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AI can respond in human-like ways without people judging it as equally conscious as a person. In five preregistered experiments involving 1,092 participants in the UK, people rated human agents as more conscious than artificial agents, even when their described responsiveness was similar. But judgments of awareness rose with responsiveness for both.
What the 2026 study found
The study, “AI is not as conscious as humans: Essentialism in mental state attributions to artificial systems,” was published online in Cognition on October 1, 2026. Across two preregistered study sets comprising five experiments, participants read scenarios about human or artificial agents. The agents varied in how responsive they were to spatial, social, and temporal features. Participants then rated their consciousness and awareness, either separately or together.
The results differed by judgment and agent type:
- Consciousness: At comparable levels of responsiveness, participants attributed more consciousness to human agents than artificial ones.
- Awareness: Ratings increased with responsiveness for both human and artificial agents.
In other words, making an artificial agent seem responsive did not erase the gap in consciousness ratings. Responsiveness mattered more consistently for awareness judgments.
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In this context, consciousness refers to subjective experience: what it is like to be a system. Awareness ratings in the experiments tracked how agents responded to features in the scenarios. A system can appear responsive without that behavior establishing that it has subjective experience.
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The distinction matters when interpreting claims such as “the chatbot understood me” or “it seemed aware.” Those descriptions may reflect a person’s impression of the system’s behavior. They do not by themselves show that the person believes the system has an inner experience, or that it actually does.
How the findings compare with a 2024 survey about LLMs
A 2024 study by Christina Colombatto and Stephen M. Fleming surveyed 300 U.S. residents about whether large language models could have phenomenal consciousness. Its abstract reports that a majority were willing to allow some possibility of such experience. The researchers explained phenomenal consciousness before asking about it, defining the idea around subjective experience.
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One figure from the survey requires particular care: 23% of participants placed ChatGPT above the midpoint on a scale of human-like experience, if the scale is interpreted as measuring credence. The authors note that respondents may instead have understood the scale as a measure of degree, and that explaining phenomenal consciousness could have prompted people to consider the possibility. So 23% is not a general measure of how many people believe AI is conscious.
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The survey and the 2026 experiments do not produce a direct contradiction. The 2024 survey asked about ChatGPT’s possible phenomenal experience after explaining the concept; the later experiments compared ratings of human and artificial agents described in scenarios. They involved different populations, prompts, measures, and comparisons, so their results should not be combined into a single yes-or-no statistic about public opinion.
Human-like descriptions of AI do not prove belief in consciousness
A 2025 study in Communications Psychology analyzed more than 12,000 metaphors from a nationally representative U.S. sample. Responses were collected between May 2023 and August 2024, and the study found that descriptions of AI grew more human-like and warm after ChatGPT’s introduction.
That finding provides context for why people may describe or experience AI in human terms, but it did not measure whether they believed AI had subjective experience. The study examined broad public conceptions, did not distinguish every type of AI tool, and did not assess AI literacy.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.What these studies can—and cannot—tell us
These studies measure people’s judgments about described or named AI systems. They do not test whether an AI system actually has subjective experience, and they do not settle the philosophical or scientific question of machine consciousness.
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The central takeaway is narrower: human-like responsiveness can influence how people judge an AI’s awareness, but it does not necessarily make them judge the AI as conscious to the same degree as a human.
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