A Mind like Mine: The Exceptionally Ordinary Underpinnings of Anthropomorphism
By Nicholas Epley. Journal of the Association for Consumer Research, 2018
156 citations recorded by the source corpus.
From computers to cars to cell phones, consumers interact with inanimate objects on a daily basis. Despite being mindless machines, consumers nevertheless routinely attribute humanlike mental capacities of intentions, beliefs, attitudes, and knowledge to them. This process of anthropomorphism has historically been treated as an exceptional belief, explained away as simply an inevitable outcome of human nature or as an occasional product of human stupidity. Recent scientific advances, however, have revealed the very ordinary processes of social cognition underlying anthropomorphism. These processes enable psychologists to predict variability in the magnitude of anthropomorphism across contexts and also connect it to the inverse phenomena of dehumanization whereby people treat other human beings as if they lack a humanlike mind. Consumer behavior researchers are uniquely equipped to study these processes, to identify the precise situational features that give rise to anthropomorphism, to understand implications for consumer welfare, and to predict important consequences for how people treat everything from machines to animals to other human beings.
Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Social Psychology
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/459be422f7fcab41ac5853627fc035d221ee3c33
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Citations in the corpus
- Eliza in the uncanny valley: anthropomorphizing consumer robots increases their perceived warmth but decreases liking (2019, background): “Similar to Professor 2 Theoretical background 2.1 Anthropomorphism Epley (2018) defines anthropomorphism as B perceiving human-like traits in nonhuman agents ^ (p. 591).”
- Anthropomorphism in AI (2020, background): “…mechanisms of anthropomorphism are not unlike those that make humans develop a theory of mind, i.e., attributing mental life to other people (Epley 2018; Epley et al. 2008) even when anthropomorphism goes beyond that by also attributing emotional states, behavioral characteristics, and…”