A Mind like Mine: The Exceptionally Ordinary Underpinnings of Anthropomorphism

Abstract

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.

Human or Bot? How (Corrected) Errors Humanize a Communicator

“…Our findings also contribute to a much broader literature on the antecedents, processes, and consequences of anthropomorphism (e.g., Epley et al, 2007, Epley, 2018, dehumanization (e.g., Haslam & Loughnan, 2014;Haslam, 2006), and re-humanization (Fiske, 2009). Whereas the majority of prior work has investigated how the presence or absence of human nonverbal cues (e.g., facial features such as eyes, mouth; voice; body) can affect anthropomorphism of machines (Bartneck, et al, 2009;Castro-González et al, 2016;DiSalvo et al, 2002;Hegel et al, 2011) or the ways in which specific features of machines can be modified to convey different human-like traits (e.g., robots with baby faces, computer programs with different types of voices;…”

The most human bot: Female gendering increases humanness perceptions of bots and acceptance of AI

“…Research suggests that social machines should resemble humans and be granted human mental capacities to increase acceptance and ease social conversations with humans (Ruijten et al, 2019). Despite the deceptive nature of this strategy (Epley, 2018; Zawieska, 2015), the use of anthropomorphic (humanlike) design (cf. Epley et al, 2007; Fink, 2012) helps in building successful human–robot relationships and increasing positive responses towards robots (Damiano & Dumouchel, 2018; Waytz et al, 2014).…”

Service encounters with virtual agents: an examination of perceived humanness as a source of customer satisfaction

“…In other words, we humans are preconditioned, primed and neurologically prepared to interact with humans, and reaction patterns from human-human interactions easily translate into similar reactions to non-human objects (Karr-Wisniewski and Prietula, 2010). Epley (2018) argues that similarity between the non-human object and a human is a particularly important factor that can trigger this translation; because of the associative nature of human brains, exposure to a non-human object that is similar in some ways to a real human can make accessible and activate mental content (and its affective charge) related to real humansand in the next step, this content is applied, more or less automatically, to the non-human object [a similar priming-based argument appears in Aggarwal and McGill (2007)]. This provides us humans with efficient information processing possibilities; we can capitalize on our knowledge about what it means to be human.…”

“…The capability to recognize the emotionality of a target person is another aspect of having theory of mind (Epley, 2018;Leslie et al, 2004) and a first step toward empathy or empathizing (Wiese et al, 2017). One main source for recognizing others' emotionality is that others frequently display various levels of specific emotions, particularly with facial expressions.…”