How do you imagine a threat that creeps into your home unannounced and takes away your loved ones? In Europe infected with the plague, the answer was a skeletal figure with a hood and scythe in hand – The grim reaper (Grim Reaper). It first appeared in the 14th century, at the time of the Black Death, when wave after wave of infection swept across the continent and killed half of its population.
The exact form of this ghostly creature varies from country to country – “Death” can be young or old, male or female, dressed in white or black – but most folklore throughout history represents sickness and death in human form.
After the age of enlightenment and the progress of science, we would think that we would stop attributing human characteristics and conscious intention to natural phenomena, but even a cursory look at the images we used to describe covid 19 indicate that we have not freed ourselves from that urge.
We described the coronavirus as a vicious plague that has a conscious intention to destroy humanity, we drew it with arms, legs and an evil smile, and the then US President Donald Trump spoke of it as “resilient and smart”. Some scholars have even begun to give him different variants of nicknames inspired by mythology.
U.S. officials first began naming tropical storms during World War II, and in 1953 the process was formalized—though initially they were all named after women. Today, names are chosen by the World Meteorological Organization, which has a strict six-year rotation of male and female names.
According to recent scientific research, this tendency of ours is a natural human reaction to unpredictable events, and although it is mostly harmless, it can sometimes lead us to overestimate the real risks of a situation. Everything depends on the specific characters we create and the characteristics we assign to them.
The foundations of this scientific theory can be traced back to the Scottish philosopher David Hume. “There is a universal tendency among men to regard all beings as similar to themselves, and to transfer to every object those qualities with which they are well acquainted and aware,” he wrote in Natural history of religiona work published in 1757. “We find human faces on the moon, armies in the clouds; and by natural tendency, if we do not correct it by experience and thinking, we attribute malice and good will to everything that hurts or pleases us.”
Hume believes that this is a way to deal with the uncertainty of the world – “the constant uncertainty between life and death, health and sickness, abundance and scarcity, which are distributed among mankind by secret and unknown causes”. Imagining the human mind behind events may be irrational, but it prevents the panic that would be caused by the recognition of our sheer inability to understand what has happened and to predict the likelihood of future events.
Until the 20th century, Hume’s claims were purely philosophical. During the 1940s, however, a famous experiment confirmed his theory and revealed that it takes surprisingly little to trick the mind into seeing human-like intent.
Fritz Heider and Marianne Simmel from Smith College in Massachusetts showed participants in the experiment an animated film with geometric shapes – a large triangle, a small triangle and a circle – moving across the screen. There was nothing more in the picture than the basic box with a lid. At one point, a small triangle and a circle enter the box and the lid closes.
There are no facial expressions, no faces, and no signs of body language in these purely abstract figures – but most participants offered highly anthropomorphic language to describe what they saw, and often gave personality traits to the various forms.
They saw it as a love story, for example, in which two triangles fight for the circle – and ultimately fight for her affection. The larger triangle is declared a “thug” or “villain”; he (most agreed he was male) was “aggressive” and “cunning”; one participant claimed that the big triangle was “blinded with rage and frustrated” when his love rival ran off with the circle (which was revealed to be female).
Would the participants create such imaginative narratives, full of intentions and emotions, if the forms seemed more predictable? According to Hume, the answer would be no; when it comes to natural phenomena, he argued, we anthropomorphize them in order to understand things that would otherwise not make sense. Psychologists describe this as the “motivation effect” of anthropomorphism—and researchers like Adam Weitz of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, have now found good evidence for the idea.
Weitz’s research primarily examined our tendency to anthropomorphize technology. In the first study, they asked people about their computers. They had to rate how often they faced problems with the device and how many times it seemed to them to “act as if it had its own will and desires.” The results were exactly as hypothesized: the less reliable the participants’ devices were, the more they rated them as working on their own accord.
All of the team’s subsequent experiments revealed the same trend. They asked participants to consider different types of devices, for example, which ones were more reliable than others. For example, for one watch they were told that when they pressed the button to stop the bell, the watch would run away or jump on them. The unpredictability of its behavior significantly increased participants’ ratings of the device’s apparent “free will” or “consciousness,” compared to similar devices that lacked this element of surprise.
Anthropomorphic bias has also been registered in brain MRI scans. When learning about the unpredictable devices, participants had increased activity in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and anterior cingulate cortex. These areas were already known to be involved in “mentalizing”—that is, putting ourselves in other people’s shoes and trying to understand their motives. The researchers conclude that “seeing things as having a mind of their own may not be just a metaphor”—our brains try to consider the device’s behavior as if it were literally another person.
In their latest experiment, Weitz and his colleagues directly tested whether anthropomorphism successfully reduced feelings of uncertainty—and to do so, they returned to the version of the film used by Heider and Simmel in their classic study from the mid-1940s, with geometric shapes that they “run” across the screen.
This time, the researchers wanted to actively encourage or discourage anthropomorphism to measure its effects, so they divided the subjects into two groups that received different instructions. Before watching the clip, some were told, “When you look at these shapes, we want you to try to get inside their minds and think about them the same way you would think about other people.” Others were instructed, “When you look at these shapes, we want you to think only of the visible movements they make and think of them as you would any other unknown object.”
Afterwards, participants were asked to rate how well they understood the shape’s actions and how well they could predict future behavior. Consistent with the idea that anthropomorphism arises from affect motivation, instructions to “get into the minds of shapes” increased both of these ratings.
Given these results, the personification of Covid-19 may have been a natural reaction to the enormous uncertainty of the pandemic, Vejc suspects. “The desire for meaning in a very unpredictable situation has led people to anthropomorphize illness,” he says.
A sense of control can offer useful comfort. “Our work has shown that people have a sense of predictability and understanding of the things they anthropomorphize,” says Weitz, “so whether or not they actually understand those things, it provides a sense of psychological relief.”
However, the long-term consequences will depend on the context. At worst, anthropomorphism can exacerbate irrational behavior.
For example, how we view happiness and how it affects our financial decisions. Katina Kulov of the University of Louisville and her colleagues recently asked participants to rate the degree to which they anthropomorphized happiness by rating on a scale statements such as, “To what extent does happiness have intentions?” She found that the more they attributed human characteristics to different randomness, the more likely they are to make riskier choices when gambling. That should be kept in mind whenever we think that it would Miss Luck (Lady Luck) could be on our side.
However, when it comes to our health, anthropomorphism can protect us from risk. The personification of illness appears to make the danger closer and heighten people’s sense of vulnerability, prompting us to take appropriate precautions, according to research by Lily Wang and her team at Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, China.
In the early stages of the Covid pandemic, for example, participants were given one of two messages that offered information on ways to avoid infection. The only difference between the messages was the level of anthropomorphism – whether the text referred to “coronavirus” or “Mr. Coronavirus”, for example.
“You can meet Mr. Coronavirus through contact with an infected person when they cough or sneeze. You can also get it when you touch a surface or object that has the virus and then touch your eyes, nose or mouth,” the notification said. “There is currently no vaccine to keep Mr. Coronavirus at bay, but you can protect yourself and others by keeping your hands clean, not touching your face, avoiding close contact with people outside your household, and taking other common-sense measures to limit your exposure (eg. staying at home).”
Despite relatively small differences in message content, the personification of the virus increased people’s willingness to follow the recommendations.
To verify these results, the team conducted similar experiments for a number of other diseases – and each time came up with very similar results. Regardless of whether participants were examining information about yellow fever vaccination, breast cancer screening, sunscreen to avoid skin cancer, or means to lower high blood pressure, messages anthropomorphizing the relevant disease encouraged greater adherence to medical advice.
Given these results, Wang suggests that anthropomorphism could be a useful tactic in public health campaigns. While visual cues can also be helpful, Wang says that it’s hard to get the right effect with visualization. “There is a danger that the visual signs are too cartoonish or cute to represent some serious illness,” he adds.
Looking back on human history, some researchers have argued that our anthropomorphic bias may have given birth to various religious deities. These stories may begin as vague suspicions about human intentions behind an unexpected event, and then develop over time into complex belief systems. In many cases, they include detailed descriptions of specific figures and their powers, along with traditions designed to appease them.
Hume stated that in Natural history of religion and modern scientists agree with it. “The everyday ability to recognize and infer other people’s mental states and to represent goals and intentions also enables people to imagine, think about, and believe in various supernatural agents,” writes Will Gervais of the University of Kentucky in a research paper on the subject. “The ability to represent gods arises as a cognitive byproduct of the human ability to perceive minds,” adds Gervais.
Available evidence supports that hypothesis. Feelings of uncertainty are likely to increase beliefs in religious or paranormal figures, for example, and brain scans show that these beliefs often share the same neural underpinnings as other forms of anthropomorphism.
Source: www.sitoireseto.com
