Volume 109, November 2015, Pages 167–176
Open Access
Highlights
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- We review the cognitive processes supporting mind attribution to animals.
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- Mind attributions result from a set of automatic and reflective processes.
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- Autonomously moving entities automatically engage mechanisms of social cognition.
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- Human-animal similarity affects mind attribution triggered bottom-up and top-down.
Humans
readily attribute intentionality and mental states to living and
nonliving entities, a phenomenon known as anthropomorphism. Recent
efforts to understand the driving forces behind anthropomorphism have
focused on its motivational underpinnings. By contrast, the underlying
cognitive and neuropsychological processes have not been considered in
detail so far. The marked increase in interest in anthropomorphism and
its consequences for animal welfare, conservation and even as a
potential constraint in animal behaviour research call for an
integrative review. We identify a set of potential cognitive mechanisms
underlying the attribution of mental states to nonhuman animals using a
dual process framework. We propose that mental state attributions are
supported by processes evolved in the social domain, such as motor
matching mechanisms and empathy, as well as by domain-general mechanisms
such as inductive and causal reasoning. We conclude that the activation
of these domain-specific and domain-general mechanisms depend on the
type of information available to the observer, and suggest a series of
hypotheses for testing the proposed model.
Keywords
- animals;
- anthropomorphism;
- dual process theory;
- empathy;
- reasoning;
- social cognition
It
may be considered a human universal to anthropomorphize the relevant
subjects and objects in one's environment. Anthropomorphism is defined
as the attribution of human characteristics or behaviour to any other
nonhuman entity in the environment and includes phenomena as diverse as
attributing thoughts and emotions to both domestic and wild animals, to
dressing a Chihuahua dog as a baby, or interpreting deities as human.
Several authors have addressed the multifaceted nature of
anthropomorphism (Kracher, 2002). Fisher (1991)
identified two different ways in which people engage in anthropomorphic
thinking. He defined ‘interpretative’ anthropomorphism as the
attribution of intentions, beliefs and emotions to nonhuman agents based
on their behaviour and ‘imaginative’ anthropomorphism as the
representation of imaginary and fictional characters as human-like.
Representing gods as human-like or as having human-like characteristics
such as personalities, emotions and interests is an example of what Fischer (1991)
defined as imaginative anthropomorphism. Inferring that our cat is
hungry because it sits in front of the fridge and meows or that a dog is
soliciting play when it barks at us are instances of interpretative
anthropomorphism. In this review, we focus mainly on interpretative
anthropomorphism, that is, in the attribution of mental states to other
animals. Mental states are understood here as brain events that are
causally linked to observed behaviour.
Animals
are by far the most frequent nonhuman targets of people's attribution
of mental states, perhaps because humans seem to be biophilic, that is,
instinctively and intensely interested in nature and animals (Wilson, 1984). Babies pay more attention to animals than to any other kind of object in their environment (DeLoache, Pickard, & LoBue, 2011). Even 2-day-old babies prefer to look at point light displays of biological motion to other kinds of motion (Simion, Regolin, & Bulf, 2008).
In addition, the first words children produce are nouns, including
proper names and common names of small objects, food items and animals (Nelson, 1973). Caselli et al. (1995)
using parental report data of 659 English and 195 Italian infants
between 8 and 16 months of age found that animal names and sound effects
of animals (woof, meow, quack, moo, etc.) were among the first 50 words
produced by infants. The younger the children, the more this is the
case and the greater also their interest in animals (Wedl & Kotrschal, 2009). Even among adults, living beings engage the attention of people more than objects do (New, Cosmides, & Tooby, 2007).
The evolutionary logic behind this is that paying selective attention
to other living beings is relevant for individual fitness (Barrett, 2005 and Barrett et al., 2005). Conspecifics and heterospecifics are, after all, among the strongest agents of selection for living beings (Dawkins & Krebs, 1979).
Many
consequences of anthropomorphism are known. For example, people are
more willing to pay for the conservation of animals than plants and more
for vertebrates than for invertebrates, regardless of the roles of
these organisms in ecosystem functioning or of their taxonomic
uniqueness (Martín-López, Montes, & Benayas, 2007).
A similar tendency holds even for governmental decision making: species
that are phylogenetically closer to humans or are similar in appearance
to humans receive a higher share of conservation funds and policy
attention (Martín-Forés, Martín-López, & Montes, 2013).
The closer the morphological and behavioural resemblance of animals to
humans, the more people tend to project human characteristics and, more
specifically, human mental states on them (Driscoll, 1995, Eddy et al., 1993, Harrison and Hall, 2010, Herzog and Galvin, 1997 and Nakajima et al., 2002).
Perceiving or inferring that other living beings have certain mental
states such as emotions or awareness also has important consequences for
their moral status (Gray, Gray, & Wegner, 2007). Gray et al. (2007)
found that living beings that are thought to experience emotions,
including the capacity to feel pleasure and pain, are more likely to be
attributed with moral rights. In particular, beings that are considered
intelligent and aware are held responsible for their actions (Gray et al., 2007). Linking worthiness of protection with anthropomorphic features is even common in the field of animal ethics (Singer, 1975 and Würbel, 2009).
The
debate about the nature and implications of anthropomorphism has rarely
been neutral or scientifically objective but has focused mainly on its
fallacious essence (e.g. Kennedy, 1992),
which has diverted attention away from the goal of understanding the
nature of the phenomenon. The term itself is not clearly defined and can
have multiple meanings and, most importantly, multiple implications.
For example, by labelling the attribution of jealousy to our dog as
anthropomorphic, does this mean that dogs are not capable of feeling
jealous because jealousy is an emotion that only humans can feel, or
that we cannot establish with objectivity what our dog is experiencing
because humans and dogs have a completely different ‘Innenwelt’ and
‘Umwelt’ (von Uexküll, 1909).
Both are historical theoretical positions that have long been at the
centre of the debate about anthropomorphism, but will not be addressed
here. Recent results on dog inequity aversion (Range, Horn, Viranyi, & Huber, 2009) and on the general homologies in the social brains of mammals and other vertebrates (Goodson, 2005)
hint at the possibility that much of what has been considered as
anthropomorphic interpretations may in fact do more justice to the
mental states of other animals than was previously believed. In the
present review, we focus on anthropomorphism as the result of a set of
cognitive processes, but we do not make any assumption regarding the
uniqueness or accuracy of these attributions.
