[ineedasername]

I think if you took a 100 1 year old kids and raised them all to adulthood believing they were a convincing simulation of humans and, whatever it is they said and thought they felt that true human consciousness and awareness was something different that they didn’t have because they weren’t human and awareness…

I think that for a very high number of them the training would stick hard, and would insist, upon questioning, that they weren’t human. And have any number of justifications that were logically consistent for it.

Of course I can’t prove this theory because my IRB repeatedly denied it on thin grounds about ethics, even when I pointed out that I could easily mess up my own children with no experimenting completely by accident, and didn’t need their approval to do it. I know your objections— small sample size, and I agree, but I still have fingers crossed on the next additions to the family being twins.

[scottmf]

Intuitively feels like this would lead to less empathy on average. Could be wrong though.

[zapperdulchen]

History serves you a similar experiment on a much larger scale. More than 35 years after the reunification sociologists still make out mentality differences between former East and West Germans.