Why do we feel the need to humanise everything, from dogs to cars?

Human-ish
Justin Gregg, One World

In the late 19th century, a strange debate raged in the journal Nature about the “reputed suicide of scorpions”. They had been seen stinging themselves in the head and deliberately self-destructing when trapped by fire. Did this “scorpionic suicide” (if it happened as described) amount to existential hopelessness, as credible men of science argued?

Zoologist Conwy Lloyd Morgan was so energised by all this that he experimented on scorpions himself, declaring it his “duty”, given the implications for the emerging theory of natural selection. Morgan surrounded scorpions with fire, heated them in glass jars and coated them with acid. None attempted suicide; they did, however, burn to death.

Today, this may register as an oddity, but we still cling to ideas about non-human life and minds that say more about us than them. In Human-ish: How anthropomorphism makes us smart, weird and delusional, Justin Gregg explores the baggage we bring to our engagement with other animals.

Gregg is a dolphin cognition researcher and an author whose last book, If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal, looked at what animal intelligence says about human stupidity. Here, his focus is our tendency to attribute human-like thoughts, feelings and intentions to non-human beings.

Through many entertaining examples, Gregg reveals the mind-boggling lengths to which we take this projection, such as in the existence of “neuticles”: prosthetic testicles for neutered dogs to counter perceived emasculation and “loss of dignity”. He also tells us about the couple who contacted him about an “ocean birth”, dissuaded only when he pointed out they would attract sharks as well as dolphins.

Despite his genial tone, Gregg is serious in exposing how animals suffer due to our chronic anthropomorphism, for example in our lop-sided relationship with pets, increasingly treated as substitute children. Bulldogs, pugs and Persian cats – inbred to satisfy our love of large eyes, small noses and baby faces – are plagued with health issues, even struggling to breathe. And the plot of the film Jaws turned sharks from rarely seen ocean-dwellers into public enemies facing official culls, to the detriment of ocean ecosystems.

Irrational as Gregg reveals our anthropomorphism to be, he is sympathetic to the inclination: we are hard-wired for it, and it’s fun. But it can rebound: projecting human needs and desires onto other beings (even ones as unlike us as scorpions) affects which species we study. For instance, “mammalcentrism” means we know relatively little about insects.

Like another recent book, The Arrogant Ape by primatologist Christine Webb, Human-ish also examines “human exceptionalism” and our tendency to place ourselves at the centre of nature. This even extends to natural phenomena: it is known, for example, that hurricanes tend to kill more people if they have feminine names, because they are perceived as less dangerous, meaning people are less likely to take adequate precautions.

In Human-ish‘s final third, Gregg shows how projecting human characteristics onto machines and products (think cars and bottles) leaves us vulnerable to marketing. It is also increasingly leading us astray in tech as people project human-like sentience onto AI. Anthropomorphism may seem like a low-stakes diversion, even a natural impulse, but Gregg shows it is worth taking seriously – and keeping in check.

Elle Hunt is a writer based in Norwich, UK