Exopsychology: The Psychology of No One We Ever Knew
The academic attempt to establish a psychology of alien intelligences — for whose existence we have no evidence — tells us something about ourselvesThis month’s buzz in Psychology Today is exopsychology, the psychology of extraterrestrial intelligence. Why’s that? There aren’t any such intelligences around. Never mind, we have been informed that studying them is good for our moral development anyway: For instance, rigorously challenging assumptions about extraterrestrial motivations rooted in anthropocentrism (projecting human motivations onto non-humans), might help us do a better job relating to other humans who are very different from us, or to gain a deeper understanding of animal behavior. Eric Haselstine, “Exopsychology, the Study of Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Psychology Today, November 8, 2023 It’s called anti-anthropocentrism: Imagining motivations and predicting behaviors of intelligent entities, who are wildly different from us, and who, for reasons of their own, have traveled here—either themselves Read More ›