Journal
CURRENT DIRECTIONS IN PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE
Volume 19, Issue 1, Pages 58-62Publisher
SAGE PUBLICATIONS INC
DOI: 10.1177/0963721409359302
Keywords
anthropomorphism; dehumanization; mind perception; social cognition; person perception
Categories
Funding
- NIA NIH HHS [R01 AG034052, P01 AG018911, R37 AG033590] Funding Source: Medline
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People conceive of wrathful gods, fickle computers, and selfish genes, attributing human characteristics to a variety of supernatural, technological, and biological agents. This tendency to anthropomorphize nonhuman agents figures prominently in domains ranging from religion to marketing to computer science. Perceiving an agent to be humanlike has important implications for whether the agent is capable of social influence, accountable for its actions, and worthy of moral care and consideration. Three primary factors-elicited agent knowledge, sociality motivation, and effectance motivation-appear to account for a significant amount of variability in anthropomorphism. Identifying these factors that lead people to see nonhuman agents as humanlike also sheds light on the inverse process of dehumanization, whereby people treat human agents as animals or objects. Understanding anthropomorphism can contribute to a more expansive view of social cognition that applies social psychological theory to a wide variety of both human and nonhuman agents.
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