14 DAY TRIAL // As you all know, people tend to give names to a whole bunch of things, and also to attribute human characteristics to things that have no correlation with being human whatsoever. Following this, we've come to a point where we complain of a sick economy, while fearing a hurricane named after a person, and walking around in the cold with sweater-enabled Chihuahuas. Some dress their dogs like superheroes, or even the Enterprise, and one could logically argue that these people don't know the difference between what is living and what is not. But psychologists and anthropologists provide us with a clear explanation as to why this is happening, LiveScience reports.
According to Harvard University psychology research Adam Waytz, people are perfectly capable of understanding what makes a person from a biological standpoint. But when looking at the same thing psychologically, the differences blur, and the regular classifications are broken apart. One of the main reasons that Waytz and his team identified for this type of behavior is the fact that naming things, and endowing them with exclusively-human traits, makes us feel more in tune with our environment, and therefore more capable of controlling. It's the idea that matters, scientists say, as no one can have control over all the factors in their environment. But the feeling of power is enough to propagate the use of this approach.
Allocating human traits to non-humans is a process called anthropomorphism, which roughly translates into making something look human. For a number of years, experts have tried to make sense whether it’s correct to compare a dog to a toaster in terms of human qualities, but the Harvard team took a new approach to the issue. The experts wanted to know what is it that makes people anthropomorphize objects. They learned that most of the reasons for this were directly linked to selfishness. In unexpected situations, such as, for example, when you car is broken, or the Internet connection is down, a certain feeling of being disconnected might develop, the group says.
“One way to make sense of it is to treat it like something familiar, which is the human form. We have this need to belong and to affiliate. When people are deprived of connections with other humans, they'll form connections with non-humans through anthropomorphism. There may be nothing like the real thing, But that's a question that we want to test in the future,” says Waytz. Details of his work appear in the latest issue of the scientific journal Current Directions in Psychological Science.
“Whether we are concerned about the treatment of disadvantaged minorities, or the protection of endangered species, anthropomorphism is profoundly important, because it tells us when we treat them with fairness, dignity, and compassion, and when we fail to do so. This work is bringing much-needed attention to this topic,” adds University of British Columbia social psychologist Ara Norenzayan, who was not a part of the investigation.