For the animal subscale, the linear model produced a significant fit, F(6,78) = 2.57, p = 0.03, R 2 = 0.17, that was not significantly improved by the quadratic model (**Table 3**). After controlling for the significant effects of age, significant differences

2: Frequency2

2, p = 0.04), but not compared with children with toy ICs (Model 1: Moderator 1, p = 0.48). Role play frequency was not a significant predictor, nor was the interaction of frequency with role play type. Notably, the significant effect of role play type on anthropomorphism of animals diverges from the non-significant ANCOVA results. As noted above, the non-significant ANCOVA results may have resulted from insufficient power. A post hoc power analysis on the linear regression using G∗Power (Faul et al., 2007) with four predictors and an effect size of f 2 = 0.3 indicated observed power of 0.99, suggesting that the different statistical outcomes were due to power issues that were resolved in the regression. Finally, on the overall scale, the curvilinear (quadratic) model

produced the best fit, F(6,78) = 3.03, p = 0.04, R

(**Table 3**). There was a significant curvilinear relation between frequency of engagement and overall anthropomorphism (Model

when comparing children with invisible ICs to those with toy ICs (Model 2: Freq.2 × Mod. 1, p = 0.04) and those who impersonated (Model 2: Freq.2 × Mod. 2, p = 0.004). Evidence of the curvilinear relation between role play frequency and overall anthropomorphism as moderated by role play type is illustrated

, p = 0.02). Role play type moderated that relation

were found in animal anthropomorphism between children with invisible ICs and those who impersonated (Model 1: Moderator

significant for each type of role play. Children with invisible ICs had a significant U-shaped curvilinear relation, b = 0.11 [0.01, 0.21], t(2,15) = 2.26, p = 0.04, evidenced by a slight negative association between frequency of role play and overall anthropomorphism at low frequency of role play that became stronger and positive as frequency of role play increased from moderate to high. However, on the overall scale, there were no significant relations (linear or curvilinear) for children with toy ICs (ps > 0.65) or those who impersonated (ps > 0.21). Given that the overall scale disproportionately weights the eight technology and inanimate nature items relative to the four animal items, it is not surprising that the overall scale more closely resembles the Technology-Nature subscale than the Animal subscale.

### DISCUSSION

## General Discussion

The present study provides initial evidence of a meaningful relation between children's role play and anthropomorphism. This work marks a preliminary step toward addressing the question of whether role play and anthropomorphism are related, and potentially rely on a common simulation process of imagining others' minds and internal states. Harris (1992, 2000) has argued that pretense (in the form of role play) involves a dual-process of simulating and projecting internal states, whether projecting others' imagined mental states onto oneself (impersonation) or projecting imagined personalities onto a stuffed animal or invisible friend (ICs). We propose that anthropomorphism similarly involves the process of simulation and projection of internal states onto non-human others (e.g., animals, inanimate nature, or technologies). As an initial step in addressing this question, we reasoned that if role play and anthropomorphism involve a similar underlying process of simulation and projection of internal states and minds, then there should be a correspondence between children's tendency to engage in role play and their tendency to anthropomorphize. Moreover, higher forms of role play should be related to attributing internal states to the least likely candidates (i.e., inanimate nature and technology), as both would involve greater imaginative processes.

The results from this study provide preliminary evidence consistent with our predictions. First, our findings indicate that the imaginative act of impersonation (i.e., pretending to be another entity) was positively related to anthropomorphism in general, and specifically the anthropomorphism of inanimate nature and technology. That is, children who impersonated more broadly across entities (animals, people, and/or machines) were more likely to anthropomorphize, especially inanimate nature and technologies. Whereas children who were more restrictive in who or what they impersonated tended to anthropomorphize less. Said differently, as this finding is correlational, children who more readily anthropomorphized were more likely to impersonate animals, people, and/or machines, and those who anthropomorphized less were less likely to impersonate.

Second, the results suggest that anthropomorphizing animals versus technology and inanimate nature may require

2 = 0.19

fpsyg-09-02140 November 9, 2018 Time: 16:30 # 10

differing degrees of imagination. Consider that animals provide numerous cues of agency and internal states (e.g., face, animate movement) – what has been termed 'target triggers' (Waytz et al., 2013) – and therefore may necessitate a lower level of imagination in order to attribute internal states. On the other hand, inanimate nature and technology lack such external cues of agency and internal states (i.e., target triggers), and therefore may require greater levels of imagination in order to attribute internal states. Given that, it is not surprising that children anthropomorphized animals more than technology and inanimate nature. Yet, over and above these differences, we found a pattern of results that suggest individual differences in role play may reflect differences in the degree to which children tap into the simulation process. That is, children who more readily imagine (or simulate) others' mental states do so both in the context of role play and anthropomorphism.

The evidence in support of this suggestion comes in two forms. First, let us consider the differences found in anthropomorphism by role play type. The regression analysis indicated differences in anthropomorphism of animals by role play type: Although children with invisible ICs did not differ significantly from those with toy ICs, children with invisible ICs anthropomorphized animals significantly more than those who impersonated (recall that the ANCOVA was underpowered to statistically detect these group differences although the pattern was consistent with the regression analysis).

We also found differences by role play type in the anthropomorphism of technology and inanimate nature. Here, children with invisible ICs were more likely than those with toy ICs to anthropomorphize technology and inanimate nature. Arguably, children with invisible ICs are more advanced in their imaginative abilities, as an invisible IC lies completely within the realm of imagination. On the other hand, children with toy ICs may be constrained in their imaginative possibilities by the physical features of the toy, and as a result tap into the simulation process to a lesser degree. In line with this reasoning, Tahiroglu et al. (2011) found that 5-year-olds with invisible ICs demonstrated advanced imagery abilities compared to those with toy ICs. Moreover, children with invisible ICs have better theory of mind (Taylor and Carlson, 1997) and mental representation abilities (Taylor et al., 1993). Yet, we also found that children who exclusively impersonated (and did not have a toy or invisible IC) anthropomorphized technology and inanimate nature to nearly the same degree as children with invisible ICs. This finding appears counter to our expectation that more sophisticated forms of role play should be associated with greater tendencies to anthropomorphize. However, further consideration suggests this piece of evidence may be consistent with our premise. That is, children who exclusively engaged in impersonation are not bound in the personas they simulate. In any moment, they might pretend to be an astronaut, a rhinoceros, or a Martian. As a result, impersonators may be readily tapping into the simulation process as they impersonate a broad array of characters.

The second piece of evidence comes from our finding that children who most frequently engaged with their invisible ICs had the highest rates of anthropomorphizing technology and inanimate nature compared to all other role play groups. This finding suggests that the repetitive engagement in simulating and projecting mental states in one context may lead children to more readily engage in the simulation process in other contexts (role play to anthropomorphism, or vice versa). Intriguingly, the frequency of role play alone was not explanatory, rather the association between frequency and anthropomorphism (overall and technology-nature) depended upon the form of role play. Recall from the regression analysis that children with invisible ICs anthropomorphized technology and inanimate nature more as their frequency in engagement in this form of role play increased from moderate to high. However, children with toy ICs had only modest increases in anthropomorphism when their engagement in role play increased in frequency. Why might this be the case? Consider again our argument above that the form of role play may differentially draw upon the child's imaginative abilities. Children with invisible ICs are completely unbound in the characters they create, and as a result may engage most substantively in the simulation process. As a result of greater imaginative abilities, in the absence of target triggers, these children may be better equipped or more inclined to 'fill in the blanks' with inanimate nature and technology. Thus, the level of imaginative ability associated with these more advanced forms of role play are associated with higher levels of mental state attribution to technology and inanimate nature. On the other hand, the imaginative potential for children with toy ICs might be limited by the physical features of the toy such that it is difficult for children to overcome the particular physical characteristics of a toy when imbuing it with a persona. As a result, they may engage less deeply in the simulation process – a limitation that is not wholly overcome by engaging more frequently in this form of role play.

Although children who impersonate have arguably fewer bounds in that they can impersonate any number of personas or characters, they nonetheless tend to impose limits by frequently impersonating familiar roles (e.g., mom) or storybook characters (e.g., Superman) (Carlson and Taylor, 2005), rather than generating a completely novel entity. This study did not assess the characters or persona children impersonated, thus we cannot know whether children who only engaged in impersonation tended to impersonate novel personas or known characters. However, our results do point to an interesting lack of relation between frequency of impersonation and anthropomorphism: Regardless of the frequency of impersonation, children who impersonated did not differ in their anthropomorphism (overall and technology-nature). The absence of this association stands in contrast to the significant curvilinear relation found for children with ICs – both showed increases in anthropomorphism of technology-nature and overall as the frequency of role play shifted from moderate to high. As with Carlson and Taylor (2005), it is possible that impersonators in the current study were often enacting known characters or roles rather than generating novel personas. In so doing, these children might be behaviorally enacting these characters, rather than deeply tapping into the simulation process of imagining these character's internal states.

Why might it be the case that higher levels of imagination are associated with more anthropomorphism? We argue above that by more deeply engaging in the simulation process, children

may be more inclined or equipped to simulate and project mental states in other contexts. Here, we lay out an additional, complimentary explanation that helps unpack why children may anthropomorphize the least likely candidates for mental state attribution: inanimate nature and technology. Carlson (2010) has argued that higher levels of imagination involve a freeing up of top-down conscious control in order to allow for greater imaginative products. Accordingly, it may be that children with greater imaginations (vis-à-vis having a frequent invisible IC) may use less conscious control, in general, when imagining others' minds and internal states and are able to more readily attribute internal states to the least obvious candidates – inanimate nature and technology. In other words, these children are not constrained by the lack of target triggers or external cues of mental states when they simulate and project mental states, whether onto an invisible friend or technology and inanimate nature.

Finally, in light of the positive relation between role play and anthropomorphism, one lingering question regards children's level of commitment to their anthropomorphic beliefs. To explore this question, we must first unpack a critical difference between role play and anthropomorphism. In the case of role play, children are quite clear on the distinction between pretense and reality (Woolley and Wellman, 1993; Taylor, 1999; Gleason, 2013; Woolley and Ghossainy, 2013). That is, although children may be immersed within the imaginary space, they maintain a clear grasp on what is real and what is pretend. Accordingly, in terms of level of commitment, children have low commitments to their pretend attributions (i.e., they know they are just pretend). Conversely, individuals may express varying levels of commitment to their attributions when anthropomorphizing, in line with Epley et al.'s (2008) weak and strong forms of anthropomorphism. Weak anthropomorphism reflects a low-level of commitment, wherein individuals engage in 'in-the-moment' mindless (non-deliberate) behaviors that are not substantiated by their explicit judgments (e.g., Nass et al., 1993; Nass and Moon, 2000; Kim and Sundar, 2012). For example, one may act as if their computer has intentions (e.g., "You always try to update right when I need to give a presentation!"), and at the same time not explicitly believe their computer has intentions. Thus, like pretense, weak anthropomorphism involves a divergence between a person's explicit claims and their in-the-moment behaviors. However, the difference between pretense and weak anthropomorphism lies in the individual's level of awareness: One is aware of their pretense, but more often likely to be mindless when engaging in weak anthropomorphism (Nass and Moon, 2000). Strong anthropomorphism, on the other hand, is marked by explicit commitment to anthropomorphic beliefs, and a consistency between one's behaviors and their expressed beliefs (e.g., believing their dog has emotions and treating them accordingly).

What form of anthropomorphism – weak or strong – do children's attributions reflect? Given that our study measured anthropomorphism with an explicit measure (IDAQ-CF), we argue that our results reflect the strong form of anthropomorphism. That is, we argue that explicit anthropomorphic attributions are more likely to reflect a higher level of commitment. At the same time, children were judicious in the degree to which they attributed anthropomorphic characteristics to non-humans. Recall that children's attributions were nowhere near ceiling levels, but rather were at the lower-end (for inanimate nature and technology) and mid-point (for animals) of the 3-point scale. Thus, children may be committed to their attributions, even when they are conservative in the degree to which they endorse anthropomorphic attributes (e.g., being sure that an insect thinks for itself only a little).

#### Limitations

The current study has several limitations that warrant consideration. First, this study involved a single-time-point correlational design to investigate the relation between role play and anthropomorphism. Although the results are consistent with our proposal that role play and anthropomorphism involve a common process of simulation and projection, any firm conclusion to that effect would be premature and go beyond the existing data or study design. Certainly, questions about causal relationships between role play and anthropomorphism would require time-lagged, longitudinal, or experimental designs. Second, our anthropomorphism measure relied exclusively upon self-report. Although we found variability in children's use of the IDAQ-CF scale (thus rendering unlikely a yes bias in their responses), other factors may have affected how children responded on this measure. Our role play scale similarly relied upon children's self-report, however, in this case their reports were largely corroborated by their parent. That said, additional behavioral measures of role play, such as free play with real- and fantasy-oriented toys, pretend actions (Taylor and Carlson, 1997), or the toy phone task (Taylor et al., 1993; Tahiroglu et al., 2011), would provide a more comprehensive and robust measure of engagement in role play. Third, the two measures were presented in the same order (IDAQ-CF followed by the Role Play Measure), thus we were unable to assess or control for potential order effects. Finally, this work should be replicated to guard against the possibility of a spurious finding and would be strengthened by including a larger (i.e., to increase power) and more representative sample.

#### Future Directions

Research on the development of anthropomorphism is in its nascent stage, and much work remains in order to understand the causes, correlates, and consequences of the tendency to ascribe human-like mental states to animals, artifacts, and nature. Indeed, the current study is a starting point for understanding the relation between role play and anthropomorphism. Future work here should focus on investigating the specific mechanisms that may underlie a general process of mind attribution. For example, do more general cognitive abilities explain the relation between role play and anthropomorphism? Accordingly, future research would benefit from the addition of measures of cognitive abilities (e.g., executive function, theory of mind, analogical reasoning), as well as other control measures associated with mentalizing abilities (e.g., birth order, multilingualism). It will also be important to test whether anthropomorphism can be causally linked to role play, for example by experimentally

testing whether increases in role play would result in increases in anthropomorphism. Importantly, future work examining frequency of engagement in role play needs to be considered in light of the form of role play, as the curvilinear relation between frequency of engagement and anthropomorphism of technology and nature and in general is moderated by role play type. Future research could also assess whether the nature of the relation between role play type and anthropomorphism undergoes a qualitative shift across age groups. In addition, the current study has raised questions regarding children's level of commitment to their anthropomorphic attributions. We have argued above that children's explicit judgments on the IDAQ-CF reflect a strong form of anthropomorphism (i.e., high commitment), however, this interpretation is conceptual rather than empirical. Thus, future research could directly assess how committed children are to their attributions, and whether their level of commitment undergoes developmental change. That is, a strong commitment to anthropomorphic beliefs may reflect a less advanced understanding. Whereas, a lower level of commitment to one's anthropomorphic attributions may reflect a more sophisticated and nuanced appreciation that ascertaining whether non-human others have mental states is a challenging, if not futile, task (e.g., Nagel, 1974).

In addition, we suggest three distinct lines of research that are particularly relevant to understanding the development of anthropomorphism, as well as the variation between individuals (whether innate or a result of experience) and cultures.

We have argued that, like role play, anthropomorphism involves a process for ascribing mental states onto others, whether a toy or stuffed animal (in the case of role play) or a non-human entity (in the case of anthropomorphism). Relatedly, Harris (2000) has argued that simulation underlies both role play and theory of mind. Previous research has shown links between pretense (and role play, specifically) and theory of mind (e.g., Astington and Jenkins, 1995; Taylor and Carlson, 1997). Although, as pointed out by Dore et al. (2015), there is conflicting evidence regarding any directionality between pretense and theory of mind. One interpretation of the conflicting directional evidence is a third variable: Both may involve a common underlying process. The current paper makes a third link—that is, the speculation that simulation also underlies anthropomorphism. In other words, it is possible that the process of simulation and projection of internal states to others includes other people (theory of mind), imagined others (role play), and non-human others (anthropomorphism).

Thus, one line of future research might explore the relation between anthropomorphism and theory of mind (see also Atherton and Cross, 2018). As previously discussed, there is evidence that anthropomorphism activates the same neural network as theory of mind (Castelli et al., 2000, 2002). Interestingly, Castelli et al. (2002) found that, in response to viewing anthropomorphized animated shapes, individuals with high-functioning autism provided fewer and less accurate interpretations of putative mental states and showed less activation of the mentalizing network. At the same time, individuals with autism demonstrated similar activation as typical adults of an additional region – the extra-striate visual cortex. However, unlike typical adults, those with autism had poor connectivity between the extra-striate cortex region and the mentalizing network. The authors suggest the results point to a physiological explanation for theory of mind deficits among individuals with autism; that is, information from lower-level perceptual (visual processing) areas is not transmitted to the higher-level mentalizing network. These results provide neural evidence of a link between theory of mind and anthropomorphism in typical adult, as well as a neural explanation for the difficulty individuals with autism have interpreting animate shapes in mental terms.

Yet, there may be a critical difference between perceiving animated objects in mentalistic terms and explicitly ascribing them mental states. A recent study found that roughly half of adults with autism spontaneously personify objects (White and Remington, 2018). This finding may call into question the logic of our argument that social cognition and anthropomorphism are related. White and Remington suggest this result is particularly striking given that roughly half of autistic individuals experience difficulties identifying their own emotion (alexithymia). However, as participants' emotion understanding – their own or others' emotions – were not assessed (nor other aspects of theory of mind), it is not possible to know whether the 56% of participants with autism who reported personifying objects also experienced alexithymia. Nevertheless, these results underscore the importance of additional research on any links between attributing mental states to humans (theory of mind) and non-humans (anthropomorphism). It may be, as White and Remington suggest, that anthropomorphism "may result from difficulties mentalizing" (p. 3). To this point, we propose two related avenues of inquiry. First, it will be important to explore potential links between anthropomorphism and accuracy in theory of mind understanding (e.g., emotion understanding, perspective taking, knowledge attribution, etc.). This line of investigation would shed light on whether the tendency to anthropomorphize is associated with a lack of accuracy in understanding other people's minds, or vice versa. Second, and relatedly, future research should also consider the relation between anthropomorphism and the propensity to make inferences about others' minds, what has been termed mind-reading motivation (Carpenter et al., 2016). Carpenter et al. (2016) have found that one's accuracy in interpreting others' mental states is distinct from (although weakly related to) their propensity or motivation to do so. Thus, independent of individual's accuracy in mind-reading, future work could investigate whether anthropomorphism is more likely to arise in individuals with a greater willingness to attribute mental states to others – what we may think of as 'promiscuous social cognition.'

Finally, a critical question regarding any potential link between theory of mind and anthropomorphism is whether the association would be the same for animals as it is for technology and inanimate nature. As evident in the current study and previous research (Waytz et al., 2010a; Severson and Lemm, 2016), these forms of anthropomorphism are distinct. As we argued above, animals may be more readily anthropomorphized as they provide numerous external cues of internal states. Accordingly, the simulation process applied to humans (theory

of mind) may be more akin to that applied to animals as both provide external cues that may more readily allow for inferences of internal states. However, technology and inanimate nature provide few, if any, external cues and therefore may draw upon different aspects of theory of mind and/or other cognitive abilities (e.g., visual imagery). Thus, the distinction between anthropomorphism of animals and anthropomorphism of technology and inanimate nature should be maintained in future work.

A second line of future research might investigate whether anthropocentric biases may interact with children's tendency to anthropomorphize. Anthropocentrism refers to the tendency to use humans as a prototype for reasoning inductively about non-humans, wherein children asymmetrically extend unobservable novel biological properties from a human to a target animal, plant, or object, but not vice versa (Carey, 1985). Interestingly, rather than being a foundation for inferring knowledge about non-humans as initially theorized (Carey, 1985), subsequent research has shown that experience and social learning play an important role in children's anthropocentric biases (Waxman and Medin, 2007; Herrmann et al., 2010). Compared to urban children, children from rural environments and Native American communities do not exhibit an anthropocentric bias, presumably due to more direct experience with animals and nature (Bang et al., 2007; Medin et al., 2010). Moreover, children in urban environments show less of an anthropocentric bias when they have pets (Inagaki, 1990; Geerdts et al., 2015) or parents with biological expertise (Tarlowski, 2006). Although anthropocentrism and anthropomorphism are arguably distinct (e.g., anthropocentrism is evident among urban children for a relatively brief period, whereas anthropomorphism is found in children and adults; Geerdts, 2016), future research could explore whether anthropocentrism is related to anthropomorphism. On the surface, it stands to reason that they would be associated to the extent that they both involve the attribution of unobservable internal characteristics (whether biological or mental) from humans to non-humans. Indeed, there is evidence that anthropomorphic storybooks can influence children's tendency to reason anthropocentrically (Waxman et al., 2014). Alternatively, it may be that substantive differences exist between anthropocentrism and anthropomorphism, especially when considering differences in culture and experience, in addition to differing underlying cognitive processes involved in conceptual understanding versus social cognition.

Finally, a third promising line of research would explore cultural variation in anthropomorphism. As discussed above, it seems likely that culture would play a role in anthropomorphic beliefs as metaphysical beliefs and societal norms differ widely. Some have also argued that cultural differences in self-construal (i.e., perceptions of self as independent versus part of a collective) may procure differences in the tendency to perceive minds in non-humans (Waytz et al., 2013). In the adult literature, there is evidence of universality in agency detection in human faces (Looser and Wheatley, 2010) and inferences of intentions based on motion (Barrett et al., 2005), yet there is a surprising lack of cross-cultural research on mind attribution to non-humans. Anthropological study has provided initial evidence of cultural differences; that is, primatologists in Japan anthropomorphize to a greater extent than their United States counterparts (Asquith, 1986). In a more recent study with adults, Ghuman et al. (2015) found higher rates of anthropomorphism (as measured by the IDAQ; Waytz et al., 2010a) among adults in China and India compared to United States adults. Therefore, this line of research is ripe with opportunity to identify the patterns and causes of cultural variation in anthropomorphic beliefs.

## CONCLUSION

The present study provided initial evidence of a link between children's role play and anthropomorphism. We proposed that role play and anthropomorphism involve a common simulation process of mental state attribution, and our results were consistent with this proposal insofar that a positive relation was found between the tendency to engage in role play and the tendency to anthropomorphize. Moreover, our results provide evidence that differing degrees of imagination are involved in anthropomorphism of animals versus technology and inanimate nature. Future work is needed to corroborate the link found in the current study and, importantly, to identify whether there are specific underlying mechanisms. More generally, research on the cognitive underpinnings of anthropomorphism is in its beginning stages, and it represents an area rich with interesting and important questions.

### DATA AVAILABILITY STATEMENT

The raw data supporting the conclusions of this manuscript will be made available by the authors, without undue reservation, to any qualified researcher.

## AUTHOR CONTRIBUTIONS

Both authors made substantial intellectual contributions to this paper and approved it for publication. RS conceived the study, collected the data, analyzed the data, and wrote the manuscript. SW analyzed the data and wrote the manuscript.

### FUNDING

This work was supported, in part, by a Small Grant (Grant No. 325453) from University of Montana and Grant-in-Aid (Grant No. 693177) from Western Washington University to RS.

### ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We would like to thank the children and families who participated in this research. We are grateful to Daniel Denis for statistical consultation. In addition, we are grateful to the team of undergraduate research assistants

for data collection: Zac Coté, Megan Dachenhausen, Angela Dodge, Kristi Fairbanks, Sarah Fay, Caleigh Horan-Spatz, Crosby Humphries, Melina McCrain, Jordan Rice, Jesse

#### REFERENCES

Boyer, P. (2001). Religion Explained. New York, NY: Basic Books.

Wear, Kelsey Wheat, and Rebecca Younger. The data were collected when RS was affiliated with Western Washington University.

touch-screen and board games? Front. Psychol. 8:55. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2017. 00055

**Conflict of Interest Statement:** The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Copyright © 2018 Severson and Woodard. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

# Anthropomorphism in Human–Animal Interactions: A Pragmatist View

#### Véronique Servais\*

Laboratory of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Liège, Liège, Belgium

This paper explores anthropomorphism in human–animal interactions from the theoretical perspectives of pragmatism and anthropology of human–animal communication. Its aim is to challenge the conception of anthropomorphism as the attribution/inference of human properties to a non-human animal – particularly as a special case of the theory of mind. The author's goal is to articulate a plausible an alternative conception of anthropomorphism as a situated direct perception of human properties by someone who is engaged in a given situation and sensitive to what the animal is doing to them. Rooted in pragmatist theory as well as in contemporary anthropological studies, this paper offers an original perspective for in depth ethnographic and empirical studies of anthropomorphism-in-situation. Such studies could bring new insights in the study of how ordinary people make sense of animal behaviors in real-life situations.

#### Edited by:

Gabriella Airenti, Università degli Studi di Torino, Italy

#### Reviewed by:

Alan Paul Costall, University of Portsmouth, United Kingdom Terra Edwards, Saint Louis University, United States

> \*Correspondence: Véronique Servais<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
#### Specialty section:

This article was submitted to Cognitive Science, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychology

Received: 28 May 2018 Accepted: 03 December 2018 Published: 18 December 2018

#### Citation:

Servais V (2018) Anthropomorphism in Human–Animal Interactions: A Pragmatist View. Front. Psychol. 9:2590. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2018.02590 Keywords: anthropomorphism, human–animal interaction, animism, pragmatism, relationality, expressive gesture, direct perception

## INTRODUCTION

How do people manage to make sense of animals? One answer, provided by the biologist and anthropologist Bateson (1974–1991), is that people make sense of plants or animals when they can perceive the "pattern which connect" them to that animal or plant. As a form of poetic introduction to the problem of anthropomorphism, I would like to cite an excerpt from a poem by William Wordsworth already used by Bateson in a paper about aesthetics entitled "The creature and its creation." In this poem Wordsworth mocks a man in these words:

'A primrose by a river's brim A yellow primrose was to him And it was nothing more'

Because the primrose is "just" a yellow thing over there, this man is unable to relate to the flower. In contrast with this man, stands the poet, to whom, according to Bateson, the primrose can be something more: a self-reflexive recognition. "The primrose resembles a poem and both poem and primrose resemble the poet." (Bateson, 1974–1991, p. 269). Something of the poet is perceived to be present "in" the primrose itself. In the introductory section of Mind and Nature (Bateson, 1979), Bateson also evokes this poem, arguing that this recognition allows the primrose to become relevant to the poet, because through this recognition, the poet discovers that he is part of the same story as the primrose. Thus, according to Bateson, to make sense of something is to

**36**

be able to share a story with it, and this is how people make their environment – both human and non-human– relevant. "I would assume that any A is relevant to any B if both A and B are parts or components of the same 'story' (Bateson, 1979, p.

At first sight, the aesthetic experience of the poet has nothing in common with anthropomorphism, if anthropomorphism is defined as the conscious "attribution" or "inference" of human characteristics to a non-human being. The poet's experience seems to be completely different: it has to do with the direct perception of some human – yet indeterminate – qualities in the flower.

Still, the story of the primrose indicates the direction of the discussion that will follow. The main argument is that in everyday life, animal mental qualities are not so much inferred as they are recognized, or directly perceived, by a human being who is engaged in a specific interaction. This point of view is defended by Gallagher (2008) in the context of human social cognition and by Morris (2017) in the context of humananimal interaction. The approach advocated here is in line with the "embodiment approaches" that Morris (2017) identifies as promising alternatives to the theory-of-mind approaches of animal minding. Morris criticizes the theory-of-mind approaches because they all assume that "there must be some cognitive process or mechanism that is operating to allow people to bridge the gap between observable behavior and mind" (Morris, 2017, p. 2). On the contrary, says he, the essence of embodiment approaches is that "mind is embodied in behavior" or that "mind is directly available in behavior" (ibid., p. 3).

Accordingly, the aim of this paper is to provide a convincing theoretical framework to support such a claim. It draws mainly on the pragmatist perspective of J. Dewey and G. H. Mead, but also on anthropologists T. Ingold and K. Milton's current use of the affordance theory of J. Gibson and on G. Bateson's theory of communication. The framework is elaborated systematically, along with a discussion about empirical studies of anthropomorphism, contemporary anthropological analysis of animism, and ethnographic studies of human–animal interactions. It tries to identify the conditions in which animal mental qualities can be perceived directly and it leads to a definition of anthropomorphism as the situated direct perception of animal minds (or other human properties) in the behavior or bodily expression of animals, by someone who is engaged in a specific process of activity. In a pragmatist perspective, anthropomorphism is a social activity that cannot be studied separately from its context of appearance. Its description and analysis must be achieved through careful ethnographic studies of real-life situations.

The first section examines previous studies of anthropomorphism and concludes that the concept of anthropomorphism as an act of inference is valid only in the context of the scientific activity of minding animals. In the non-professional activity of anthropomorphizing animals, people are not acting as distant or neutral observers of the animal's behavior, but on the contrary, they are engaged in some kind of dialog with their environment. The dialogic structure of anthropomorphism (Airenti, 2012) will be discussed and analyzed in relation with G. Bateson's theory of communication in the next section, leading to the conclusion that it is from the inside of a relationship (i.e., when they are affectively engaged) that people see human properties in animal's behaviors or anatomical features. Thus, anthropomorphism does not only depend on characteristics that are present in the animal, but also on the kind of relationship and interaction between the person and the animal. In other words, the perceptual cues for the recognition of mental qualities are out there, in the animal, but they are discovered by someone who is doing something.

The fourth section will try to answer this question: if mental qualities of animals are directly perceived, can Gibson's affordance theory (Gibson, 1979) account for anthropomorphism? In their analysis of animism in human– animal interactions, anthropologists Ingold (2000, 2002) and Milton (2002) convincingly claim that personhood is directly perceived by animist people in their environment. They provide ethnographic examples that clarify the kind of relationship in which such a perception occurs and call it a relational epistemology. In a relational epistemology, people turn their attention on what the animals (or plants) are doing to themselves and it seems that this affords for the direct perception of personhood in the surroundings. But the affordance theory is not enough for understanding of anthropomorphism because it leaves the social nature of the act of minding animals unexamined. The fifth section of the paper turns to empirical studies of human–animal interactions in the specific settings of the bio-medical laboratory. It is then obvious that the perception of affordances is not only learned, neither is it only dependent on the activity of the organism, it is also guided by materially and symbolically organized situations. To account for this, I introduce the concept of "perceptual frame." A perceptual frame is both a definition of the situation in Goffman's (1974) terms, and the performance of normative ways of attending to the animals, looking at them and letting oneself being affected – or not– by them. Through their very activity, people are trying to keep these perceptual frames alive and stable. Still, animals are living and acting beings, so unexpected affordances can emerge, inviting laboratory people to unexpected (or unwanted) kinds of relationships. In this perspective, animal's (ontological and ethical) status is always provisional and unstable, and this is precisely what is found in the anthropological analysis of the (direct) perception of personhood in plants and animals, as well as in the ethnographic studies of human–animal interactions in laboratory facilities that are reported in the sixth section.

In contrast with the inference theory, the pragmatist perspective that I offer here is capable of considering the emergence of new significations in a situation. It shares the basic pragmatist view that perception is guided by the current activity: "What the sensation will be in particular at a given time, therefore, will depend entirely upon the way in which an activity is being used. It has no fixed quality of its own. The search for the stimulus is the search for exact conditions of action; that is, for the state of things which decides how a beginning coordination should be completed" (Dewey, 1896, p. 369). "Whatever we are doing determines the sort of a stimulus

which will set free certain responses which are there ready for expression, and it is the attitude of action which determines for us what the stimulus will be" (Mead, 1936, p. 366). This perspective also assumes that people don't "passively" and intellectually perceive the animals but that they rather "find" some stimulus in the animal's behavior or anatomical structure that allow for the continued course of action. But the action is social, and in this, they are supported by culturally and socially learned modes of attention, ontological definitions of animals, and by materially and symbolically designed situations.

### IS ANTHROPOMORPHISM AN ACT OF INFERENCE?

Many authors subscribe to a definition of anthropomorphism akin to the one provided by Guthrie (1997): anthropomorphism is "the attribution of human characteristics to non-human things or events" (p. 51). Even if definitions may differ on "what" precisely is attributed to the "non-human things and events," there seems to be a consensus on the fact that anthropomorphism is a specific case of inference of something human to a nonhuman entity (Fisher, 1991; Eddy et al., 1993; Herzog and Galvin, 1997; Mitchell and Hamm, 1997; Silverman, 1997). In this perspective, anthropomorphism rests upon a cognitive work of inference.

This approach to anthropomorphism is indeed in line with the first theory of anthropomorphism, developed by Romanes and Morgan at the end of the 19th-century (Costall, 1993; Morris et al., 2000). Morgan proposed the word "ejective inference" while Romanes talked about "double inference," in order to describe the double process of inference that supposedly took place when the scientist attributed mental qualities to an animal. The inference goes first from the observation of the animal's behavior to one's experience, where it is compared with one's mental experience, and then it goes from one's experience to the mental qualities attributed to the animal. According to these 19th century authors, inference of this kind was the only way in which a scientist could safely attribute intentions or other mental states to another animal. Because mental traits are "hidden" behind the behavior, they must be recovered through a double act of inference.

Yet, it should be noted that this kind of inference is the achievement of scientists who were searching for a safe way of studying animal minds in a Darwinian perspective. It is by no means a description of what people do when they are interacting with animals in everyday life. This has been made very clear by Costall (2007), who distinguishes between:

the gap between what we can observe (behavior) and what is supposed to be hidden (the mind), and such inferences are to be based on analogy from one's own introspection" (Costall, 2007, p. 87).

Applying the model of anthropomorphism-as-inference as a general model of how people make sense of animals would mean considering the communicative and interactional structures that prevail in the behaviouristic operationalism of the laboratory as also operating in the life world. However, this is probably not the case. Indeed, the life-world is excluded by the practical methodology of the laboratory (Wieder, 1980; Rollin, 1990).

Researchers themselves have long noticed that, while they painstakingly try to use logical criteria to identify mental attributes in animals, their practical-minded assistants intuitively "find" mental phenomena that work for them (i.e., Silverman, 1997). Animal keepers rely on a very different (and much more efficient) way of understanding animals, which makes them able to see chimpanzees as conscious being or "embodied consciousness" (Wieder, 1980).

So, in spite of the fact that several authors insist that the researcher and the animal keeper (or the nonprofessional) are doing different things when they are minding animals, surprisingly, when it comes to empirically study anthropomorphism, the scientific stance (anthropomorphismas-inference) is taken for granted and chosen as the model. Anthropomorphism is thus considered as a detached, decontextualized and intellectual operation, "one of many examples of induction whereby people reason about an unknown stimulus based on a better-known representation of a related stimulus, in this case reasoning about a non-human agent based on representations of the self or humans" (Epley et al., 2008, p. 145). Anthropomorphism is seen as a special case of the theory of mind, where "interpersonal understanding is seen as a theoretical accomplishment, involving a person constructing and using a "theory" of other people's minds, as well as their own. Applying the theory to observable behavior enables the individual to interpret that behavior in intentional terms and as the product of specific mental states" (Leudar et al., 2004, p. 572).

It would nevertheless be obvious to a pragmatist that the activity of the detached and neutral observer (the scientist) and the activity of the non-professional who is affectively engaged in an interaction are two very different kinds of situations, which afford different ways of knowing. Disregarding this simple fact lead to the erroneous assumptions that similarity is a crucial determinant in anthropomorphism.

#### ANTHROPOMORPHISM AND HUMAN–ANIMAL SIMILARITY

As long as it is defined as the (decontextualized) attribution of human qualities to animals, anthropomorphism can be empirically studied through questionnaires asking people to attribute more or less complex cognitive and emotional states to animals. The first empirical studies of anthropomorphism (Eddy et al., 1993; Gallup et al., 1997; Herzog and Galvin, 1997) used

this method and asked subjects to rate different animal species according to their supposed cognitive and emotional abilities. The results were rather convergent. They showed that the more the animals were considered similar or close to human beings, the more they were endowed with mental complexity. These results allowed Gallup et al. (1997, p. 91, my emphasis) to conclude that "the use of anthropomorphism appears to be influenced by the perceived similarity between humans and animals and the extent to which people have developed an affectionate bond with members of the species in questions (e.g., dogs and cats)." Additionally, the authors take these results as an evidence that anthropomorphism is, indeed, the result of an inferential work: "We contend that anthropomorphism is a by-product of selfawareness and the corresponding ability to infer the experience of other humans by using one's own experience as a model" (p. 91). In opposition to this, I would state that what has actually been studied there is a cultural conception of animals that is only distantly related to anthropomorphism as it works in real-life situations. Actually, the results show what people commonly think about human–animal proximity and animal mental states – and, as Airenti (2012) reminds us, there is a big difference between believing that the coffee machine has intentions and behaving as if it had. Given the general education level of psychology students (who are often taken as subjects) the fact that they rate mammals as closer to human beings than invertebrate, and that they attribute more complex cognitive abilities to dolphins and apes than to pigs or rats is not surprising. Yet, knowing how people classify animals according to what they believe about their mental properties doesn't say anything about what they do when they are actually interacting with them or even observing animals' actual behaviors.

A study by Mitchell and Hamm (1997) specifies the role of perceived similarity in anthropomorphism. They gave undergraduates narratives depicting mammals' behaviors (including human beings) suggestive of jealousy or deception. They then asked the subjects to evaluate their degree of agreement or disagreement with psychological characterizations of the animals described. The narratives presented various contexts and species (more or less close or familiar to human beings), but the behaviors remained constant. In these conditions, only variations in the context influenced the psychological characterizations. The species did not. The authors concluded that the main criteria for the psychological characterization of animals is the perceived structure of the "behavior-in-context." This is not only more in accordance with the observations of Wieder (1980); Morris et al. (2000), and Servais (2012), it is also in agreement with the well-known fact that one can virtually attribute human properties to any object (Airenti, 2012). In Airenti's examples, a piece of wood can become a "baby" in children's play, and a coffee machine can be threatened by an angry user. Given this, we may doubt that similarity, or even plausibility, are the fundamental criteria for anthropomorphism. It might be the case when answering a questionnaire, but outside this very specific situation, something else is at play.

To make sense of seemingly contradictory experimental results of this kind, as regards anthropomorphism in children, Airenti (2012) suggested that anthropomorphism has two founding properties. Firstly, anthropomorphism is the expression of a basic teleological thinking, a way of representing non-human beings through their assimilation with human beings. Secondly, and most importantly, anthropomorphism manifests itself mainly in interactions. According to Airenti, for anthropomorphism to happen, it is necessary that the human characteristics be perceived in a specific interactional setting that she identifies as a dialogic relationship. She then suggests anthropomorphism should be seen as placing an object or an animal in the position of interlocutor in a dialogic relationship1 (Airenti, 2012, p. 49, my translation).

### THE DIALOGIC STRUCTURE OF ANTHROPOMORPHISM

The implications of the dialogic structure of anthropomorphism for the perception of animal behavior may be examined along with G. Bateson's theory of communication. In a paper about mammalian communication (Bateson, 1963), he suggests that every message (intentional or not) should be considered a twosided entity: it is both a report and a command. It is a report about a past event (i.e., an emotion) and a command or a stimulus for a reaction of the partner (i.e., a threat). Or, in Bateson's own terms: "The wag of the dog's tail which for individual psychology signifies an inner state of the dog becomes something more than this when we ask about the functions of this signal in the relationship between the dog and his master. [. . .. . .] It becomes an affirmation or a proposal about what shall be the contingencies in that relationship" (Bateson, 1963, p. 230). Simply speaking, the report is about the content of the message, while the command is about what the message does to the receiver, how it affects them and how it shapes the relationship. Every message has both aspects. Only the emphasis changes.

We can now see that the detached spectator (the scientist) is someone who makes oneself blind to the "command" aspect of a message. It means that they are not affected by the animal's communicative signals. The signal is just a "report," a bit of information about something else. Indeed, the best way to achieve neutrality when dealing with a living being, is precisely to make oneself impervious to the "command" aspect of the organism's behavior or communicative signals. It is the safest way not to feel the urge to act when seeing, for example, a "depressed chimpanzee" (lowered body, slower pace, loss of appetite, increased response time. . .). The main point here is that precisely because the detached spectators keep themselves from being affected, they won't even see a "depressed" chimpanzee; but only some behavior to be scientifically interpreted (i.e., neurophysiological cause). This deduction is in accordance with the phenomenological point of view that the perception of the behavior of certain things and beings is immediately given to us. Still this is only true for the involved consciousness, for "if we choose the 'being-in-the-world' of the detached spectator"

1Freely translated by the author from Airenti (2012, p. 49): "Toute familiarité est donc liée à la possibilité de placer un objet inanimé dans la position d'interlocuteur dans un dialog."

this given understanding disappears (Buytendijk, 1952, p. 19, my translation).

For example, in one biology laboratory studied by Arluke (1988), rats about to be guillotined were kept in a separate room so that they could not see or smell the beheadings. This was justified on the grounds that "significant emotive changes in the rats produced by high-frequency distress calls would compromise the data." (Arluke, 1988, p. 103). This is a good example of distress calls that are recognized as distress calls but do not call forth empathic responses as a distress call in a human infant might.

In the interactional setting of the disinterested or disengaged observer, inference is the only way to know about the animals' mind. On the contrary, in a dialogic structure, because I agree to be sensitive and be affected by it, the animal's experience becomes manifest through its expressive actions and body movements. Phenomenologists would say that knowledge of the animal's mind is given through the contextualized apperception of its expressive body. "A crucial part of learning to be a "chimper" [namely a talented animal keeper] is learning to read chimpanzees body movements and gestures, that is, to see them as appresenting – to see, for example, arousal and anxiety in the slight erection of hair on the shoulders and in a particular bobbing motion in some particular context" (Wieder, 1980, p. 94, underlined by the author). Accordingly, in their paper arguing for animals as psychological beings, Bateson (1979) claim that expression is the heuristic route to direct knowledge of the mental states of others and that expression is only visible from within relationships (Bateson, 1979, p. 175).

Phenomenologically, a dialogic relationship can be conceptualized as a double move (Buytendijk, 1952). There is a move toward others in order to seize them (and this is the first property of anthropomorphism identified by Airenti) – and there is a move of offering, giving ourselves up in such a way that something might happen to us. Such a move can only be found when one agrees to be receptive to the "command" aspect of animal's behavior, signals, or even anatomical shape or color. In the case of the piece of wood that becomes a baby, cited above, the child is responsible for the piece of wood's moves, but nonetheless sees them as expressive movements, and responds accordingly.  For anyone else, it is just a piece of wood2 .

We are now in a position to conclude that mental qualities are directly perceived from the inside of a relationship. How can this be, if nothing is inferred? For phenomenologists like Buytendijk or Wieder, mental states are directly appresented by expressive bodies: we do not meet bodies, but embodied consciousness. Could a pragmatist framework shed some light on the very question of the direct perception of mental – or human – properties? If we use Gibson's affordances theory, I think it could. This isn't aberrant. Both approaches have much in common, even if they differ on some points (Noble, 1981). Moreover, this theory has precisely been used by anthropologists who sought to analyze animism – which is the perception of human qualities in the natural environment.

### AFFORDANCES AND THE DIRECT PERCEPTION OF THE ENVIRONMENT

Gibson's theory of affordances (Gibson, 1979) is the theory of a direct perception of the environment by a subject who is involved in his environment. It has been used by anthropologists Ingold (2000, 2002) and Milton (2002) to conceptualize the relationship between people and their natural environment, including animals. Affordances are "properties of the real environment as directly perceived by an agent in a context of practical action" (Ingold, 2002, p. 46, my emphasis). Affordance theory postulates that information is present in the environment, it doesn't need to be constructed by a subject. Meaning is not imposed, nor "attributed" by a disengaged observer upon environment, but it is discovered by someone who is implicated in, and oriented by a practical action. "The man throwing the stone did not, we suppose, first "construct" the stone as a missile by attaching a meaning or "throw-quality" to impressions of it received through the senses. [. . .]. Rather, it was the very involvement of the man in his environment, in the practical context of throwing, that led him to attend to the "throwability" of the object, by virtue of which it was perceived as a missile. Such direct perception of the environment is a mode of engagement with the world, not a mode of construction of it" (Ingold, 2002, p. 44).3 In its insistence on the discovering of properties in the environment according to the involvement of the subject in a practical action, Gibson's perspective sounds very much like pragmatism. Perception is guided by the practical action, and the environment exist for a given organism. Indeed, organism and environment make "an inseparable pair" (Gibson, 1979, p. 18).

When she tries to understand the complex relationships that English conservationists have developed with the nature they strive to protect, anthropologist Kay Milton also draws on Gibson's theory of direct perception. This is particularly so when she addresses the question of the "personification" of nature (Milton, 2002, pp. 42sq). Consistently with Ingold, she makes it clear that environmentalists don't make nature and natural things into persons, they don't construct them as persons. Rather, they see them as persons: they "discover the personhood of nature and natural things by perceiving their person-like affordances" (Milton, 2002, p. 45).

It is important to note that the perception of "person-like" affordances in animals or natural things does not happen in any kind of relationship or interactive situation. Many people live among animals and don't see them as persons. In her search for the interactive conditions of the personification of animals, Milton turns to the work of Bird-David, an anthropologist who

2This example should not be taken as a claim that minding animals from the inside of a relationship equates to hallucinating non-existent movements. Still, it reminds us that anthropomorphism is more or less has linked with affect and imagination.

3Note that Tim Ingold has turned to affordance theory to object to the traditional anthropological conception of animals as "cultural construct" – a very old anthropological view that assumes that the entire signification is in head of the human being and that nature, animals, plants, etc. are pure materiality.

studied the Nayaka hunter-gatherers of South India. These people have a specific way of relating themselves to their environment that Bird-David called a "responsive relatedness" (Bird-David, 1999). Responsive relatedness is a way of engaging one's attention to the surroundings. The Nayaka are attentive to the changes of things in the world in relation to themselves. In other words, their attention is turned to what things in their environment do to themselves rather than what they are. "Animals and other objects which actively engage their attention, stones which 'come toward' or 'jump on' them, elephants which 'walk harmlessly' or 'look straight into the eyes' are perceived as having a kind of personhood" (Milton, 2002, p. 46).4 Milton adds that the sort of environmental knowledge the Nayaka express, and which Bird-David called a "relational epistemology," has been identified many times by anthropologists, particularly in hunter-gatherer cultures. Many North American hunters describe not only animals, but a wide range of other natural phenomena as "persons" including trees, rocks, winds, the sky, and so on. This has generally been understood as evidence that hunter gatherers "believe" that animals, plants, wind, etc. have psychological properties and intentions. Nevertheless, Milton notes that such an interpretation is a gross falsification that led to a deep misunderstanding of animism. It is due to our modernist point of view, which sees animism as the attribution of personhood to natural things (through inference) rather than the perception of personhood in these things. In relational epistemology, personhood is not a property of something, it emerges out of what something does in relation to others. Ingold (2000) shares Milton's analysis. For him, when Cree hunters describe their reindeer prey as offering its life to the hunter, they are not making a statement of fact about the reindeers. Rather, their description should be understood as "a performance of which aim is to give form of human feelings" (Ingold, 2000, p. 25) where feeling is "a mode of active, perceptual engagement, a way of being literally 'in touch' with the world" (ibid, p. 23). In other words, the Cree's description is mistaken by the modernist observer as being about the "report" aspect of communication, although it should be understood as an account of the "command." In the perspective opened by Ingold, the Cree's description of the hunt will not be misunderstood as a "weird" or irrational conception of animals anymore. On the contrary, it is a very accurate and precise description of the experience of the hunter of being touched and moved by his prey.

The cultural interpretation varies, of course, but relational epistemology is probably not restricted to hunter-gatherer societies (Bird-David, 1999; Milton, 2002). I would argue that in both societies, our sensitivity to the personhood of non-human animals depends on the intensity with which they engage our attention and respond to what we do.

This discussion shows that the perception of personhood in the environment happens when people are sensitive to animals in relation to themselves. More precisely, they are sensitive to their own response to the animal's behavior or anatomical features. In this situation, one doesn't "construct" nor infer mental properties, but feels or sees them. In Bateson's language of relations, we would say that the animal's body or behavior affords a certain kind of relationship and that the mental qualities that are perceived "in" the animal emerge from this felt relationship. In this relational perspective, there is an interesting rapprochement to be noted with G. H. Mead's reflexion about how objects acquire their "interior." According to Mead, an object "gets its inside when it arouses in the organism its own response and thus the answering response of the organism to this resistance" (Mead, 1959, p. 136?).5

The theory of affordances allows us to understand how it is that a perceptual salience born by an animal (i.e., anatomical structure, a behavior, a gesture, or any specific shape) will be discovered or not by a human being, according to the practical action in which they are engaged. Now, the problem of anthropomorphism may be phrased as follows: how does it come to be that certain "traits" or "structures" on the animal (or plant) are "selected" and "aggregated" instead of some (or no) others? The affordance theory suggests that the kind of practical action in which one is engaged is determinant in the perception of affordances. However, the theory alone doesn't help when it comes to the description and analysis of these practical actions and how they frame and constrain perception. Moreover, as Noble (1981) has perceptively noted, the theory itself is unable to account for the social meaning with which some objects are endowed. Noble claims that Mead's theory of the social object is able to solve some of the problems encountered by Gibson when it comes to social meaning. As the next section will clearly show, animals are attended to in social settings. There is a framing work that organizes the perception and the attention of the people engaged in corresponding actions. As I conceptualize it, this framing work is realized both symbolically (through language and many other symbolic acts) as well as materially (through material devices such as chains, cages, etc.). As I see it, such perceptual frames are enacted permanently by people through their coordinated actions and perceptions in a situation. Still, because animals are living beings that do unexpected things, these perceptual frames are challenged and fragile I have chosen "perceptual frame" over Meads theory of the social act because the latter cannot account for the instability of emergent significations in the situation, nor can it help to single out specific frames as objects for investigation.

### KEEPING THE PIG IN THE RIGHT PERCEPTUAL FRAME

In his late work "Frame Analysis" (Goffman, 1974), the sociologist E. Goffman used the concept of frame to refer to the (mostly implicit) social definition of a situation. Each situation needs to be defined or framed as a specific occurrence of something, for example, "interacting with a pet dog." According to the situational definition, some perceptual (behavioral, anatomical, etc.) cues will be perceived as affordances for the

4We could extend the example that Ingold has given about the stone and the perception of its "throw-quality" affordance by saying that in the kind of attention that is characteristic of responsive relatedness, I can even hear the stone saying "take me."

5Examining this convergence more thoroughly in the scope of further research would be of interest.

current action. In a pragmatist view, there is a mutual definition of the perceptual frame and the practical action. As the perceptual frame helps guiding the action and discovering the affordances for the action, the current action confirms and stabilizes the perceptual frame so that the practical action can continue.

Coming back to laboratory life, it is clear now that between the scientists who make themselves blind to the "command" aspect of communication, and do not attribute mental qualities to animals, and the animal caretakers who engage in a subject-to-subject relationship with the same animal, and perceive it as minded, the difference is not just in the act of inference. It is not that they perceive the same animal but differ in their willingness to infer mental qualities. Rather, I argue that they perceive (or enact) different animals because they are engaged in different actions with them, within different interaction regimes. The extensive ethnographic work of Arluke (1988) in biomedical laboratories and their animal facilities offers many examples that provide a better understanding how technical, symbolic and practical devices contribute to construct and stabilize perceptual frames in the life world of their face-to-face interactions with animals.

Arluke's (1988) main finding is that laboratory animals don't have a single status but, on the contrary, are seen as objects and pets. He documents the transformation of "naturalistic" animals6 into either objects or pets as a "social construction" of the laboratory animals. Here my focus will stay on the practical interactive conditions in which each status is actualized and how it affects anthropomorphism. From the point of view of pragmatism, what is constructed is less the animal itself than the perceptual frame in which the animal is directly perceived as object or pet. The "construction" work happens upstream from the face-to-face human–animal interaction. For example, animals are objectified through a set of procedures that involve technical, material and symbolic devices (cages, codes, etc.) that deprive them of their individuality and expressive capacities. These procedures and devices define the current activity and ascribe it to a recognizable category of activities. But their function is also to prepare laboratory workers to perceive animals as – mainly objects. They organize the activity toward the animals and orient perception. They help laboratory caretakers, technicians and scientists avoid being sensitive to the "stimulus" aspect of the animal's behavior. When these procedures fail, laboratory workers resort to specific strategies that help them keep the animal in the right perceptual frame. Arluke precisely describes the de-anthropomorphizing strategies used to objectify animals. Interestingly, they mainly have to do with perception and can be seen, in a broad sense, as "education of attention" (Ingold, 2001) devices.

(1) Animals are de-individualized, treated as a collective entity and labeled with a code that refers to the experiment in which they are enrolled. De-individualization not only facilitates the redefinition of the animal's nature. It also materially prevents laboratory workers from seeing them as individuals. In a laboratory, one post-doctoral student was asked to stop naming the sheep because it made it harder for the others to conduct their experiments. I would say that naming changes the perceptual frame: when they have a name, animals have the power of making themselves present in the eye of the human being. Their behavior and expressive movements now afford for a subject-to-subject relationship and this challenges their objectification.

The final example is about failing to keep the animals (pigs) in the right perceptual frames. In an experiment, pigs had to be attended 24 h a day by technicians (who became known as pigsitters). Their job was to sit at a desk, two feet away from the pen in which pigs were kept, to monitor the technical equipment, to record the pigs' global activity and to keep the pen clean. Three months later, the pigs were sacrificed for additional data. In these circumstances the technicians couldn't avoid developing strong attachment to the pigs. The pigs were named after super-heroes

6This is what Lynch (1988) called the "biological" animal in the laboratory. He opposed it to the "analytical" animal, which is a source of reliable scientific information. In a Science and Technology Studies approach, Lynch's analysis aims at describing the process by which the analytical animal is constructed.

and the pig-sitters were sincerely fond of them. Although they tried not to develop a pet relationship with the pigs, it was impossible for the pig-sitters to see them simply as laboratory objects. Because of the intricacies of their respective lives, the pigs and their pig-sitters shared a story, they were in a dialogic relationship and the pig-sitter were affected by the pigs. With the growing familiarity, the pig-sitter's perception of their animal charge became more acute; the pig became present not as an experimental body, but as an embodied consciousness. Sacrifice, Arluke writes, "was clearly a collective trauma" (Arluke, 1988, p. 115).

### FRAGILE PERCEPTUAL FRAMES?

As the previous examples have shown, the animal's status varies enormously depending on the practical actions the human beings make them parts of. Herzog (1988) documented the case of "escaped" mice in a laboratory. The escaped mice once lived as experimental subject, but they managed to escape and since then, they live an underground life and changed status: now they are bad mice that need to be exterminated. According to Herzog, the label "good" or "bad" mouse explains why individuals of the same species receive such different treatments: while the good ones are killed with kindness, the others are cruelly trapped. In agreement with Noble (1981), I don't think that the name of a thing in and of itself causes it to be perceived in one way or another. Rather, mice change status because people act differently toward them; as escaped mice, they offer different bodily and behavioral cues, and they engage people in different actions (trap, destroy. . .) that in turn cause them to behave differently. For the pragmatist, who considers action prior to perception, the name is second: they become bad ones because they are cruelly trapped.

The observations of Fluvian (2010) may provide some additional understanding. She too has observed that mice are given several statuses (living being, preparation and sensitive being), but no name is attached to it. Interestingly, she has noted that when the mouse status changed, the whole interactive situation changed: the researcher's tone of voice while talking to the mouse, her facial expression, the way she handled and perceived the mouse. Again, it would be difficult to argue that the perception of the mice' mental qualities depends on an act of inference that would proceed cognitively from behavioral cues and analogical reasoning in one situation but not in another one. Objectively, it can be argued that the cues are probably present in each situation, but the practical conditions of the action and interactive settings are making them obvious (affordances) or invisible. When shifting from a detached to an engaged position, the researcher perceives or enacts another mouse.

Actually, it is well known in anthropological research that animal status can change abruptly, in a rapid process that challenges the whole definition of the situation. In many huntergatherer societies, ontological differences between human beings and animals are far from fixed. They are rather "chronically unstable" and require efforts (i.e., relational processes) to be both stabilized and transformed (Remme, 2016, p. 118). Even in our society, in the most "fixed" perceptual frame, as is the laboratory, it may happen that a simple "look" on an animal's face unexpectedly challenges the course of action.  In one way or another, that dog managed to make his personhood perceptible in spite of the objectifying perceptual frame. It can happen that an unexpected affordance arises from a perception that is peripheral with regard to the main action and the main definition of the situation. Then, an alternative signification takes shape and the whole situation is reframed. In this case, sacrifice became murder, and the action became impossible to carry out. This is why laboratory people develop strategies to keep these competing affordances in the background of their awareness. It should be emphasized that this is a never-ending process. Cultural devices help stabilize the status of animals, but these are always provisional.

In the pragmatist view advocated here, perceptual cues, like a dog offering itself for petting, work as social affordances which invite particular kinds of behavior, and not others. According to the current action, they will be perceived or not. In any event, the interaction is the context in which mental states are perceived. It can even be argued that the perception of affordances, like the dog inviting me to stroke her, is directly linked to the apperception of mental states. As I perceive the dog's invitation to stroke her, I feel her as friendly. Maybe I'll later verbalize it as "she is kind," but it is not necessary, as I can stay in the feeling of being related to this "kind" animal. Additionally, it is misleading, as this verbalization is only a post hoc utterance that pretends to describe the dog while it is indeed about my feeling of the dog and my relationship with her.

### ANTHROPOMORPHISM AND IMAGINATION

Before I conclude, I'd like briefly re-examine the question of imagination in anthropomorphism. According to the pediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, imagination is necessary to relate oneself to something that is different from one's self. He created the concept of "intermediate area" or "potential space" to name "an intermediate area of experiencing, to which inner reality and external life both contribute" (Winnicott, 1971, 2005, p. 3). This intermediary area that could support an encounter with something very different from one's own self contains the possibility of establishing a relation with the world that does not force the individuals to choose between the inner life and the outer reality, but, quite on the contrary, enables them to connect the inside and the outside in a creative way. The example of the girl playing with a piece of wood as a baby is a good example of an experience taking place in an intermediate area. I would hypothesize that, maybe in many animal encounters, the creation of an intermediate area is the condition for people to be able to aggregate their experience and, thanks to imagination, connect

the heterogeneous perceptual cues afforded by the animal's body and/or behavior, and recognize some pattern.

While the example of the girl reminds us of the potential role of imagination in anthropomorphism, the concept of intermediate area cautions us against a radical view of anthropomorphism as a pure projection of human properties onto animals. In the scope of this theory, anthropomorphism is better defined as a way to perceive/create patterns that connect people with animals and make them relevant according to the current activity. This perspective is radical in the sense that we no longer need to decide whether some features (i.e., jealousy), "really" belong to the animal behavior or are projected by the human observer, but instead it invites the researcher to empirically document the cultural, interactive and situational conditions in which it happens.

#### CONCLUSION

This paper has shown that anthropomorphism, when it is studied in its naturally occurring circumstances, appears to be more complex than the attribution of mental or human qualities to an object, event or living being, according to a similarity gradient. As many examples have shown, anthropomorphism is not so much the product of an act of inference as it is the direct perception of human properties by someone who is engaged in a specific interaction and who accepts to let him/herself being touched or affected by the animal and its expressive qualities. Personhood is perceived rather than attributed, and it is perceived by the whole body, not only by the mind. Because the human or mental qualities are perceived from the inside of a relationship, keeping a relational point of view on anthropomorphic terms would prevent confusing them with a description of the animal "itself " while they are truly about the human–animal relationship.

From a pragmatist point of view, if it is true that animal mental qualities are discovered/produced in a specific

#### REFERENCES

interactional setting, it follows that any description of animal mental qualities should be accompanied by a description of its relational context of discovery. This could also be the case for the scientific inquiry in animal minds, as it has been suggested that animals are differently minded according to the interactional regime. Actually, this kind of reflexive thinking is usual in anthropology and, from a pragmatist point of view, could have its rationale in cognitive ethology too. Finally, the paper also suggests that uncertainty, imagination and illusion could be considered as important ingredients of human–animal relationships. Considered the situated perception of human and/or mental qualities, anthropomorphism appears as a powerful lens through which human–animal relationships can be studied. The perspective that has been advocated here also offers conceptual tools for in-depth ethnographic studies of anthropomorphism as a complex situated phenomenon.

#### AUTHOR CONTRIBUTIONS

The author confirms being the sole contributor of this work and has approved it for publication.

#### FUNDING

The research published has been completed while the author was employed as a full Professor by the University of Liège.

#### ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I wish to thank the reviewers for their very insightful comments and helpful suggestions that greatly improved the manuscript.

**Conflict of Interest Statement:** The author declares that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Copyright © 2018 Servais. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

fpsyg-09-02590 December 14, 2018 Time: 14:34 # 10

# Dimensional Structure of and Variation in Anthropomorphic Concepts of God

#### Nicholas J. Shaman1 \*, Anondah R. Saide2 and Rebekah A. Richert3

1 Department of Psychology, University of Houston–Clear Lake, Houston, TX, United States, 2 Educational Psychology, University of North Texas, Denton, TX, United States, 3 Department of Psychology, University of California, Riverside, Riverside, CA, United States

When considering other persons, the human mind draws from folk theories of biology, physics, and psychology. Studies have examined the extent to which people utilize these folk theories in inferring whether or not God has human-like biological, physical, and psychological constraints. However, few studies have examined the way in which these folk attributions relate to each other, the extent to which attributions within a domain are consistent, or whether cultural factors influence human-like attributions within and across domains. The present study assessed 341 individuals' attributions of anthropomorphic properties to God in three domains (psychological, biological, and physical), their religious beliefs, and their engagement in religious practices. Three Confirmatory Factor Analyses tested hypothetical models of the underlying structure of an anthropomorphic concept of God. The best fitting model was the "Hierarchical Dimensions Concept," the analyses indicated one overall dimension of anthropomorphism with three sub-domains. Additionally, participants' religiosity was negatively related to attributing human-like psychological properties to God, suggesting that the more people engage with their religion, the less they think about God as having a 'human-like' mind. Religiosity was positively related to individual consistency scores in the biological domain. In other words, greater religiosity was related to less consistent answers about God's biological properties. As a result, the findings of the current study also suggest that individuals do not just vary between each other in how much they anthropomorphize God, but additionally, variation exists in the type of anthropomorphic reasoning used within an individual person's concept of God.

Keywords: anthropomorphism, religious cognition, cognitive science of religion, religiosity, supernatural agents

### INTRODUCTION

The tendency for humans to anthropomorphize non-human entities across the life course has been well documented (e.g., Heiphetz et al., 2016; Nyhof and Johnson, 2017). Rather than focus on the generalized tendency to anthropomorphize non-human entities and objects by attributing to them agency and mental states, the current study examines the extent to which anthropomorphizing supernatural beings, such as God, occurs across domains and for uniquely human-like psychological processes. There is considerable evidence suggesting that applying human-like traits to non-human entities, like animals, computers, shapes, and supernatural beings,

#### Edited by:

Gabriella Airenti, Università degli Studi di Torino, Italy

#### Reviewed by:

Roy Spina, University of Chichester, United Kingdom Mike Dacey, Bates College, United States

> \*Correspondence: Nicholas J. Shaman<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
#### Specialty section:

This article was submitted to Cognitive Science, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychology

Received: 21 April 2018 Accepted: 20 July 2018 Published: 10 August 2018

#### Citation:

Shaman NJ, Saide AR and Richert RA (2018) Dimensional Structure of and Variation in Anthropomorphic Concepts of God. Front. Psychol. 9:1425. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01425

**46**

may constitute an innate cognitive bias, a bias that is common among all human minds (Guthrie, 1993; Dacey, 2017). In practice, an anthropomorphic bias leads people to make inferences about entities using their concept of "human" or "agent," rather than based on direct observable evidence from that entity (Rottman and Kelemen, 2012). Both children and adults will apply human-like traits even to geometric figures (e.g., triangles, squares) if those figures seem to move in systematized (i.e., patterned) ways (Csibra et al., 1999). Although some researchers are unpacking the nature of individual differences in the tendency to anthropomorphize (e.g., Waytz et al., 2010; Severson and Lemm, 2016), studies aiming to unpack the underlying structure of anthropomorphic concepts and relate that structure to folk reasoning in domains of psychology, physics, and biology, have been limited. The current study leverages the fact that concepts of unobservable, supernatural agents (e.g., God) are represented across human cultures and in human minds to examine the underlying dimensional structure of anthropomorphic attributions to God.

By studying how individuals make anthropomorphic inferences about unobservable, supernatural agents the current study simultaneously addresses three often understudied aspects of anthropomorphizing from the existing literature. First, the current study examines the attributions of human-like, rather than general, psychological properties to God. Although most studies of anthropomorphic reasoning consider it to be driven by folk psychological cognitive processes, anthropomorphic attributes are often conflated with attributions of agency (Epley et al., 2007). There are however, important differences between attributions of agency (self-propelled movement and having goal-directed actions) and mentality [goal-directed actions (i.e., agency) that are driven by internal thoughts, beliefs, emotions, perceptions, and desires] (Barrett, 2008); and there are further distinctions that are associated with human-like agency and mentalizing. However, studies that focus on the mentalizing attributions to non-human agents and objects typically focus on mental states that are also regularly associated with non-human entities (i.e., animals), such as having thoughts, desires, and perceptions (Epley et al., 2007; Shtulman and Lindeman, 2016).

Less commonly studied are inferences individuals make about whether non-human entities have human-like cognitions, such as the ability to pretend. Asking individuals whether they would apply specific, human-like psychological states to non-human entities can highlight the extent to which anthropomorphic reasoning about spiritual agents involves more than general attributions of agency or mentalizing, but rather attributions of human-like agency or mentalizing.

Second, studies of anthropomorphism must contend with the fact that anthropomorphizing involves the coordination of different inputs and cognitive processes, inputs based on direct observation or experience, in conjunction with the use of anthropomorphic reasoning. In research, the difficulty in delineating the role of anthropomorphic reasoning in concept formation arises when the information coming from these inputs overlaps. For example, a computer is a physical object that must conform to many of the same physical laws as a human body. Thus, a study that identifies that people attribute human-like physical traits to a computer would not be able to disentangle if that attribution is based in direct observation of computers conforming to physical laws, generally speaking, or to the inferences made that a computer must conform to the same physical laws as a person. Studying anthropomorphic attributions to an unobservable entity such as God, removes this confound, reflecting anthropomorphism through inference, rather than through direct experience (e.g., people cannot see if God has a body, they must infer if God has a body).

Third, studies of anthropomorphic reasoning often only assess the psychological attributions people make about nonhuman entities. However, humans are conceptualized as having biological and physical attributes as well. The focus on psychological attributes exclusively is due to the fact that the non-human entities examined have biological and/or physical attributes of their own, independent of any anthropomorphic inferences. For example, a person may infer that a dog needs to eat and cannot pass through walls, but that inference is not made because of any anthropomorphic reasoning. Asking individuals to make inferences about a non-human entity that does not have a corporeal form (according to religious or cultural messages) provides an opportunity to examine anthropomorphic reasoning beyond the psychological realm.

The current study of God concepts addresses each of these understudied aspects and delineates the structural nature of anthropomorphic concepts. Overall, the present study sought to determine: (a) the underlying structure of individuals' anthropomorphic concept of God, (b) whether there are cultural and experiential predictors of that structure, and (c) whether individuals are consistent in how they anthropomorphize the different sub-domains of concepts of God. To examine these research questions, the present study assessed individuals' attribution of anthropomorphic properties to God in three domains (i.e., psychological, biological, and physical), their religious beliefs, and their engagement in religious practices. Within each domain of human-like traits, participants were asked about characteristics of humans that would differentiate humans from an omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent explicit concept of God (e.g., humans can forget, God cannot forget). The primary contributions of the current study include an analysis of how these domains relate to one another and an exploration of the experiential (e.g., religious belief and participation) and personal (e.g., belief in God) factors that contribute to individual differences in anthropomorphizing across the three domains.

### ANTHROPOMORPHIC REASONING

According to Epley et al. (2007), there are at least three separate factors that contribute to the tendency to anthropomorphize: (a) people use concepts of agency to reason about non-human entities, (b) people are motivated to understand the behavior of non-human entities, and (c) people are socially motivated to seek social contact. The first factor, the tendency to use of concepts of agency to reason about non-human entities, is the most heavily researched, particularly in the cognitive science of religion (e.g., Rottman and Kelemen, 2012; Heiphetz et al., 2016). From this

perspective, when a person is reasoning about a non-human entity, that person conceptualizes that entity as an intentional actor that wants to effect some change upon the world. A set of assumptions can follow once an entity has been characterized as an intentional actor, including the assumption that the entity has mental states (including knowledge, emotions, and/or desires) that drive actions.

However, humans are not just conceptualized as intentional actors, but also as biological entities that obey the laws of physics. When making inferences about human beings, people do not only use their folk-psychological reasoning but use their folk-biological and folk-physical reasoning as well. A concept of a human is an entity that has mental states that drive action, but also has biological processes and obeys the laws of physics. However, there is debate as to whether people make anthropomorphic inferences based solely on their folkpsychological reasoning or their concept of 'human' (Rottman and Kelemen, 2012). If people only apply their folk-psychological reasoning to non-human entities, they would only make assumptions of agency and mentality. If people use their concept of 'human,' which includes all three domains of folk knowledge, when reasoning about a non-human entity, they would also make assumptions of growth and physicality. When engaging in anthropomorphic reasoning, thinking that a dog can have human-like mental states is just as anthropomorphic as thinking that God has a biological body. However, studies have suggested there are circumstances in which people are more or less likely to apply folk-psychological reasoning or their concept of 'human' to non-human entities.

More specifically, studies have begun to document extensive variation in the ways in which people anthropomorphize. Waytz et al. (2010) examined individual differences in people's tendency to anthropomorphize, creating and validating the Individual Differences in Anthropomorphism Questionnaire (IDAQ). Using this measure, Waytz et al. (2010) found individual differences in how much people anthropomorphize non-human entities and found these differences to be stable over time. When spiritual entities were among the non-human entities participants were asked to consider, spiritual entities loaded on a separate factor than animals and non-animals (technologies). Waytz et al. (2010) primarily operationalized anthropomorphism as the extent to which people attribute mental states to non-human entities (e.g., mind, free will, consciousness). Regarding the spiritual entities in particular, participants did not discriminate anthropomorphic and non-anthropomorphic traits from each other; Waytz et al. (2010) interpreted this finding to mean the measure more likely was a measure of belief in spiritual agents rather than anthropomorphism of spiritual agents.

Without the spiritual agents, the IDAQ had two underlying factors: anthropomorphism of animals and anthropomorphism of non-animals (Waytz et al., 2010). Waytz et al. (2010) found that these two factors were related in such a way as to suggest two factors within a superordinate tendency to anthropomorphize, with animal anthropomorphizing loading more strongly than non-animal anthropomorphizing. By collapsing the two factors together for a dispositional trait measure of anthropomorphism, the researchers found that increases in anthropomorphic reasoning are related to moral judgments of non-human entities, environmental concern, and trust in technological agents (i.e., computers and robots) (Waytz et al., 2010). In other words, the more an individual anthropomorphizes an agent, the greater reported belief that the agent deserves moral regard, moral care, and is trusted. This body of work indicates that anthropomorphizing differs both by individual but also by entity (human versus different types of non-humans). Regarding spiritual entities, the conflation in the IDAQ of anthropomorphizing with belief in spiritual entities suggests individual differences in anthropomorphizing spiritual entities involves more than reasoning about just their agency.

#### Anthropomorphic Reasoning About God

Although the tendency to anthropomorphize non-human entities is seen as a universal and innate behavior, an individual's cultural context influences which non-human entities are anthropomorphized and how those entities are anthropomorphized. Nowhere is this clearer than in the conceptualization of supernatural beings (Heiphetz et al., 2016). In cultures across the world, people often conceptualize supernatural beings, such as gods, spirits, and ghosts, as having minds or mental states that are similar to humans (e.g., Knight et al., 2004).

Given the interest in the current study on the extent to which adults make anthropomorphic inferences about God, the current study measured explicit concepts of God. However, it should be noted that people do not just anthropomorphize supernatural beings explicitly in stories or religious practices. In fact, although supernatural beings are often assigned special mental, biological, or physical properties that distinguish them from humans explicitly (i.e., consciously) (Boyer, 2001), people implicitly (i.e., non-verbally, unconsciously) conceptualize these beings as having human-like properties as well (Heiphetz et al., 2016). In other words, while adults may explicitly reason about God in non-anthropomorphic ways (i.e., God is omniscient), they may implicitly conceive of God as human-like, with human limitations and needs (Barrett and Keil, 1996; Shtulman and Lindeman, 2016).

One method for tapping into participants' implicit anthropomorphic reasoning while asking explicit questions is to ask participants to rate their certainty about whether or not God has certain human-like traits (Richert et al., 2017). For example, in a study measuring the relation between parents' anthropomorphic attributions to God and children's differentiation of God's mind and human minds, parents indicated their certainty that God had specific psychological (e.g., could forget), biological (e.g., could get sick), or physical (e.g., could get wet in the rain) limitations. Although parents globally answered no to these questions, Muslim parents were significantly more certain that God did not have these kinds of anthropomorphic traits than Protestant Christian, Roman Catholic, or Religiously Non-Affiliated parents (Richert et al., 2017).

Within the area of the cognitive science of religion, researchers have taken at least two approaches to the study of anthropomorphic concepts of the Judeo-Christian God. The first approach has been to explore how individuals conceptualize God's mind and knowledge, as compared to that of other entities (e.g., Barrett et al., 2001; Knight et al., 2004; Makris and Pnevmatikos, 2007; Lane et al., 2012; Richert et al., 2017). These studies of applying folk-psychological reasoning to concepts of God have indicated support that some (primarily Christian and Non-Affiliated) children think of God has having human-like mental states and limitations, whereas other (primarily Muslim) children do not.

The second approach has examined the degree to which individuals reason that God has human-like properties in all three folk domains: psychological, biological, and physical properties (e.g., Shtulman, 2008; Shtulman and Lindeman, 2016). Studies that examined each domain separately suggest people attribute more psychological properties to God than biological properties. Shtulman (2008) examined how adults attributed various properties to God and fictional beings (like fairies and vampires). On average, participants stated that God and the fictional beings had more psychological traits than either biological or physical traits. These findings suggest that people apply more folk-psychological reasoning to God than folkbiological or folk-physical reasoning.

Extending this research, Shtulman and Lindeman (2016) examined how adults attributed psychological and biological and physical traits to God. In their study, the psychological traits were related to agency and mentality (e.g., having beliefs, desires, intentions, emotions, and the ability to perceive). The biological traits were related to biological processes (e.g., breathing, eating, aging, becoming ill) and biological organs (e.g., heart, brain, bones). The physical traits related to existing as a physical entity in the world that was subject to the laws of physics (e.g., exerts force, has weight). Consistent with the previous findings, adults attributed more psychological traits to God than biological or physical traits. Shtulman and Lindeman (2016) noted that despite the participants not attributing many biological or physical traits to God, the mean levels were not zero. Thus, adults did utilize their folk-biological and folk-physical reasoning to conceptualize God, just not in the same way as their folk-psychological reasoning.

#### The Role of Religious Belief and Experience

As noted above, anthropomorphizing of culturally specific supernatural agents should be shaped by and responsive to the cultural context (Heiphetz et al., 2016). Support for this assertion has emerged in research into the influence of belief in God and religious exposure on anthropomorphizing of God. Shtulman and Lindeman (2016) found that measures of religiosity were related to attributions of human-like properties of God. Religiosity was measured with a 16-item questionnaire on daily spirituality, positive religious coping, participation in public and private forms of worship, and self-reported religiosity. Participants who reported higher levels of religiosity also were more likely to attribute psychological and physiological properties to God (although attributions of physiological properties to God was lower than attributions of psychological properties).

The positive nature of these correlation patterns indicates potential concern about confounding participants' belief in God with attributions they make to God. For example, Willard and Norenzayan (2013) found that variation in a person's ability to reason about mental-states (i.e., theory-of-mind) was linked to belief in God. Interestingly however, belief in God was unrelated to the general tendency to engage in anthropomorphic reasoning as measured by the IDAQ. This suggests that a person does not necessarily need to believe in the existence of God in order to hold anthropomorphic concepts of God. Additionally, Waytz et al. (2010) found that measures of anthropomorphizing God that focus on attributions of agency and mentality may conflate belief in God with attributing any traits at all to God.

Studies in the development of anthropomorphizing of God have suggested that religious factors other than belief in God may additionally relate to individuals' anthropomorphizing. For example, children of parents who believed the actions of prayer serve a ritualized, communicative function were more anthropomorphic in their concepts of God than children of parents who believed that the actions of prayer were there to promote internal reflection (Richert et al., 2016).

Recent studies have also documented differences in anthropomorphic reasoning about God by religious tradition. In one study, Muslim children and parents anthropomorphized God significantly less than Protestant Christian and Catholic children and parents (Richert et al., 2016). In a study with children from Latter-Day Saints and mainstream Christian backgrounds, children demonstrated an understanding that supernatural agents like God, have special mental properties; and the religious traditions that those children were from, influenced that understanding (Nyhof and Johnson, 2017). In another study, Hindu adults were more likely than Protestant Christian adults to associate physiological traits to God (Shtulman and Lindeman, 2016). To assess the varying influences religious beliefs and practices may have on anthropomorphic reasoning about God, the current study incorporated measures of belief in God and the soul, participation in religious activities, and participation specifically in religious rituals.

### RESEARCH QUESTIONS

In summary, previous research on anthropomorphic reasoning has found that people use their concept of agency to make inferences about non-human entities (Epley et al., 2007). Between people, however, there is considerable variation in the tendency to anthropomorphize (Waytz et al., 2010; Severson and Lemm, 2016). In order to separate the role that cognitive processes and direct experience play in anthropomorphizing non-human entities, researchers have examined how people anthropomorphize God, a nonobservable, non-human entity (e.g., Barrett and Keil, 1996; Barrett et al., 2001; Shtulman, 2008; Heiphetz et al., 2016;

Shtulman and Lindeman, 2016; Richert et al., 2017). Overall, studies on how people anthropomorphize God have found that people do differentiate between the mental abilities of God and human beings (Heiphetz et al., 2016). Moving beyond the psychological domain, research has also shown that people attribute more anthropomorphic psychological properties to God than biological or physical properties (Shtulman, 2008; Shtulman and Lindeman, 2016). Finally, research on the contextual factors that might predict individual differences have shown that people anthropomorphize God less when they have more religious exposure, and less when they are from the Islamic religious tradition (Richert et al., 2016, 2017). However, research has yet to fully characterize the underlying structure of anthropomorphic reasoning when it's applied to concepts of God. Thus, the current study examines (a) the conceptual structure of anthropomorphic reasoning about God, (b) predictors of that structure in individuals, and (c) consistency within and between the sub-domains of that structure in individuals.

### Conceptual Structure of Anthropomorphic Reasoning

The first research question of the current study regards the underlying conceptual structure of anthropomorphic reasoning about God in adults. Adults and children do vary in what human-like properties they attribute to different categories of non-human entities (Waytz et al., 2010; Severson and Lemm, 2016). However, researchers commonly collapse the underlying sub-categories of anthropomorphism together (e.g., animal and non-animal) to create a trait-like score of an individual's tendency to anthropomorphize. Research has yet to fully explain variation within and across dimensions of anthropomorphic reasoning.

As mentioned above, there is still debate as to whether anthropomorphic reasoning is just the application of agency and mentalizing (i.e., folk-psychological reasoning) to non-human entities, or the application of the entire 'human' concept (i.e., all three folk domains). Within concepts of God specifically, adults are more likely to attribute psychological properties to God than physical or biological properties (Shtulman, 2008; Shtulman and Lindeman, 2016). If anthropomorphic reasoning was just the application of agency and mentality, attributions of God's psychological properties would be unrelated to the attributions of God's physical and biological properties. The examination of mean differences between domains (psychology versus biology versus physics) has not outlined how or if domains relate to each other within individuals. Thus, the primary goal of the present study was to characterize the underlying structure of anthropomorphic reasoning in individual concepts of God.

To answer this question, three competing hypotheses were tested. The first hypothesis proposed that there is one overarching dimension of anthropomorphic reasoning, without sub-domains (**Figure 1**). In this structure, an individual who highly anthropomorphizes God in biological traits also would highly anthropomorphize God in psychological and physical traits. This hypothesized structure is labeled as the "One-Dimension Concept."

The second hypothesis proposed that there are three independent dimensions of anthropomorphic reasoning: psychological, biological, and physical (**Figure 2**). In this structure, an individual's anthropomorphic reasoning about God in the biological domain would be unrelated to their anthropomorphic reasoning about God in any of the other domains. This hypothesized structure is labeled as the "Independent Dimensions Concept."

The third hypothesis proposed that there is an overall dimension of anthropomorphic reasoning that is composed of three sub-domains – psychological, biological, and

physical – each of which contributes differentially to the overall anthropomorphic concept of God (**Figure 3**). In this structure, an individual's anthropomorphic reasoning about God in one domain would be partially determined by a domain-general tendency toward anthropomorphizing God while also being independently determined by domain-specific anthropomorphizing of God along a specific dimension. This structure is labeled as the "Hierarchical Dimensions Concept."

### The Role of Religious Belief and Experience

The second research question was related to understanding what cultural inputs are potential causes of variation between and within individuals regarding their anthropomorphic reasoning about God. Some research suggests that more religious individuals attribute more anthropomorphic properties (e.g., can hear, be aware of things) to God than less religious individuals (Shtulman and Lindeman, 2016). However, other research indicates that the tendency to anthropomorphize in general is unrelated to belief in God (Willard and Norenzayan, 2013). Developmental research in children show that anthropomorphic reasoning about God is unrelated to the frequency of participation in religious practices, instead children's anthropomorphic reasoning is related to their parents' anthropomorphic reasoning (Richert et al., 2016). Thus, the present study explored whether religious behavior and/or belief was related to an individual's anthropomorphic concept of God.

### Sub-domain Consistency of Anthropomorphic Attributions

The third research question was more exploratory and addressed the extent to which people's anthropomorphic reasoning varies within themselves, between domains in attributing anthropomorphic properties. In other words, people may rate God (or other non-human entities) as highly anthropomorphic across domains or may rate God as highly anthropomorphic in some domains (e.g., psychological) and not others (e.g., biological). Previous research has examined how people differ from one another in their global attributions of anthropomorphism (Waytz et al., 2010; Severson and Lemm, 2016) and in mean differences in the attribution of anthropomorphic properties in domains of anthropomorphism (Shtulman, 2008; Shtulman and Lindeman, 2016). However, it remains unclear where variation exists within people, between domains (psychological versus biological), and potentially within a single domain. Thus, the present study examined if individuals were consistent in their anthropomorphic attributions to God within each domain.

## MATERIALS AND METHODS

The present study assessed adults' anthropomorphic concepts of God, the underlying dimensional structure of anthropomorphic reasoning, predictors of the dimensional structure, and the consistency of individuals' attributions. Adults, varying in religious affiliation, indicated their certainty that God had biological, psychological, and physical attributes. Participants also answered questions about their religious behavior and religious belief.

### Participants

Three hundred and forty-one undergraduate students participated in this study. All participants were recruited through introductory psychology classes at a large university in Southern California. All participants received course credit for participation, and all participants spoke English. Participants had a range of religious affiliations (**Table 1**).

### Assessments

#### Anthropomorphic Reasoning

Participants answered nine questions about the anthropomorphic properties of God. Of the nine questions, three focused on God's psychological properties, three focused on God's biological properties, and three focused on God's physical properties (see **Table 2** for exact questions). Previous research with adults and children has indicated these nine questions reliably predict anthropomorphic reasoning about God (Richert et al., 2016; Shaman et al., 2016). Participants rated their certainty that God had each of these anthropomorphic properties on a 5-point scale from "Definitely No" [−2] to "Definitely Yes" [+2]).

For each domain of anthropomorphic properties, the mean of participants' ratings was calculated. Thus, each TABLE 1 | Age, gender, and religious affiliation of participants.

TABLE 2 | Questions assessing anthropomorphic properties of God.

participant had three domain average scores (psychological, biological, and physical) ranging from −2 to +2; a high score indicated the participant thought God was anthropomorphic in that domain and a low score indicated the participant thought God was non-anthropomorphic in that domain. An overall anthropomorphic reasoning score was also calculated by averaging all nine responses (**Table 3**).

For each domain of anthropomorphic properties, the standard deviation of participants' ratings was calculated. Thus, each participant had three domain consistency scores (psychological, biological, and physical); a high score indicated the participant was not consistent in attributing to God anthropomorphic properties within that domain and a low score indicated the participant was consistent in attributing to God anthropomorphic properties within that domain.

#### TABLE 3 | Anthropomorphism of God.

An overall consistency score was also calculated (**Table 4**).

#### Religious Belief

fpsyg-09-01425 August 9, 2018 Time: 9:7 # 8

Participants answered questions about their belief in God and belief in the soul, as well as questions about how religious and spiritual they considered themselves to be. Participants indicated their certainty that God and the soul existed on a 5-point scale from "Definitely does not exist" [−2] to "Definitely does exist" [+2]. Overall, participants were somewhat certain that God existed and that the soul existed (**Table 5**). Participants also indicated how religious and spiritual they considered themselves to be compared to the average American on a 5-point scale from "Not at all" [1] to "Very" [5]. Overall, participants considered themselves about average on religiosity and spirituality.

#### Religious Behavior

Participants answered three questions about the frequency of their religious behavior: attendance at events sponsored by a religious organization (e.g., youth group), engaging in private religious practices (e.g., prayer), and participation in public religious practices (e.g., religious services). Participants rated the frequency of participation on a 9-point scale from "Never" [0] to "Multiple times a day" [8]. These scores were averaged for an overall religious behavior variable. Overall, religious behavior was low, around 'multiple times a year' (**Table 6**).

#### Religious Experiences

Participants also answered questions about their experiences with specific religious activities, rituals, and events. For each event, participants indicated if they experienced it, prayed or observed someone praying during the activity, attended a

TABLE 5 | Religious belief.

TABLE 6 | Frequency of religious behavior.

religious institution for that activity, whether a religious figure was present, and whether they learned about the activity's meaning. For each aspect of each activity, participants indicated "yes" [1] or "no" [0]. For each question type, the sum of all experiences was calculated (**Table 7**).

Christian, Catholic, and Non-Affiliated participants responded to 20 activities: Baptism, Christmas, Communion, Easter, Funerals, Lent, Marriage, Pentecost, Last Rites, Bible Study, Confession, Confirmation, Eucharist, Gospel Singing, the Lord's Prayer, Missionary work, Ordination, the Rosary, making a Pilgrimage, and Speaking in Tongues. Muslim participants responded to 20 different activities: Aqiqa/circumcision, Eid Adha, Eid Fitr, Eid Mubahila, Eid Zehra, Jumah (Friday) Prayer, Muharram/Ashura, Mahe Ramadhan, Wiladat/Shahadat, Qur'an recitation, Namaz/Salah, fasting, Hajj/Umrah, Ziyarat, learning Arabic, attending madressah/Sunday school, learning Fiqh and Hadith, majalis/matam, dua recitation, and praying tasbeeh.

#### Procedure

Participants answered the survey electronically over the internet. Participants answered questions about their anthropomorphic concept of God first, followed by the questions about their religious beliefs and behavior. The survey took participants 38.5 min on average to complete.

#### RESULTS

#### Conceptual Structure of Anthropomorphic Reasoning

The first research question was about the underlying structure of an individual's anthropomorphic concept of God. Three confirmatory factor analyses (CFA) were conducted to test the three competing hypotheses. For each CFA model, the nine questions assessing different anthropomorphic properties of God were entered as the observed variables (see **Table 8** for correlations between observed variables). Models were estimated using maximum likelihood estimation. Additionally, for each model, the variances of the latent factors were set to 1. Factor loadings were then standardized.

When fitting data to a model in a CFA, a comparative fit index (CFI) greater than or equal than 0.95, a root mean square error of approximation (RMSEA) less than 0.08, and a standardized root mean square residual (SRMR) less than 0.08 indicate that the model acceptably fits the data (Schreiber et al., 2006). When fit to the data, the one-dimension model did not meet acceptable standards, χ 2 (27) = 144.64, p < 0.001,

TABLE 7 | Sum of religious experiences.

∗p < 0.05, ∗∗p < 0.01.

CFI = 0.847, RMSEA = 0.113, SRMR = 0.071. When fit to the data, the independent model did not meet acceptable standards, χ 2 (27) = 397.842, p < 0.001, CFI = 0.638, RMSEA = 0.201, SRMR = 0.274. When fit to the data, the hierarchical model did meet acceptable standards, χ 2 (24) = 73.086, p < 0.001, CFI = 0.952, RMSEA = 0.077, SRMR = 0.051.

An additional way to assess model fit is to compare models to each other rather than assessing if each model meets acceptable standards. When using Akaike information criterion (AIC), smaller values indicate the model fits the data better than larger values (Schreiber et al., 2006). Not only was the "hierarchical dimensions concept" model the only one to acceptably meet the fit criteria, when using a comparative fit statistic, the hierarchical model (AIC = 9543.567) fit the data better than the one-dimension model (AIC = 9609.125), which fit the data better than the independent model (AIC = 9862.323).

The findings from the three CFA analyses support the "hierarchical dimensions concept" hypothesis. In other words, when individuals conceptualize God's anthropomorphic properties, they conceptualize the psychological, biological, and physical properties differently from one another; however, each sub-domain of properties is influenced by superordinate anthropomorphic reasoning about God.

#### Sub-domain Analysis

Given the data suggest the hierarchical dimensions model best fit the data, a deeper examination of the sub-domains and the relations between them was warranted. As seen in **Table 9**, the CFA indicated the biological sub-domains loaded more strongly onto the latent construct of anthropomorphic reasoning about God than the psychological and physical sub-domains.

For further exploration, a Repeated-Measures ANOVA was conducted examining mean differences between the domains (see **Table 3** for means and standard deviations). There was a significant effect of sub-domain, F(2, 680) = 10.018, p < 0.001, η 2 p = 0.029. Participants did not rate God's psychological properties different than God's biological properties [t(340) = 1.770, p = 0.78, η 2 p = 0.012]. However, participants did rate God as more anthropomorphic in the physical domain than in the psychological [t(340) = 2.390, p = 0.038, η 2 p = 0.013] and biological [t(340) = 5.223, p < 0.001, η 2 p = 0.075] domains.

The analyses of participants' attributions of anthropomorphic properties to God revealed three primary findings. First, within a concept of God, anthropomorphic reasoning exists as latent, hierarchical construct consisting of three sub-domains: biological, psychological, and physical. Second, participants are more likely to infer God has physical anthropomorphic properties to God than psychological or biological properties. Third, participants' attribution of biological properties to God contributes more than attributions in other sub-domains to an individual's overall anthropomorphic concept of God. Because the hierarchical structure of anthropomorphic reasoning in this case (e.g., concept of God) emerged, further analyses examined predictors of variation in participants' anthropomorphic reasoning within the three sub-domains.

### The Role of Religious Belief and Experience

The second research question asked whether religious behavior and/or belief was related to an individual's anthropomorphic concept of God. A series of correlations were conducted to assess how participants' belief, religious behavior, and religious experiences, were related to their mean levels of

TABLE 9 | Unstandardized and standardized coefficients for hierarchical dimensions model.

anthropomorphic reasoning and their mean levels of each subdomain of anthropomorphic reasoning (**Table 9**).

First, a 3 × 4 Repeated-Measures ANOVA was conducted examining the mean differences between the sub-domains, as a within-subjects variable, and religious affiliation as a betweensubjects variable. For this analysis, participants who listed 'Other" were removed from the analysis due to the small number of participants. There was a significant main effect of domain, F(2, 638) = 7.660, p = 0.001, η 2 p = 0.023. Again, participants rated God as more anthropomorphic in the physical domain than the psychological and biological domains. There was also a significant main effect of affiliation, F(3, 319) = 11.067, p < 0.001, η 2 p = 0.094. Bonferroni post hoc tests indicated that Protestant Christian and Muslim participants significantly anthropomorphized God less than the Roman Catholic and Non-Affiliated participants. Finally, there was a significant interaction between domain and religious affiliation, F(6, 638) = 8.811, p < 0.001, η 2 p = 0.077.

Follow-up one-way ANOVAs were conducted to compare religious affiliations among each domain (**Figure 4**). For the psychological domain, the affiliations did significantly differ, F(3, 319) = 14.441, p < 0.001, η 2 p = 0.120. Bonferroni adjusted post hoc tests indicated Non-Affiliated participants anthropomorphized God significantly more than the other three religious affiliations. Roman Catholic participants did not differ from Protestant Christians but did anthropomorphize God significantly more than Muslim participants. For the biological domain, the affiliations did significantly differ, F(3, 319) = 9.135, p < 0.001, η 2 p = 0.079. Bonferroni adjusted post hoc tests indicated Roman Catholic participants anthropomorphized God significantly more than Protestant Christian and Muslim participants, but not Non-Affiliated participants. No other significant differences existed among religious affiliations. For the physical domain, the affiliations did significantly differ, F(3, 319) = 7.790, p < 0.001, η 2 p = 0.068. Bonferroni adjusted post hoc tests indicated Muslim participants anthropomorphized God significantly less than all other religious affiliations. Roman Catholic participants anthropomorphized God significantly more than Non-Affiliated participants.

In summary, Muslim participants anthropomorphized God less than participations from other religious backgrounds. Regarding the relations of the domains to each other, participants had strongest anthropomorphic reasoning about God in the physical domain, but patterns of psychological and biological anthropomorphic reasoning differed by religious background. Among Protestant Christian, Muslim, and Non-Affiliated participants, God was anthropomorphized least in the biological domain, with anthropomorphic reasoning in the psychological domain falling between the physical and biological domains. However, for the Roman Catholic participants, God was anthropomorphized least in the psychological domain, with the biological domain between the psychological and physical domains.

Beyond identification with a specific religious affiliation, a pattern emerged in how participants' religious behavior and belief were related to their anthropomorphic reasoning about God (**Table 10**). No significant correlations emerged between participants' biological or physical anthropomorphizing and their beliefs or experiences. However, participants who had higher levels of belief in God and the soul, reported stronger religiosity and spirituality, greater frequency of religious behavior, and

∗p < 0.05, ∗∗p < 0.01.

greater frequency of participation in religious practices were less likely to anthropomorphize God in the psychological domain.

Thus, the present study added evidence to support the hypothesis that religious beliefs and behavior are related to participants' anthropomorphic reasoning of God (Shtulman and Lindeman, 2016). However, the findings are more nuanced. Religious beliefs and experiences are specifically related to how participants conceptualized the psychological properties of God, but not God's biological and physical properties.