The other question regards particular features - if there are any- that nonhuman have to possess in order to elicit anthropomorphization.
Another approach addresses moral issues. It has been shown that children under certain conditions may very precociously attribute benevolent or malevolent attitudes to objects. Moreover, moral characteristics are often attributed to pets and animals in general, both to whole species and to single individuals. Furthermore, a systematized form of anthropomorphism pervades most religions, and as such is a central topic in the cognitive theories of religion.
In all the aspects reviewed so far, anthropomorphism is the object of scientific inquiry. There is also an additional perspective where anthropomorphism is analyzed as a methodological component inside a different scientific enterprise, notably in domains such as ethology and animal cognition. There is an ongoing debate among scientists about the merits or harm of anthropomorphism in the scientific study of animal behavior. Often anthropomorphism is seen as the risk of misattributing human-like abilities to non-humans, but there is also a heuristic value of a kind of "controlled" anthropomorphism in helping to predict animal behavior.
In this Research Topic we intend to take stock of the current developments of research on anthropomorphism and we are looking for manuscripts that address questions pertaining to any aspect relevant to the topic. These two concepts are distinct and at the same time strictly connected.
We could say that animism is a weaker form of anthropomorphism. However, when humans attribute life to non-humans, they often also attribute to them human mental and affective states.
To outline all of the forms that animism and anthropomorphism can take is a major task. Let us try, nevertheless, to propose some distinctions. A first phenomenon that we could define as anthropomorphism is perceptual.
Humans may identify perceptual characteristics of living beings in natural objects. For example, we can see a human face in the moon or a horse in the clouds. This form of imagination seems to be very basic in humans. Humans frequently use fantasy to go beyond sheer facts and include simple objects or images in narrative contexts, which make them appear more appealing and meaningful. However, I doubt that phenomena of this type may be considered as a form of animism or anthropomorphism rather than a simple manifestation of human imagination.
In fact, the perceptual aspect, the mere recognition of a human or animal form does not correspond to the definition of animism, even in its weaker form. After all, the recognition of human or animal features in a group of clouds is only one possibility among others. In clouds, we may see also artifacts, such as a coach, or other natural objects, such as a waterfall or a tree. The process of imaginary transformation may become particularly salient in some cases when our fantasy is elicited by strong feelings.
The fact that we can see a dangerous animal in a rock is not different from transforming an accidental noise behind us when we are walking on a dark and solitary street into the footsteps of a potential attacker. On other occasions, we can momentarily recognize in a stranger walking on the street someone that we long to see even if we know that it is not possible.
In these situations, we materialize the objects of our fears or desires. However, these are brief illusions that quickly disappear. As maintained by Guthrie , there are reasons to think that these illusions are also present in the animal world.
However, here again we are not considering a case of animism. A phenomenon of this type is simply, at least in the human world, an unintended mistake. If a person is able to recover her or his cool head, the illusion disappears, and she or he immediately recognizes the misinterpretation.
Thus, contrary to Guthrie, I consider that anthropomorphism - also in its weaker form, i. Just seeing a human face in the moon is not an attribution of intentional life. What may transform our imagining the moon as a face from a simple fantasy into an anthropomorphic experience is the fact that we attribute an intentional stance to that face. We can imagine, for instance, that the moon looks back at us and that attitude could be defined as animistic.
Anthropomorphism would appear, for instance, when, once this attribution of a simple intentional state is realized, we may start to think that the face shares our sadness or happiness or that it questions us, or we may even see it as menacing or foolishly indifferent to our feelings.
Following this approach, one may say that even in the case of threatening events such as a thunderstorm, fire, or disease, it is not the event itself that is anthropomorphized but rather the relation that a person establishes with it.
The language used is explicitly intentional, and this justifies an equally intentional response. The personification of fatal diseases transforms the period of illness that a person painfully endures into a fight and death into the heroic fall in a battle. In a radio broadcast, a high-level athlete who had to interrupt her activity due to physical problems described her coming back to competition as the result of her managing making a deal with her body that was personified and observed as separate from her.
What we have said about natural facts or events is much more evident when we analyze the other possible objects of anthropomorphization, i. Not surprisingly, robots or computers are the mechanisms that we most anthropomorphize, as they are purposefully constructed to interact with humans Airenti, b. We may also anthropomorphize objects that we see as obstacles to our action, such as a door that does not open.
We may even curse the door as if it intentionally resisted our attempts to open it. In fact, cooperation and hindering are connected, as we feel as an obstacle the fact that something that should cooperate with us actually does not. A door should be cooperative and let itself be opened.
Thus, any object that can cooperate with us or hinder our activity may be the target of an anthropomorphic attitude.
Finally, humans may anthropomorphize animals. For animals, the process of anthropomorphization is more subtle because animals are living beings and do have cognitive capacities. The study of animal cognition, which assesses cognitive abilities across species and their similarities with humans, poses many methodological problems.
However, it is largely accepted that animals have cognitive systems Andrews, Most animals experience pain-like states Bateson, ; Sneddon et al. Thus, the attribution of a mental life to animals is not completely due to anthropomorphism. However, the interesting point here is that the anthropomorphization of animals does not always occur, and it is often difficult to explain why the process of anthropomorphization is enacted in certain cases and not in others.
Eddy et al. It seems natural that a higher level of anthropomorphization is triggered by pets, who are often considered companions with whom one can share her or his life. In fact, it has been shown that ownership of animals influences the reporting of emotions in animals, in particular secondary emotions Morris et al.
A study has shown that ownership of birds, rabbits, and rodents significantly increases the number of emotions that are attributed to those species Wilkins et al. However, this study also showed that emotions are not consistently attributed even among mammals. The great majority of the participants also attributed secondary emotions to dogs. Only a few attributed them to cows. This result can be explained by the fact that in modern urban life, dogs are pets and cows are not.
At the same time, participants also attributed emotions to animals that society either destroys as pests or keeps to use. Also, unexpectedly, Podberscek found that South Koreans might be in favor of keeping dogs as pets and at the same time against a ban on dog eating.
On the other hand, most South Korean people were against both eating cats and keeping them as pets. Thus, evidence shows that humans are rather incoherent in their attitudes toward animals. This disparity is supported by the fact that, as it has been shown, anthropomorphism is explained more by affection than by simple ownership. Increased attachment levels result in the increased use of emotive terms to describe animal behavior Kiesler et al. Other studies have shown that owners attribute advanced human capabilities and emotions to their own animals but not to animals owned by others Fidler et al.
Thus, it appears that it is our relation to the animals that influences our beliefs about their human-likeness and not the other way around.
This conclusion shows that even in the case of animals, which are living beings and thus most susceptible to being anthropomorphized, it is not the belief for instance, regarding the existence of secondary emotions among them that causes our attribution of human-like characteristics. The belief comes a posteriori , and it is often difficult to arrange it in a coherent and rational manner.
It can also be noted that usually, transforming attitudes toward different animals into a coherent system of beliefs is not considered necessary.
Inconsistencies are manifest only when researchers induce subjects to provide explicit judgments in experimental situations. In the literature, the problem of anthropomorphism toward animals is particularly debated due to the moral issues that it involves.
My aim is to outline the emergence and development of anthropomorphism to better comprehend how it manifests in different situations and toward different objects. The most salient fact that appears from the brief summary provided above is that humans may anthropomorphize almost any object, event, or animal. The characteristics of these entities are too disparate to provide an explanation for anthropomorphism.
If the similarity is not in the entities that are the target of the process of anthropomorphization, we have to investigate the relational context in which anthropomorphism is activated. To pursue this aim, I will now analyze the beginning of anthropomorphism in young children.
He maintained that children have a spontaneous animist attitude that develops through different stages until around the age of The first, lasting until the ages of 4 and 5, is characterized by what he calls an integral and implicit animism. In the successive period, implicit animism progressively disappears, and the process of systematization begins to follow discernable stages.
It is in this period that it is possible to question the child. The sun and moon take an interest in us ibid. One important point is how Piaget obtained his data about children. He asked them questions about their beliefs.
Most of the children he questioned, including some to year-olds, gave similar answers. He put them in a position to search for responses to questions they would never had spontaneously posed to themselves.
Therefore, they had to strive to find a solution to contradictions they did not imagine. However, the similarity of responses produced by children of the same age made him confident about the reliability of his results. What does it mean that the first form of animism is implicit and integral in young children?
For Piaget, at the beginning, children do not distinguish their own mental life from the external world. They think that everything in the world shares their own subjective life; between the self and the external world, there is indissociation.
Actually, children described all moving objects as conscious and every event as intentional. Natural objects are either good or naughty according to their activity; for instance, the rain may be naughty and the light nice. Later, children develop a systematic animism, i. These beliefs are based on the principle of introjection. In this phase, when pushed to explain their animistic beliefs — for instance, that the sun follows them when they walk — children try to find reasons, to manage contradictions, etc.
Later, when children develop causal thinking, they free themselves from this form of irrational reasoning. Members of such societies, according to him, are completely dominated by respect for tradition and do not develop the cooperation that in advanced societies allows children to overcome egocentrism.
As a consequence, they never attain, even as adults, the stage of rational thinking Piaget, As we have observed in the previous section, adults practice many forms of anthropomorphism, and anthropomorphism is involved in most religious thinking in all societies.
Thus, it is difficult to attribute it to confusion between the self and the other, to egocentrism, and, in general, to underdeveloped reasoning abilities. Another point concerns the distinction made by Piaget between two forms of animism and attributed by him to different stages of development. If it rains on a day when I planned gardening, I will most likely address the rain as if it were naughty and as if it intentionally hindered my activity.
The developmental path from indissociation to introjection is rather obscure, and it appears that there is no clear distinction between the first forms of animism and the manifestations of introjection that Piaget attributes to the phase of systematization. In all cases, Piaget refers to beliefs that children entertain.
These ideas are presented as explicit beliefs or at least as beliefs that become explicit when children must answer questions about them. I argue that the adoption of the concept of belief, both implicit and explicit, in these situations must be analyzed in more detail. We do not expect that this would be the case for an adult in the same circumstances.
Moreover, the fact that things are different from what they appear to be is something that must be learned. For centuries, humans believed that the sun goes around the earth, and according of a survey performed by the American National Science Foundation in reported by Time , one in four Americans questioned about this topic gave the incorrect answer.
Connected with what is presented above, there is a third question posed by Piaget himself. The similarity between adults and children would be only apparent because children take literally what for adults are only metaphors. Developmental research has shown that this is not the case, at least with respect to the distinction between physical and mental objects.
Children by age 3 may use physical language to describe mental phenomena as adult do , but they are aware of their different natures. A real object can be touched, whereas the thought or memory of the same object cannot be Wellman, Thus also in the case of animism, we should be cautious to attribute a belief using mere linguistic evidence.
Actually, in his analysis of anthropomorphism, he never mentions pretense. He considers animism as an underdeveloped form of thinking, and he does not contemplate the connection that it might have with the world, so important for children, of pretense and fantasy. In pretend play, children attribute at least animacy, but often also mental and affective states, to puppets, dolls, stuffed animals, fictional characters, and even simpler objects, such as blocks or pebbles.
The fact that children at 18 months start to deal with narrative and fantasy situations in which intentionality and other mental and affective states are attributed to non-humans is possibly connected to other forms of animism that children perform.
Moreover, young children are often involved in relations with house pets that they consider as companions and with whom they play. It must also be stressed that these forms of animism are often favored by adults who consider them suitable for children.
In conclusion, are we confronted with different forms of anthropomorphism implicit and explicit, for instance in the cognitive development of the child? Do we have to appreciate the role played by language?
Is there a relationship with pretend play? Actually, anthropomorphism is a much more pervasive attitude that starts early and persists in different manners throughout life. Moreover, it plays an important part in the interactions between children and adults. The tendency to interpret in human terms very simple objects in motion has been demonstrated in a long experimental tradition since the seminal work of Heider and Simmel They showed subjects a brief film in which three geometrical figures — a large triangle, a small triangle, and a circle — appeared, moving in different directions and at different speeds.
The only other figure in the field was a rectangle, a section of which could be opened and closed. When asked to describe the scene, most subjects interpreted the movements of the geometrical figures as the actions of human beings and as part of a connected story.
These results were replicated with adults Oatley and Yuill, and children Berry and Springer, ; Springer et al. Montgomery and Montgomery showed that by the age of 3, children inferred goals from the movement of balls and distinguished goals from the outcomes of the acts.
Gergely et al. Researchers have tried to identify the visual cues that produce the effect of animacy and to elucidate the relation between perception and higher-level forms of inference Dasser et al. However, for the present argument, the point is that when seeing forms in coherent motion, humans since a very young age naturally attribute to them intentionality and reciprocal interactions; for instance, they think that a figure is chasing another or tries to join it.
Along the same lines are the results of experiments regarding the development of sociomoral evaluation in infants. In this experimental paradigm, infants viewed a colored wooden block with eyes attempting to achieve a goal, i. The attempt could be facilitated or hindered by another block, who pushed the protagonist up or down the hill.
This experimental paradigm in all its variations has allowed for the formulation of very interesting hypotheses about intuitive morality in infants Wynn and Bloom, ; Van de Vondervoort and Hamlin, The evaluations are made possible by the fact that infants naturally attribute good or evil intentions to geometrical objects moving on a screen. Let us focus on the developmental path. If we compare the interpretations of the movements of simple objects made by adults with those made by children, the difference between them seems to be only in terms of complexity.
However, the anthropomorphic attribution is present in both groups. A particularly interesting point is that the language used to describe these situations is affected.
As we have observed in the studies with infants mentioned above, the researchers themselves describe the experimental situation using anthropomorphic language, a block pushing the other up or down. Thus, not only the experimental subjects but also the authors of the studies and the readers are involved in anthropomorphic attribution.
We find exceptions to anthropomorphic interpretation of objects in motion only in clinical groups, such as persons with autism spectrum disorders Abell et al. A fundamental feature of anthropomorphism that appears already in infancy is the fact that in these interactions, two possible roles are attributed to the actors.
According to the age of the subjects, this simple dichotomic distinction may appear at different levels of elaboration, but it is still present in adult anthropomorphization of objects.
As said before, in everyday life, we expect that objects cooperate with us to ensure the success of our activities. One can address it and invite it to be more collaborative or blame it as an obstacle to achieving the intended goal, for example.
The analysis of the geometrical objects in motion may be pursued further. The original experiment showed that adults were very easily induced to connect the simple acts performed by the figures and construct stories. This observation means that even the simplest situations may trigger the process of imagination.
The geometrical figures are not only perceived as acting in a manner related to each other but also attributed mental and affective states.
In this case, the adults were exercising an ability that begins with children as young as 12 months in pretend play Fein, Pretense in children involves both anthropomorphization and imagination. Young children may naturally produce situations similar to the ones proposed in the experiments mentioned before, for instance, using colored blocks to represent objects and imagine simple stories involving them.
They anthropomorphize and construct stories with stuffed animals, puppets, and dolls. However, even when young children anthropomorphize the objects with which they play, they are not confused about their status.
It has been shown that at least by age 3, children distinguish reality from pretense Woolley and Wellman, ; Harris, ; Ma and Lillard, and that differences between children and adults reflect a continuous development Woolley, The use of anthropomorphization of animals for children has been recently questioned in the literature, and a number of studies have shown that it does not necessarily enhance early learning Richert et al.
From a theoretical point of view, the question is whether anthropomorphism is a natural form of thinking typical of young children that evolves in later years, as maintained by Carey , or instead if it develops under the influence of adults and the cultural milieu. In this debate, the term anthropomorphism is often replaced by anthropocentrism to stress the fact that using human categories to understand other biological entities leads to mistaken representations.
According to Carey, young children reason about animals from an anthropocentric point of view that is later abandoned due to a conceptual change. It seems to be absent, for instance, in rural cultures Medin et al.
Additionally, in urban cultures, it is not present at 3 years of age but rather develops later Herrmann et al. What these studies show is that there is not a universal developmental stage that involves the extension of anthropomorphic features to unknown biological entities.
Anthropomorphism is an attitude that children acquire in urban societies in which animals are not part of everyday life except as pets and companions. The evidence presented in this section leads us to some conclusions about the human tendency for anthropomorphism. There are aspects of anthropomorphism that seem to be universal and that emerge very early in development. Let us summarize them. As we have observed, adults have no vocabulary other than anthropomorphic terms for these situations.
This is more than a linguistic problem. Intentionality is the best model that humans have to describe these situations. One entity is perceived as trying to join or escape another, for instance. Thus, another anthropomorphic concept seems to be unavoidable, relation. Entities in a defined space that move in a coherent manner are related to one another as if they were human beings. One entity may collaborate with another or be perceived as an obstacle.
Again, this is true for children and for adults. Objects are perceived as helpers or hinderers. Thus, even in the simplest relational contexts, we do not find animism but rather anthropomorphism. Note that there is nothing in the object itself that makes it adapted to be anthropomorphized, nor is there any particular belief leading to anthropomorphic attribution of mentality. Anthropomorphism is grounded in the relation. Infants already distinguish the two situations and exhibit a preference for the cooperative object over the non-cooperative one.
Although anthropomorphism may on occasion be a source of useful hypotheses about animal behaviour, acknowledging this does not concede the general utility of an anthropomorphic approach to animal behaviour. John Staddon's model of animal short-term memory likens the process of forgetting to fluid leaking from buckets.
But the utility of this model does not point to any general similarity between animal memory and fluid in buckets. Certainly, attempts to explain complex behaviour in terms of simple mechanisms can become highly convoluted. But to argue that mentalistic accounts are simpler is, as Mark Blumberg and Ed Wasserman point out, to commit the nominal fallacy — to believe that giving something a name is the same as explaining it.
Consider the dance language of honeybees that impressed Griffin as possible evidence of consciousness. Foraging bees communicate the direction, distance and quality of a nectar source to their hive-mates.
Honeybees communicate only three dimensions of experience, and only about two things nectar sources and potential hive sites. Human communication is, in principle, unlimited in the number of dimensions of experience it can convey. To point out that if people were to communicate about nectar sources, we would do so consciously, offers no clue as to how bees might do it. Analogies at least as useful in understanding honeybee communication can be found in the activity of networked computers unconsciously establishing communication protocols.
Old-time behaviourism may have imposed excessive constraints on animal psychology. But the reintroduction of anthropomorphism risks bringing back the dirty bathwater as we rescue the baby.
The study of animal behaviour is not so mature that it can thoughtlessly reject analogies from any source. But progress will surely be most rapid when we adopt explanatory frameworks that are concrete and unambiguous. Anthropomorphism, even critical or animal-centred, cannot offer that constructive basis. Blumberg, M. De Waal, F. Article Google Scholar. Mitchell, R. Anthropomorphism, Anecdotes and Animals State Univ.
New York Press, New York, Google Scholar. Wynne, C. Do Animals Think? Princeton Univ.
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