A History of Humans Loving Inanimate Objects

Pacific Standard:

Around mid-February, someone on Reddit posted a meme that declared the following: “Sometimes, when I grab a cup from my cabinet, I will grab one that’s in the back and never gets used because I think the cup feels depressed that it isn’t fulfilling it’s life of holding liquids.”

The sentiment proved popular. “I used to work at a toy store and if anyone ever bought a stuffed animal I would leave its head sticking out of the bag.. so it could breathe,” commented one Redditor. “I actually cried when we switched microwaves when i was a kid. I felt like we should have given it a proper burial or something,” wrote another. “I feel bad for inanimate objects all the time,” confessed yet another. Hundreds of other comments carried on in a similar vein.

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Despite the book’s title, anthropologist Stewart Guthrie’s Faces in the Clouds: A New Theory of Religion, for example, continues the perennial argument that the foundation of religion comes from our tendency to ascribe human characteristics to non-human things. Indeed, in an article published by the journal Current Directions in Psychological Science, researchers from Harvard and the University of Chicago say the term “anthropomorphism” originated with the ancient Greek philosopher Xenophanes. Only now, around 25 centuries later, they contend, are psychologists beginning to study this idea—and its inverse, dehumanization—in earnest.

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