My experience is not so much the attribution of human characteristics to non-human objects, but I understand why this might be the only accessible language of expression. For me, if a useful object is damaged or otherwise loses its usefulness through neglect or malice, I experience something like an emotional response. A good example would be a dull knife. There's something "sad" about an object whose nature or purpose it is to be sharp to lose or lack that sharpness.
Or perhaps a more subtle example would be a room whose contents are haphazard or in disarray. In that situation I would sense a lack of care or attention and there might be an emotional feeling that these objects had not been respected or appreciated.
It's (usually) easy for most people to care about other people. It's a little less easy, though still pretty common, for people to care about animals. The further away from recognizably human you get, the less people seem to care: e.g. insects, plants, bacteria, viruses, etc. For me there is something that "scales" down all the way to inanimate objects.
It's easy to get sentimental over neglected things because I seem to have an innate appreciation and sense of duty toward objects that are designed to help people. It only seems fair that the contract includes care and maintenance from the user.
I live in an aging neighborhood and weep for some of these homes. I visited an abandoned unit just this weekend and went through the spectrum of sadness and anger that such a beautiful building had been allowed to fall into such disrepair. The unit was unsafe to live in, the foundation is cracking in two, one wall has a crack so large that you can see the outside and in several places, the floor is close to caving in. But the outside of the building is so nice. :(
We just bought a house in the neighborhood that is in mostly good shape considering its owners were older and lived there for over 20 years. I look forward to shaping her up, replacing the roof, refinishing the floors, repairing the foundation, fixing some water damage, etc. She's a great little home and it pains me to see her not at her best.
AFAIK I am not affected by autism, but I distinctly remember when as a child I refused to eat something because that thing didn't "want" to be eaten. I guess that from my parent's perspective, it was just their child's whim-of-the-day.
But that memory makes me think that animism is something natural - perhaps some sort "bug" in the system that make us attribute intentions [2] to others.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animism [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_mind_in_animals#Attr...
I feel like cars tend to do it much, much sooner, given how short their life is. :-)
My personal and private belief is that once I have owned an item for a while, I give it a portion of my own soul. The "personality" doesn't have to match mine, or have any desirable traits, but it is there, it is because I am, and I'm shaping the thing by my own usage patterns.
Something I found which coincides somewhat well with what you're saying: it seems like a disproportionate number of vegans are not neurotypical. I'm mostly plant-based because I can't separate animals from humans enough. It feels wrong to eat them. Not that I lower humans to animal level, though. I raise animals, or the hierarchy is flatter. I also find insects so much more amazing—and neurologically salient I suppose—than virtually everyone I know. Yet in the isopod collecting hobby, you'll find plenty of people who love insects and arachnids and so on, and they seem to lean towards neurodivergence as well.
Interesting - I think you've just explained "Tear-Water Tea" [1] (Arnold Lobel's classic childrens story) for me.
[1] https://archive.org/details/Tear-waterTea-English-ArnoldLobe...
I think this also explains a lot about how normal people behave. They not only care mostly about humans but mostly about their tribe. The operation of some system which is designed to protect everyone is only important when it's protecting their own people and can be disregarded when that isn't the case. Whereas people whose empathy extends past their own walls can feel a harm to the whole society when that happens.
Even now I'm sure there are people reading this and thinking "yes, the other tribe does that all the time! They're such hypocrites!" But that's the easy one. The hard thing is to recognize it and stop it when you're doing it.
For me, I think a big part of it is a sense of waste or lost potential. If the object hadn't been broken, it could have had longer useful life, and it upsets me that that was cut short.
One large scale example could be linux vs windows on a server. Linux seems to be more attuned to how the system wants to run. With reflection this might be me combining anthropomorphising and my own prejudices and likes and biases with a projection of my personality onto the software.
But I remember certain Windows applications felt they run better than others - even ones with worse design or that were proprietary. With more consideration this might be when computers had visual blinking LEDs and audible HD clicks and subliminal capacitor whine. If that's the case then in my feeling, software that made conservative use of CPU and HD beyond looking nice might be "happier" than more popular applications.
Writing the above I'm reminded of Terry Davis's TempleOS but I'm not sure what to make of that feeling!
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/326979070_Object_pe...
It's pretty short and was basically just a survey monkey survey of ~100 people (400 total) who report having autism.
For example in your dull knife example, maybe you could think: "the knife can now be happy because it doesn't need to be so dangerous anymore and it can make friends with the other cutlery in the drawer"
It sounds silly, buy maybe it helps.
Another example is if one is sad that a favorite software or service has become enshittified. One doesn’t attribute emotion to the software or service itself, rather one feels emotional about the state the software or service is in.
Those are completely neurotypical emotional reactions.
So it's much closer to object personification because it's the same mechanism by which I empathize with other people, animals, etc. In my description I've tried to generalize because to me it's not accurate to say that I feel the knife is sad, but the experience is almost as if that were the case.
Like, if you're designing, building, or managing a large and complex system, and there are concerns in different aspects of it, and you have maybe a kind of emotional coprocessor about it, e.g., keeping track of all the parts that bother you, and how much they bother you? (Also, parts that you like.)
I'm pretty sure that not all people have nearly the same capacity for this, but I don't know the distribution.
You know almost instantly when you meet them in the field, often within a few sentences. It's really eye opening moving between areas of high and low densities people like this.
I did used to think it was normal and common but I've definitely come to doubt that as I've got older. I think it's been a hindrance at times though, particularly in some business environments that aren't producing systems that feel nice. Although there's a certain satisfaction and special sense of achievement in making an unhappy feeling system do amazing things.
Exactly. But don't let the interview people know that, or it will become another ritual that everyone checkboxes and fakes. :)
It's really important, too. That's how the code becomes maintainable for the next person.
I used to play a tcg a bit too seriously, and sometimes seeing incorrect game states would trigger something. Part of tracking game states and derivations I guess. Only sometimes helpful in software.
It was 400 people, 100 of whom report having autism. And it was conducted by posting links to the survey monkey survey on social media.
It might have some interesting follow up studies, but I find no reason to really take this for much other than an indicator that further study should be done.
""" Together, our results indicate that object personification occurs commonly among autistic individuals, and perhaps more often (and later in life) than in the general population. """
In that recent story in the NYT about dating agencies for people on the spectrum, so many of the comments (in the NYT, not here) were very angry at how the definition of autism has been so greatly expanded in recent decades to include people who are high functioning. The commenters felt it took away from their own children's diagnoses, not just in name but also in terms of competition for resources, and didnt see what the point was for people who were low on the spectrum.
But I will say when they identify specific traits that I've always wondered about and even told clueless therapists about, it feels way better to know a little bit of the reasoning for why you have some freakish habit.
The more schizophrenic kind imparts a fantasy framing on everything which can give rise to a disorganised imparting of mental capacities that I think is fairly uniform across objects, including people. This appears as "too few mental capacities" on people, and too much to objects. This a "living in their own world, dreaming" type. Dreamer-type.
At the other extreme, it's a difficulty in establishing any kind of fantasy framing (without significant support, eg., in video games / films). This is an officious, "the rules really exist, and we must follow them" type. Officious-type.
Incidentally, imv, there's a third sort you might call dissociative, where irony is the main mode of relation to the world and others. This is an unstable blending of the two perspectives: the ironic performative frame is at once a kind of fantasy, but a sort of fantasy which seeks to make the very adopting of fantasy impossible. Irony-type.
I think quite a lot of "high-engagement culture" (ie., the type which requires a lot of its audience) is really autistic culture of these varieties in interaction.
There is actually some scientists that hypothesize schizophrenia and autism are exact opposites of each other. It's call the predictive coding hypothesis of autism.
In essence the predictive coding hypothesis assumes that large parts of our brain function like a modern video codec. Always predicting the next states and reducing information by only picking up on prediction errors that need to be encoded separatedly.
Under this hypothesis schizophrenia arises, if there is a very strong predictive coding and very little influence of the prediction errors. You hear voices out of noise, because your prediction mechanism tries to encode these noises as something sensible.
On the other hand in autism you have very little prediction and high external influence (i.e. the normal information reduction doesn't take place).
There are some studies that try to pick up the prediction vs. error components in simple cognitive tasks that support this idea.
What is an example of "high-engagement culture?"
Maybe others would benefit from understanding your intuition about this.
The paper says, they do!
The surprising part is that autist do it too, at approximately the same rates, which was unexpected.
""" Together, our results indicate that object personification occurs commonly among autistic individuals, and perhaps more often (and later in life) than in the general population. """
This is well known for many autistic people. "I put this thing there, and now it has to stay at that position, because otherwise it will be very sad."
The surprising part is not that autistic people do have empathy for inanimate objects (this is so well known, it's even covered in some diagnostic tests), but rather to find further confirmation and compare it to the general population. Mostly because this is surprising, as in general autism is related to empathy disfunction, so it is surprising to observe empathy at higher rates (see below).
However, as many researchers have pointed out that is exactely what would be expected. Empathy disfunction is incorrectly interpreted by many as "lack of empathy". But empathy means understanding and representing the emotional state of another living creature. Assigning emotional states to inanimate objects is by definition an empathy disfunction, because you are mentally representing something that is not there in the real world. Same with over-empathy that is reported by some autistics. Since these are over-representing the emotional states of others, this is also a disfunction (i.e. a mismatch between observed subject and the representation).
So the article builds strongly on the false equivalence between empathy disfunction and lack of empathy.
I'm dx'd autistic, and I am someone who will weep openly or experience unbridled joy alongside, say, a movie about a bunch of animals surviving tough times. But if I see an adult human make a poor choice and suffer consequences I feel nothing. I have to teach myself that my values are that we should care for everyone -- even the people I feel no intrinsic empathy towards.
In speaking with my doc about it, it's apparently not at all uncommon for autistic folks to have this sort of extremely strong empathy response in some cases, while a totally flat empathy response in others.
to add another datapoint to this, the only movie that's ever made me cry is Wall-E. I felt so sad for him at the beginning of it, all alone and trying to complete an impossible, unappreciated task.
I'm sure there are objectively sadder movies out there, but not for me.
The autistic version is interpreting the state of objects emotionally, which is closer to synesthesia.
The normal version is practice for interacting with people, the autistic version is consuming emotional attention that could otherwise be used for people.
The abstract seems to suggest that object personification is common with people who don't have autism too, perhaps less common than with people that have autism. This more or less tracks with my intuition that object personification is normal. People do it all the time with ships, cars, guns, computers, or whatever other machines they work with, whatever is important to them and complex enough to have a personality of its own.
From the summary it feels like the problem is more related to the fact they have more distressing events, I don't think i've had any recently but i can think of one or two when i was a kid and lot favorite toys.
Perhaps like auditory hallucinations, the experience can be distressing _or not_ and we can observe that between different cultures.
I appreciate that the abstract highlighted where personification is unhelpful.
Again because I don't have direct experience with it I don't want to lean too much into stereotypes, but it seems possible to me that people with autism have a more monistic, or at least less dualistic view on these things because the kind of thing that makes other people distinguish between subjects and objects is less present in people with autism.
I can't imagine why the toy based story that was designed from the get-go to shovel plastic into kids via emotional hooks took off better and was better supported by the industry...
I must confess one more dusty road
Would be just a road too long
Worthless
IYKYK. A few touches:
- "I just can't / I just can't / I just can't seem to get started" mimics a car trying to turn over
- Pairing the wedding and the funeral
One should control for foreign language knowledge.
I wonder if the "sadness" referenced in the paper's title stems not from object personification itself, but from living in a culture that lacks frameworks for these experiences.
In cultures with concepts like Shinto kami (where objects can have spiritual essence) or similar animistic traditions, someone who senses that their broken tool has been "disrespected" or feels that a neglected room carries emotional weight wouldn't be pathologized. These experiences would have cultural validation and shared language.
- I remember feeling sorry for cars in a car dealership on a hot summer day as a child: "they must be miserable in this heat!"
- I frequently to this day personify my childrens stuffed animals & dolls & action figures: "They must feel so lonely not being played with anymore!"
- I was inordinately attached to my own stuffed animals / toys as a kid. I remember when one got taken away during a schoolday, that I felt like someone had kidnapped a family member - and I was inconsolable.
It's fantastic to see that this is now being investigated in the literature.
At the same time, I wonder if it’s always a good thing. Like, what happens if you lose or break something you’ve gotten really attached to? Could that make the anxiety worse?
Curious if anyone here has seen this or has any personal experience.
In severe cases it can be sufficient if the object is slightly moved to trigger a meltdown, and there are reports that support those exact thinking patterns.
Even with the bugs I’m always wondering if that’s a kid thing too, but the fact the other kids her age couldn’t care less about bugs makes me wonder if it’s autism related.
Autistic children are often times very interested in learning rules and applying them in other settings. Autistic young women, especially, are navigating a complicated social environment that strongly encourages them to understand the rules of what it means to be a woman in society. Learning those rules and then saying, "Ok little (bugs|stuffed animals|toys), here's how things work" is both a thing kids do and a thing autistic kids do.
Couple that with special interests (dinosaurs, trains, bugs, bones, whatever), and you'll often see autistic kids getting WAY into one particular thing and then mapping the world they experience onto that thing.
I'm the guy who drives around with a cartoon drawing of a robot in his car that will utterly destroy anyone who tries to steal it, so I ought to know.
No one wants to be sinking while remembering that they forgot to christen the boat , they just killed a seabird, and they stepped onto the boat with their left foot.
My point: I see marine superstition as a cultural affect rather than a sign of any such other psychology.
Side note: Be sure to check out Unpaywall[1][2] which allows you to (legally!!!) read research papers for free.
This is an issue I’m acutely familiar with. Everything of import is, to a degree, personified. Not everything gets a name, necessarily, but everything has an “identity” which helps me to process events and interactions with it.
AVR crashes? “Oh, she’s being pissy today.”
Car taking a little longer to start in the morning? “I know girl, I’m tired too.”
This extends to treatment: the more personified the object, the better its treatment. Stuffed animals get names and apologies, as does Siri (though the voice assistants also get a tongue lashing when they’re non-performant). When I retire something, I try to find it a good home before trashing it (which is why an old Pioneer HDMI 2.0 AVR is still sitting in a box, alone and unloved by a new owner). I treat objects with the same reverence I treat people, which earns me the occasional eyeroll.
I’d love to know more about why this phenomena is so prevalent in autistic people, and what the benefits or harms of it are. Here’s hoping another team takes up this baton and runs with it some more.
This type of thing, where they do some statistics on survey data, seems to be fairly typical in psychology research. But I find it hard to believe that you can actually get good data from self-reporting in surveys.
There must be selection effects: "The survey was advertised on social media and through the researchers’ own networks".
And the questions may not be interpreted by the respondents as imagined. What does it mean if you select "None of the above" in their core question? That you think that objects have no attributes whatsoever? "Do you ever view objects as having: Gender / Human-like attributes / Feelings / Other / None of the above"
See also "replication crisis". Psychology is at the center of it.
(Disclaimer: not my area of expertise.)
[1] N. Breznau et al., “Observing many researchers using the same data and hypothesis reveals a hidden universe of uncertainty,” PNAS, October 2022, URL: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2203150119
[2] B. Klaas, “The Crisis of Zombie Social Science.” The Garden of Forking Paths. https://www.forkingpaths.co/p/the-crisis-of-zombie-social-sc...
[3] The crisis of zombie social science (20 points, 2 days ago) – https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44272057
Especially when you consider the Lizardman's Constant of 4%
https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/12/noisy-poll-results-and...
This article was written in 2013. The Internet has become a significantly more toxic place since then, and I would imagine the constant is closer to 15-20% these days.
On what basis?
