The iconic symbol of Mister Rogers was his trademark cardigan. Over the course of his career, he actually wore twenty-four, knitted by his mother. One of those cardigans is now on display at the Smithsonian Institution’s Museum of American History. Such is the reverence for Mister Rogers. No one could be more different from Fred West.
In a study of supernatural contagion, researchers wanted to know whether children would consider the cardigan of Mister Rogers a special garment imbued with his goodness.17 First they were shown two identical cardigans and told that one had belonged to Mister Rogers. They were then shown a picture of another child who did not know that one cardigan belonged to the famous man, and they were asked if wearing each cardigan would make the child look, feel, or behave differently. The youngest children, the four- to five-year-olds, did not think that wearing Mister Rogers’ cardigan would have any effect. Yet when asked the same questions, six- to eight-year-old children showed the beginnings of magical contagion by saying that the child would behave differently and feel more special. They also thought that something of Mister Rogers would pass from the cardigan.
The most remarkable result, however, was not from children but rather from twenty, mostly female, adult students. Most thought there would be an effect of wearing Mister Rogers’ cardigan in a child who did not know who it belonged to. Four out of five adults thought that the essence of Mister Rogers was in the garment, even though they themselves did not particularly want to wear it. This shows that there is a developing supersense when it comes to positive contamination that is a reverse of the Fred West cardigan effect. Both good and evil are perceived to be tangible essences that can be transmitted through items of clothing and contaminate them, and this belief strengthens as we grow older.
THE PRESTIGE
One of my favorite recent movies is The Prestige.18 It’s the story of two rival Victorian magicians who try to outperform each other with the ultimate stage illusion known as ‘the Transported Man’. Both perfect variations where the magician is apparently instantly transported from one location to another. ‘The prestige’ is the illusory effect. The two men achieve this effect in different ways. One of them, Alfred Borden, uses the same principle of our copy box experiments and has his otherwise unknown identical brother appear at the second location just at the right time so that it looks like the first brother has been instantly transported. The other magician, Rupert Angier, uses his wealth to recruit the brilliance of the mysterious and enigmatic Nikola Tesla, a real-life maverick genius of the time, to build him an actual copying machine that duplicates the magician at the second location.19 In the movie, Tesla achieves what our copy box only pretends to do. Of course, it’s a work of fiction, but theoretical physicists have argued that it could be possible to teleport an object by decoding its physical information at one location and sending that information to reconfigure matter at the other end. This would create two versions of the object. Duplication is all very well and fine for inanimate objects, but what about copying real people? How would we cope with an identical copy of ourselves? In the movie, Rupert Angier solves the problem by drowning the original each time he duplicates himself. I think that this is an unlikely scenario. Not many people would willingly kill themselves so that an identical copy could live on for the rest of their lives. Still, The Prestige raises really interesting questions about duplicated bodies and minds.
We cannot easily conceive of ourselves as being copied exactly. This stems from our increasing sense of dualism that I described in chapter 5. Physical states may be copied, but not mental ones. As children, we understand our own minds before we appreciate that others also have unique minds. With development, we become aware of our own minds as being unique and what makes us who we are. The possibility of exact duplication of our own minds is an affront to the sense of self. If we consider ourselves unique – and let’s face it, we all do – then the possibility that someone else shares exactly the same mind would mean that we no longer have our own unique identity. We would be exact clones. This is why having an identical twin who looks the same is a bit weird but ultimately not a problem. However, having a twin with exactly the same mind would be. We are happy to consider simple animals such as aphids as clones because we generally don’t attribute minds to insects. The difference arises with animals that we think may have minds. This is much more worrying, and the reason human cloning is so repulsive to most.
We decided to investigate the origins of these intuitions with a live animal that we apparently instantly copied.20 We introduced six-year-olds to our pet hamster. We told the children three invisible physical things and three mental states about the hamster. We said that the hamster had a marble in his tummy, had a blue heart, and had a missing tooth. Note that we chose three properties that could not be directly seen. We did this because we wanted to compare invisible physical properties with three mental states, which are, by their very nature, invisible to others. We then induced three mental states of mind in the hamster. We asked the children to tickle the hamster, show it a picture they had drawn, and whisper their name in its ear. Each child understood that the hamster would remember each of these events. We then placed the hamster in the copy machine. When the second box activated, it was opened to reveal a second identical hamster. The question of interest was: which, if any, of the invisible states would the child think were present in the second animal?
FIG. 21: Then there were two. The copy box machine apparently duplicates a living hamster. AUTHOR’S COLLECTION.
One-third of the children thought the second hamster was absolutely identical on all properties, and one-third thought it was completely different, sharing none of the same properties. The remaining children reported that while the invisible physical properties had copied (the missing tooth, the blue heart, and the marble in the tummy), the mental states had not. Children were beginning to draw a distinction between physical and mental properties and the possibility of duplication. Just to check, we repeated the study with a digital camera that recorded events such as hearing a name and seeing a picture. We also said that the camera contained blue batteries, had a marble inside, and had a broken catch. When we produced a second identical camera from the copying machine, all of the children thought that all properties had been readily duplicated. Likewise, if the original hamster was simply ‘transported’ from one box to the other, children thought that everything remained intact. Duplication was the problem.
What do these findings tell us? First, children believe that the machine can copy objects faithfully but are less inclined to believe that this is true in the case of a living hamster. They draw a distinction between duplicates of inanimate objects and living animals. In particular, most children think that a copied animal would be different from the original. If anything is copied, it is more likely to be something physical rather than something mental. This suggests that children see living things as more unique than artefacts on the basis of nonphysical properties. This fits with the quiggle study I described earlier.
What if we had copied a real person? I bet that most of the children would not have regarded the copy as having the same mind. After all, would you? Paul and I are still considering whether we would ever be allowed to duplicate a child’s mother. Whether this study is ever conducted or not, we strongly predict that children would not readily accept a duplicated mother as a suitable replacement for the original any more than they would accept a copied attachment object. That’s because people are also seen as having a unique essential identity. Let me end with a warning about what happens when we lose our capacity to essentialize the world.