![]() ![]() Anthropomorphism of spiritual entities plays an important role in the psychology of religion ( Barrett and Keil, 1996 Shaman et al., 2018). ![]() There are a number of different reasons that researchers have begun to pursue empirical work on anthropomorphism. ![]() Despite the long history of awareness of anthropomorphism, it had gone surprisingly neglected as a topic of study in psychology until relatively recently. Going back to, arguably, the 6th century B.C.E., it has been common to describe anthropomorphism as a human tendency that is common and difficult to avoid, perhaps even compulsory and innate ( Epley, 2018). To anthropomorphize, in the broadest sense of the term, is to interpret the actions or behaviors of a nonhuman agent as if it were human. The human tendency to anthropomorphize has been a focus of increasing empirical research in the last 15 years or so. It also provides a potential measure for further exploration of implicit anthropomorphism. This demonstrates a role for automatic processes of emotion recognition in anthropomorphism. They also appear to emerge with more processing time, and the pattern was the same with human as with primate faces. These appeared to be more robust in older adults. Overall, we found consistent priming congruency effects in accuracy but not response time. Experiment 4 used human faces as control. In Experiments 1–3, we primed participants with images of nonhuman animals that appear to express happy or sad emotions, and asked participants to categorize words as positive or negative. Previous work suggests that priming with human faces displaying emotional expressions facilitated categorization of words into congruent emotion categories. In the present work, we tested for implicit components of anthropomorphism based on an affective priming paradigm. For example, the grin of a nonhuman primate often looks to us like a smile, but it actually signals a state more like fear or anxiety. However, anthropomorphism can affect how we interpret animal behavior in other ways as well. Second, they generally only track one anthropomorphic result: the attribution (or non-attribution) of a particular trait. First, they do not capture automatic components of anthropomorphism. These measures, however, have two limitations. Participants are asked whether they attribute some human-like trait to a nonhuman agent on some scale. Most of this work uses explicit measures. This tendency has only recently become a subject of empirical research. That is, we naturally and effortlessly interpret the behaviors of nonhuman agents in the same way we interpret human behaviors. It has long been recognized that humans tend to anthropomorphize. 2Department of Psychology, Colby College, Waterville, ME, United States.1Department of Philosophy, Bates College, Lewiston, ME, United States. ![]()
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