It's not clear to me that categorising or treating things as conscious is innate/genetic/whatever. This seems like exactly the kind of relatively easy empirical question of human nature where anthropology can just come along and sucker-punch you with a society that has no conception of consciousness.

In general, I think this heuristic is very weak evidence; belief in the supernatural and acceptance of fake or epiphenomenal explanations are mistakes to which humans and their societies are reliably prone. (In fact, if I had to try to name things that wouldn't get me sucker-punched by anthropology when I claimed them as universal to human cultures, then belief in the supernatural and fake explanations might be near the top of the list.)