Beyond Anthropomorphism

We all anthropomorphize at times, projecting our emotions onto other animals. It may be a fundamental part of our emotional wiring. One study found that injury to the amygdala, an emotional center of the brain, can sever this tendency. Some researchers think our inclination to apply human terms and concepts to other animals (and even to nonliving objects) is evolutionarily adaptive, aiding our survival across changing environments over long periods of time. When trying to understand the behavior of another creature, we have to start from somewhere, after all. And the easiest place to start is with ourselves. 

But scientists have been criticized for misattributing human traits to animals in their research. Barbara King, an anthropologist at William & Mary, says she has been accused of anthropomorphizing in her studies of animal grief and love. When King described an orca named Tahlequah swimming for 17 days with her dead calf as a whale in mourning, she was rebuffed by some colleagues who felt she was taking the comparison to humans too far. Although King supports careful research on animal emotions, she counters that the anthropomorphism criticism is often leveled unfairly. She says that many times, the accusation comes from other scientists who worry that using emotional terms like “grief” dilutes the rigor of the science. 

“Largely in my work, I have felt that [the charge of] anthropomorphism is weaponized as a dismissal,” King says. 

Accusing people of anthropomorphism is also sometimes used to deny the existence of emotions that animals genuinely seem to have. Valli Fraser-Celin, an animal welfare consultant who previously studied African wild dogs, argues that researchers need to find a balance—recognizing animals as individuals, yet ones we can’t fully know. Although humans and other animals have many similarities, “they do have their own capacities and their own lived experiences and their own ways of living in the world,” he says.

Scientific understanding of animals’ inner lives has come a long way since French philosopher René Descartes’ assertions that animals are automatons responding to stimuli, without the capacity for emotions or even pain. Research has since expounded on the emotional lives of animals. Imaging studies have shown that many mammals’ brains light up in ways that suggest emotions parallel to our own. Other studies have demonstrated social behaviors that include what many researchers define as culture: whale pods with distinctive dialects, wild African dogs that make group decisions through sneezing, and bumblebees that pass along foraging tactics.

Laboratory animal research also reveals an awkward inconsistency in how scientist think about other species. Animal models are routinely used to study pain, anxiety, and depression—the implication being that their psychological states are comparable to those in humans. Yet, when the thinking is reversed—when it’s suggested that our emotions might be a starting point for understanding animals—researchers tend to balk and dismiss the notion as anthropomorphism. 

“It’s a really profound double standard,” says Jessica Pierce, a bioethicist at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus. “You can’t have it both ways.”

Accepting the emotional commonalities between humans and other species is not only truthful, it can also motivate more empathy toward animals. “My hope is that the more people use accurate, anthropomorphic language to talk about animal minds and animal feelings, the more we’ll recognize them as like us,” says Pierce, “and not engage in quite so much exploitation.”

That more nuanced view doesn’t mean that anthropomorphism can’t be a problem. A classic example is that of Ham, a chimp sent to space in the 1960s. After he emerged from his space capsule, LIFE Magazine reported that he was “seemingly mugging for the camera.” Primatologists later clarified Ham's expression, which looked to us like a smile, was actually a grimace, perhaps a result of a stressful ocean landing. There’s also all sorts of clumsy anthropomorphizing in the media. For example, nature television shows routinely use terms like “honeymoon” or “marriage” in describing a mating ritual, says King. Such leaps in projection can lead us to misunderstand other species. 

Ironically, conservation scientists who generally avoid the romantic aspects of anthropomorphizing often embrace the term to demonize a species, to little criticism. For instance, King points out feral cats are sometimes called “murderers” and “assassins” because of their impacts on wildlife, but native predators don’t get hit with the same terms.

Our pets are frequently the victims of sloppy anthropomorphism, too. In one study, canine researcher Alexandra Horowitz of Barnard College found that humans misinterpreted dogs’ "guilty look." This look is more likely an expression of appeasement toward an angry owner rather than an understanding of misdeed. The dogs’ averted gaze and slinking posture were an effort to placate their frustrated owners.

But it’s not necessarily true that dogs don’t feel guilt, or a variety of other emotions. Rather, we may be bad at reading their actual mental states. That confusion can lead to unfair consequences for the canine, like citing their "guilty" expression as a confession and as a basis of punishment. 

“We jump to these conclusions, and I think what it leads to with pets is that people then punish their dogs for all sorts of unintentional acts of misbehavior,” says Pierce. “Anthropomorphizing is a much more serious problem when committed by pet owners, because they don’t have, often, the biological information to do it carefully.” Deeper research into canine cognition, now taking place at university labs around the world, are filling in some of those information gaps. Accessing that information can help pet owners get a clearer idea of what their dogs really mean. Learning about dog body language or the nuance in vocalizations, for instance, can help us start to see the world through their eyes. The whole idea is not to see dogs as humans, but to see them as living beings with a stake in the pleasure, pain, and feeling of their own  lives. From that perspective seeing them as emotional is not a bridge too far.

“I never have thought that [the term] is really misused in such an egregious way as the anthropomorphism critics claim it is,” comments Marc Bekoff, a biologist and ethologist at the University of Colorado, Boulder. 

Anthropomorphism is a starting point from which we can layer on knowledge of the animal’s biology to sharpen an image of their experience. Trying too hard to avoid emotional projection can even run the opposite risk—completely denying that animals have emotional lives. Primatologist Frans de Waal, who died recently, coined the term “anthropodenial” for this blanket rejection of animals' inner experiences. “Clearly, anthropomorphism that takes into account a species' evolved biology and perceptual world is a helpful starting point,” says King, while emphasizing it’s “not an ending point.” 

To salvage anthropomorphism from its excesses, researchers have described a few remedies. In 2008, geographer Catherine Johnston suggested “responsible anthropomorphism” as a way forward. Just as we, through spending time with friends and family, learn to predict their reactions and preferences, it’s possible to do so for other organisms, she argued. By applying responsible anthropomorphism, we can attribute our traits while maintaining guardrails that prevent us from straying too far from the biology of a given animal. Bekoff calls his related approach “biocentric anthropomorphism.” He asks why a particular behavior might be important for an organism, and “why is it important for them to express what their feelings are?” 

To get to this middle ground, we have to understand that every animal species displays its emotions in distinctive ways that we humans might not intuit. For instance, sometimes when a chimpanzee dies, male chimps in its social group hit the corpse or display other aggressive behaviors that we might not immediately think of as mourning, says King. “But that doesn’t mean it’s not mourning or grief for chimpanzees," she says. "You have to really look at the animal and you never just export directly.”

Despite these proposals, modern research language often remains sanitized of even the slightest appearance of anthropomorphism. “Just look at some headlines from Applied Animal Welfare Science, I think they’re one of the worst offenders,” says Pierce of the scientific journal. “There’s a lot of ‘pain-like’, or ‘anxiety-like’ behavior.” King sees it when she reviews studies, too. She says even researchers who will talk openly of animal grief in person will avoid attributing the emotion in their academic writing. 

“Nobody wants to feel that they are being criticized for being too soft,” says King. “And I think that that is a shame, because I think that we have very credible scientific reasons to apply those terms … So I think we do lose something by this extremely clinical perspective.”

Whether intentional or not, Bekoff says, the avoidance of acknowledging animal emotions maintains a distance between humans and other species. And thinking of animals as fundamentally different from ourselves makes it easier to justify practices that might be harming them. Creating that distance “opens the door to allowing them to do horrible things,” says Bekoff. “If you distance yourself from another animal, it really allows you to just basically brutalize them.” 

This mental distancing extends not only to only animal research laboratories or cramped industrial feedlots but to conservation. Bekoff says he has been accused of anthropomorphizing for questioning lethal control measures, such as the eradication of invasive rats on islands. Recognizing the rats as individuals that suffer when poisoned brings an uneasiness into work that’s typically shrouded in euphemisms, such as “cull” or “dispatch.” 

Conservationists, on the other hand, often use anthropomorphism as a tool to cultivate public empathy for target species and to promote support for the protection of wildlife. When rooted in a rational recognition of the animal mind, is such framing really wrong? Scholars have argued that denying animal minds leads to a greater tendency to see the environment as a means to our ends. Conversely, fueled in part by popular representations of animals in the media, people have broadly moved from attitudes of domination to mutualism toward wildlife, says Michael Manfredo, a natural resource management expert at Colorado State University. “All of a sudden, an animal isn’t an ‘other,’ it’s ‘us,’” he says of the shift.

Given all the baggage it carries, "anthropomorphism" might not even be the right word to use anymore, except in instances where a human trait really does not apply to an animal. “Emotions like love, grief, sorrow, joy, fear, are not human capacities—they should not be defined as uniquely human capacities,” says King. “Therefore, it’s not anthropomorphism, right?”

“When we think “I am anthropomorphizing,” we have already created a cognitive barrier between us and our empathetic appreciation of and feeling for another being,” says Pierce. 

If ascribing emotions carefully isn’t even anthropomorphism, because it’s acknowledging actual parallel emotions, then what do should call it? Pierce calls for a move toward “post-anthropomorphism,” an empathetic response that doesn’t require having to create separation between humans and other animals. More simply, she says, we could call our recognition of animal emotions “mindful empathy.” 

The key to developing a deeper understanding of our place in the animal kingdom, Pierce suggests, is acknowledging a “both/and” mindset. Animals share many internal experiences with us, yet we will never truly know those experiences. That murky middle ground, she says, “is a healthy place to be.”