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Our relationships with other animals are governed by how we view their capacity for sentience and suffering. However, there is currently little agreement as to whether people's beliefs about animal minds are largely accurate or inaccurate. We used an innovative task to examine how people update their beliefs in response to noisy but informative clues about animal minds. This allowed us to compare participants' posterior beliefs to what a normative participant ought to believe if they conform to Bayes' theorem. Five studies (four pre-registered; n = 2417) found that participants shifted their beliefs too far in response to clues that suggested animals do not have minds (i.e., overshooting what a normative participant ought to believe), but not far enough in response to clues that suggested animals have minds (i.e., falling short of what a normative participant ought to believe). A final study demonstrated that this effect was …