Whether people think the capacities of animals are more innate than the capacities of humans depends on which capacities we are talking about

People readily distinguish between capacities they think of as ‘innate’ and those they think of as ‘acquired’ or ‘learned’. I hypothesized that people think about animals using a core cognitive system of intuitive biology, which has a bias towards assuming innateness; whereas they think about people using a core cognitive system of intuitive psychology, which has a bias towards assuming that the contents of the mind come from experience. I performed 7 studies with over 1200 UK adult participants, where a capacity of some individual was described, the treatment was whether the individual was described as animal or human, and the outcome was ascription of innateness to the capacity. Studies 1, 2 and 4 supported the prediction of higher ratings of innateness in the animal conditions, whilst studies 5 and 6 produced effects in the opposite direction, higher innateness ratings in humans. I present the results and show how different choices of materials and instructions led to different patterns. The studies failed to support recent claims about differences in innateness judgements by sex and by autism spectrum diagnosis, though testing for these differences was not the original purpose. The experiments do however confirm that the more a capacity is understood to involve thinking, the more distinctive it is considered to humans; and that capacities considered to involve more thinking are reliably considered less innate.