Animism

Animism means labeling inanimate objects as living, attributing characteristics of animate objects (typically humans) to inanimate objects, and making predictions or explanations about inanimate objects based on knowledge about animate objects (again usually represented by human beings). Anthropomorphism or personification means the extension of human attributes and behaviors to any nonhumans. Thus animistic reasoning can be regarded as personification of an inanimate object. In both cases, assigning mental states (desires, beliefs, and consciousness) to inanimate objects, including extraterrestrial entities (e.g., the sun) and geographical parts (e.g., a mountain), provides the most impressive example ("The sun is hot because it wants to keep people warm").

The term animism was introduced by English anthropologists to describe mentalities of indigenous people living in small, self-sufficient communities. Although such usage was severely criticized by Lévy-Bruhl (1910), the term became popular among behavioral scientists, as PIAGET (1926) used it to characterize young children's thinking. Piaget and his followers (e.g., Laurendeau and Pinard 1962) took animistic and personifying tendencies as signs of immaturity, as reflecting the fact that young children have not yet learned to differentiate between animate and inanimate objects or between humans and nonhumans. Chiefly because of methodological differences, a large number of studies on child animism inspired by Piaget, conducted in the 1950s and early 1960s, obtained conflicting results as to the frequency of animistic responses (Richards and Siegler 1984), but the results were discussed only within the Piagetian framework.

Since the 1980s, studies of young children's biological understanding or naive biology have shed new light on child animism. A number of investigators have shown that even young children possess the knowledge needed to differentiate between humans, typical nonhuman animate objects, and inanimate ones (see COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT). For example, Gelman, Spelke, and Meck (1983) found that even three-year-olds can almost always correctly attribute the presence or absence of animal properties to familiar animals and nonliving things. Simons and Keil (1995) demonstrated that young children can distinguish between natural and artificial constituent parts of their bodies even when they do not know specifics about them. Young children may even assume that each animal and plant has its underlying essential nature (Gelman, Coley, and Gottfried 1994; see also ESSENTIALISM).

Then why do young children, even when they are intellectually serious, make animistic or personifying remarks fairly often, although not so often as Piaget claimed? What functions does the mode of reasoning behind animistic or personifying errors have? Both Carey (1985) and Inagaki and Hatano (1987) propose that, though young children are able to classify entities into ontological categories, when they have to infer an object's unknown attributes or reactions, the children apply their knowledge about human beings to other animate objects or even to inanimate objects. This is probably because they do not have rich categorical knowledge, and thus have to rely on ANALOGY in inferences. Because they are intimately familiar with humans, although necessarily novices in most other domains, they can most profitably use their knowledge about humans as a source analogue for making analogies.

Inagaki and Hatano (1987) propose that animistic or personifying tendencies of young children are products of their active minds and basically adaptive natures. Young children's personification or person analogies may lead them to accurate predictions for animate objects phylogenetically similar to humans. It can also provide justification for a variety of experiences, sometimes even with phylogenetically less similar objects, such as trees or flowers. Young children may have learned these heuristic values through their prior contacts with a variety of animate objects. The analogies young children make may involve structurally inaccurate mapping (e.g., mapping the relation between humans and food to that between plants and water), and induce biased reasoning (neglect of the roles of nutrients in the soil and photosynthesis). Although young children may carry analogy beyond its proper limits, and produce false inferences, they can generate "educated guesses" by analogies, relying on their only familiar source analogue of a person (Holyoak and Thagard 1995). Animistic errors and overattribution of human characteristics to nonhuman animate objects should therefore be regarded as accidental by-products of this reasoning process. Because their personification is subject to a variety of constraints, such as checking the plausibility of the inference against what is known about the target, it does not produce many personifying errors, except for assigning mental states to nonhumans.

How can we explain animistic thinking among indigenous adults? According to Atran (forthcoming), in cultures throughout the world it is common to classify all entities into four ontological categories (humans, nonhuman animals, plants, and nonliving things, including artifacts), and to arrange animals and plants hierarchically and more or less accurately because such taxonomies are products of the human mind's natural classification scheme (see also FOLK BIOLOGY). Because indigenous people generally possess rich knowledge about major animals and plants in their ecological niche, their animistic and personifying remarks cannot result from having to rely on the person analogy, except for poorly understood nonnatural entities like God (Barrett and Keil 1996). Such remarks seem to be products of cultural beliefs, acquired through discourse about a specific class of entities. Mead's early observation (1932) that children in the Manus tribes were less animistic than adults lends support to this conjecture. Animistic or personifying explanations are widespread, but they are more about the metaphysical or imaginative universe than about the real world (Atran 1990). Even contemporary Japanese culture, outside the science classroom does not consider it a silly idea that large, old inanimate entities (e.g., giant rocks, mountains) have CONSCIOUSNESS.

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-- Giyoo Hatano

References

Atran, S. (1990). Cognitive Foundations of Natural History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Atran, S. (Forthcoming). Folk biology and the anthropology of science: Cognitive universals and cultural particulars. Brain and Behavioral Sciences.

Barrett, J. L., and F. C. Keil. (1996). Conceptualizing a nonnatural entity: Anthropomorphism in God concepts. Cognitive Psychology 31:219-247.

Carey, S. (1985). Conceptual Change in Childhood. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Gelman, R., E. Spelke, and E. Meck. (1983). What preschoolers know about animate and inanimate objects. In D. Rogers and J. A. Sloboda, Eds., The Acquisition of Symbolic Skills. New York: Plenum Press, pp. 297-326.

Gelman, S. A., J. Coley, and G. M. Gottfried. (1994). Essentialist beliefs in children: The acquisition of concepts and theories. In L. A. Hirschfeld and S. A. Gelman, Eds., Mapping the Mind: Domain Specificity in Cognition and Culture. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, pp. 341-365.

Holyoak, K. J., and P. Thagard. (1995). Mental Leaps. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Inagaki, K., and G. Hatano. (1987). Young children's spontaneous personification as analogy. Child Development 58:1013-1020.

Laurendeau, M., and A. Pinard. (1962). Causal Thinking in the Child: A Genetic and Experimental Approach. New York: International Universities Press.

Lévy-Bruhl, L. (1910). How Natives Think. Translated by Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985. Originally published as Les fonctions mentales dans les sociétés inférieures. Paris: Alcan.

Mead, M. (1932). An investigation of the thought of primitive children with special reference to animism. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 62:173-190.

Piaget, J. (1926). The Child's Conception of the World. Translated by Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Allanheld, 1960. Originally published as La représentation du monde chez l'enfant. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.

Richards, D. D., and R. S. Siegler. (1984). The effects of task requirements on children's life judgments. Child Development 55:1687-1696.

Simons, D. J., and F. C. Keil. (1995). An abstract to concrete shift in the development of biological thought: The inside story. Cognition 56:129-163.

Animism

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