Living Things

Five jobs ago I sat in an office. Beside Mark.

Inside, floor plans and 3D models surround the sales centre. Outside, a construction site. Beyond the desks and glass windows, machines move earth from morning to dusk. A building rises.

Dozens of machines work the site. Cranes pivot. Trucks haul gravel. From my desk I can see it all. But every day, with the inevitability of gravity, my attention drifts to a small excavator in the far corner of the lot. The large ones work the centre, confident, efficient. This one works the edges. Scooping loads too heavy for its arm. Reversing. Trying again. Always trying its best.

At night it rests sometimes under a tarp while the larger machines sit in rows, uncovered. Other times it is left in the mud at the edge of the lot, angled as if it had been set down mid-thought.

To the rest of the world, a piece of equipment. To me, Mark.

My gateway is named Dan. The Roomba and the Braava are Bennie and the Jets. I lend feelings to objects, encourage appliances, assign personality. Think about a bowl held together by gold. Imagine an hourglass waiting in a studio to be noticed. This is a part of me that refused to grow up.

Do you see human where others see machine?

Anthropomorphism is the attribution of human characteristics, emotions, or intentions to non-human entities. We name storms, scold devices, and mourn stuffed animals.

In 1944, psychologists Fritz Heider and Marianne Simmel showed participants a short animation: two triangles and a circle moving around a rectangle. No faces. No voices. Just shapes. Nearly every viewer described a story. The large triangle was a bully. The circle was frightened. The small triangle was protective. Participants assigned personality, motive, and emotion to geometry. The mind did not wait for evidence of life. It assumed it.

Nicholas Epley's three-factor theory explains the variability. Anthropomorphism intensifies under three conditions: when knowledge of human behaviour is easily accessible, when we need to control something unpredictable, and when we lack social connection. Loneliness is a powerful driver. People who feel isolated attribute more humanlike qualities to pets, gadgets, and even religious agents.

The same research identifies imagination itself as a catalyst. The more readily your mind accesses human concepts, the more it applies them everywhere. Some people do not anthropomorphise because they lack connection. They do it because their social cognition never learned to stop at the species boundary.

The mind does not wait for connection. It creates it.

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Neuroscience reveals something more fundamental. When we watch a robotic arm perform a simple action, the brain's mirror neuron system activates in the same regions used to process human action. The response is not metaphorical. The brain does not distinguish cleanly between human and non-human agents. It processes both through the same social circuitry.

This is why a child talks to a toy before fully grasping that other children have inner lives. The social mind does not wait for proof. It broadcasts first and corrects later. Evolution favoured this. Early humans who assumed the rustling grass held a predator survived more often than those who assumed wind. False positives carried survival value.

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But the same mechanism operates in reverse. Waytz, Epley, and Cacioppo found that the factors driving anthropomorphism also predict dehumanisation.

People who feel socially connected are less likely to see minds in non-human things. They are also more likely to deny them in certain people. The satisfied mind stops scanning. And when it stops, it can miss minds that are actually there.

The mechanism that makes you feel guilt when you discard a childhood toy is the same one that, when it shuts down, allows entire groups of people to be treated as less than human.

Anthropomorphism is not taught. No one sat us down and explained how to see life in a stuffed animal. We arrived that way.

As we move through life, correction begins. "It cannot hear you." "Do not be silly." "It is just a toy." Each correction teaches the same lesson: not everything feels. By adulthood, the lesson is fluent. Automatic.

But we do not have one system for understanding people and a separate, defective one that fires at objects. We have one mechanism. The part of you that names appliances, apologises to furniture, roots for small excavators in the mud is the part that reads a stranger's face on the train and knows, without asking, that they are having a terrible day.

Anthropomorphism when it fires at objects. Empathy when it fires at people.

Which means we were born with a mind that defaults to connection. That assumes inner life. That extends feeling before it has proof. Everything after that is restriction. Learned, practised, reinforced. Meant to narrow the circle of attention.

Notice what you are correcting.

There is no danger in seeing too much life in things. The danger is learning to see too little life in people. Dehumanisation requires only that you stop imagining an inner life where one actually exists. "It is just business." "He is just the delivery guy." "She is just old."

Anthropomorphism is empathy before we are taught to aim.

^{This is a space for exploration and reflection, not medical, psychological, or therapeutic advice. Each reader’s situation is unique and deserves the right kind of support. If you are struggling or in crisis, please contact a licensed mental health professional. This edition contains affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate, we may earn from qualifying purchases at no additional cost to you.}