As humans, we love projecting our emotions on non-human things like animals, objects and weather events. I’m told the psychological term for this is anthropomorphism, which is difficult to say three ...

People talk to their plants, pray to human-like gods, name their cars, and even dress their pets up in clothing. We have a strong tendency to give nonhuman entities human characteristics (known as ...

Take a class in animal behavior and you’ll probably receive a warning: Beware of anthropomorphism. Explaining animals in terms of human motivations, emotions, or mental characteristics invites ...

Have you ever assigned personalities to your pets and explained their behaviors in terms of human motivations, such as imagining that a cat is being stubborn? The attribution of human characteristics, ...

At the start of Elizabeth Hobson’s career as an ecologist, she knew to stick to one rule: Never anthropomorphize the animals you study. For plenty of people, assigning human characteristics to another ...

Anthropomorphism is the tendency to attribute human emotions, intentions, or behaviours to non-human entities. This psychological habit leads people to relate to machines, animals, or objects as if ...

The complexity of animal behaviour naturally prompts us to use terms that are familiar from everyday descriptions of our own actions. Charles Darwin used mentalistic terms freely when describing, for ...