two broad possibilities. People may rely on a single general principle: the more appropriately an agent responds to its environment, the more conscious it is, whether human or artificial. We call this a functionalist attribution.
Alternatively, people may reserve consciousness for certain kinds of beings: even an artificial system that behaves just as responsively as a human is judged less conscious. This is an essentialist attribution.
A further question is whether this pattern is unique to consciousness or extends to closely related constructs such as awareness. In two pre-registered sets of studies (five experiments, N = 1092), UK participants read scenarios describing human or artificial agents whose responsiveness to spatial, social, and temporal features of the environment varied, and rated the agents’ consciousness and awareness, either separately or in conjunction.
Attributions of consciousness followed an essentialist logic: at similar levels of responsiveness, participants consistently attributed greater consciousness to humans. Attributions of awareness followed a functionalist pattern: for both humans and artificial agents, awareness increased steadily with responsiveness, although humans were rated more aware at the highest levels.
These findings suggest that people use different inferential rules for different mental concepts. Consciousness is treated as depending on what an agent is; awareness largely on what an agent does.
