From artifacts to human lives: Investigating the domain-generality of judgments about purposes.

People attribute purposes in both mundane and profound ways-such as when thinking about the purpose of a knife and the purpose of a life. In three studies (total = 13,720 observations from = 3,430 participants), we tested whether these seemingly very different forms of purpose attributions might actually involve the same cognitive processes. We examined the impacts of four factors on purpose attributions in six domains (artifacts, social institutions, animals, body parts, sacred objects, and human lives).