The mind behind anthropomorphic thinking: attribution of mental states to other species
By Esmeralda G. Urquiza-Haas, K. Kotrschal. 2015
213 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Humans readily attribute intentionality and mental states to living and nonliving entities, a phenomenon known as anthropomorphism. Recent efforts to understand the driving forces behind anthropomorphism have focused on its motivational underpinnings. By contrast, the underlying cognitive and neuropsychological processes have not been considered in detail so far. The marked increase in interest in anthropomorphism and its consequences for animal welfare, conservation and even as a potential constraint in animal behaviour research call for an integrative review. We identify a set of potential cognitive mechanisms underlying the attribution of mental states to nonhuman animals using a dual process framework. We propose that mental state attributions are supported by processes evolved in the social domain, such as motor matching mechanisms and empathy, as well as by domain-general mechanisms such as inductive and causal reasoning. We conclude that the activation of these domain-specific and domain-general mechanisms depend on the type of information available to the observer, and suggest a series of hypotheses for testing the proposed model.
Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Genetics, Social Psychology
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/928da194d6d962883471a369bd3e07c9ff1a2840
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Cognitive Neuroscience
In Genetics
In Social Psychology
Citations in the corpus
- Theories and possible processes of action in animal assisted interventions (2017, background): “Anthropomorphism is a response to human-like behavior (Caporael & Heyes, 1997) or features (Guthrie, 1997) based on implicit and explicit processes (Urquiza-Haas & Kotrschal, 2015).”