Do people think animals have purposes? If so, do they know what those purposes are?

Recent work suggests that people think that membership in a species kind is partly shaped by the purpose of the species (Rose & Nichols 2019, 2020). But do people actually think all animals have a purpose? If they do, what kind of purpose do they think animals generally have? And what about specific kinds of animals — do people know what the particular purpose of different animal species might be? For some species people might think they know what their particular purpose is. For others, they might think the species has a purpose but not know what it is. That is, they might treat the purpose as a placeholder. Here we ask whether people think animals have purposes, what kind of purpose animals generally have, and we ask whether there are some kinds of animals that people think have purposes but don’t know what they are.