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Anthropomorphism is the attribution of human traits, emotions, or intentions to non-human entities. It is considered to be an innate tendency of human psychology. Personification is the related attribution of human form and characteristics to abstract concepts such as nations, emotions, and natural forces, such as seasons and weather. Both have ancient roots as storytelling and artistic devices, and most cultures have traditional fables with anthropomorphized animals as characters. People have also routinely attributed human emotions and behavioral traits to wild as well as domesticated animals.
It is not possible to say what these prehistoric artworks represent. A more recent example is The Sorcerer, an enigmatic cave painting from the Trois-Frères Cave, Ariège, France: the figure's significance is unknown, but it is usually interpreted as some kind of great spirit or master of the animals. In either case there is an element of anthropomorphism.
This anthropomorphic art has been linked by archaeologist Steven Mithen with the emergence of more systematic hunting practices in the Upper Palaeolithic. He proposes that these are the product of a change in the architecture of the human mind, , where anthropomorphism allowed hunters to identify Empathy with hunted animals and better predict their movements.
Ancient mythologies frequently represented the divine as deities with human forms and qualities. They resemble human beings not only in appearance and personality; they exhibited many human behaviors that were used to explain natural phenomena, creation, and historical events. The deities fell in love, married, had children, fought battles, wielded weapons, and rode horses and chariots. They feasted on special foods, and sometimes required sacrifices of food, beverage, and sacred objects to be made by human beings. Some anthropomorphic deities represented specific human concepts, such as love, war, fertility, beauty, or the seasons. Anthropomorphic deities exhibited human qualities such as beauty, wisdom, and power, and sometimes human weaknesses such as greed, hatred, jealousy, and anger. Greek deities such as Zeus and Apollo often were depicted in human form exhibiting both commendable and despicable human traits. Anthropomorphism in this case is, more specifically, anthropotheism.
From the perspective of adherents to religions in which humans were created in the form of the divine, the phenomenon may be considered theomorphism, or the giving of divine qualities to humans.
Anthropomorphism has cropped up as a Christian heresy, particularly prominently with Audianism in third-century Syria, but also fourth-century Egypt and tenth-century Italy. This often was based on a literal interpretation of the Genesis creation myth: "So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them".
Hindus do not reject the concept of a deity in the abstract unmanifested, but note practical problems. The Bhagavad Gita, Chapter 12, Verse 5, states that it is much more difficult for people to focus on a deity that is Nirguna than one with Saguna brahman, remarking on the usage of anthropomorphic Icon (Murti) that adherents can perceive with their senses.
Xenophanes said that "the greatest god" resembles man "neither in form nor in mind".Clement of Alexandria, ''Miscellanies'' V xiv 109.1–3
Both Judaism and Islam reject an anthropomorphic deity, believing that God is beyond human comprehension. Judaism's rejection of an anthropomorphic deity began with the prophets, who explicitly rejected any likeness of God to humans. Their rejection grew further after the Islamic Golden Age in the tenth century, which Maimonides codified in the twelfth century, in his thirteen principles of Jewish faith.
In the Ismaili interpretation of Islam, assigning attributes to God as well as negating any attributes from God ( via negativa) both qualify as anthropomorphism and are rejected, as God cannot be understood by either assigning attributes to Him or taking them away. The 10th-century Ismaili philosopher Abu Yaqub al-Sijistani suggested the method of double negation; for example: "God is not existent" followed by "God is not non-existent". This glorifies God from any understanding or human comprehension.
In secular thought, one of the most notable criticisms began in 1600 with Francis Bacon, who argued against Aristotle's teleology, which declared that everything behaves as it does in order to achieve some end, in order to fulfill itself. Bacon pointed out that achieving ends is a human activity and to attribute it to nature misconstrues it as humanlike. Modern criticisms followed Bacon's ideas such as critiques of Baruch Spinoza and David Hume. The latter, for instance, embedded his arguments in his wider criticism of human religions and specifically demonstrated in what he cited as their "inconsistence" where, on one hand, the Deity is painted in the most sublime colors but, on the other, is degraded to nearly human levels by giving him human infirmities, passions, and prejudices. (2025). 9789400766143, Springer Science+Business Media. ISBN 9789400766143 In Faces in the Clouds, anthropologist Stewart Guthrie proposes that all religions are anthropomorphisms that originate in the brain's tendency to detect the presence or vestiges of other humans in natural phenomena.
Some scholars argue that anthropomorphism overestimates the similarity of humans and nonhumans and therefore could not yield accurate accounts. (2025). 9781138918009, Routledge. ISBN 9781138918009
Apollonius noted that the fable was created to teach wisdom through fictions that are meant to be taken as fictions, contrasting them favorably with the poets' stories of the Greek mythology that are sometimes taken literally. Aesop, "by announcing a story which everyone knows not to be true, told the truth by the very fact that he did not claim to be relating real events".Philostratus, Flavius (c. 210 CE). The Life of Apollonius , 5.14. Translated by F.C. Conybeare. the Loeb Classical Library (1912) The same consciousness of the fable as fiction is to be found in other examples across the world, one example being a traditional Ashanti way of beginning tales of the anthropomorphic trickster-spider Anansi: "We do not really mean, we do not really mean that what we are about to say is true. A story, a story; let it come, let it go."
In many of these stories the animals can be seen as representing facets of human personality and character. (2025). 9781412930130, Sage Publications Ltd. ISBN 9781412930130 As John Rowe Townsend remarks, discussing The Jungle Book in which the boy Mowgli must rely on his new friends the bear Baloo and the black panther Bagheera, "The world of the jungle is in fact both itself and our world as well". A notable work aimed at an adult audience is George Orwell's Animal Farm, in which all the main characters are anthropomorphic animals. Non-animal examples include Wilbert Awdry's Railway Series stories featuring Thomas the Tank Engine and other anthropomorphic . Author Jilly Cooper has been criticised for over-use of the attribution in her novel Mount!
The Juvenile fantasy genre developed from mythological, fairy tale, and Romance motifsJohn Grant and John Clute, The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, p 621, sometimes have anthropomorphic animals as characters. The best-selling examples of the genre are The Hobbit100 million copies sold: BBC : Tolkien's memorabilia go on sale. 18 March 2008 (1937) and The Lord of the Rings (1954–1955), both by J. R. R. Tolkien, books peopled with talking creatures such as ravens, spiders, and the dragon Smaug and a multitude of anthropomorphic goblins and elves. John D. Rateliff calls this the "Doctor Dolittle Theme" in his book The History of the Hobbit and Tolkien saw this anthropomorphism as closely linked to the emergence of human language and myth: "...The first men to talk of 'trees and stars' saw things very differently. To them, the world was alive with mythological beings... To them the whole of creation was 'myth-woven and elf-patterned'."
Richard Adams developed a distinctive take on anthropomorphic writing in the 1970s: his debut novel, Watership Down (1972), featured rabbits that could talkwith their own distinctive language (Lapine language) and mythologyand included a police state warren, Efrafa. Despite this, Adams attempted to ensure his characters' behavior mirrored that of wild rabbits, engaging in fighting, copulating and defecating, drawing on Ronald Lockley's study The Private Life of the Rabbit as research. Adams returned to anthropomorphic storytelling in his later novels The Plague Dogs (1977) and Traveller (1988).
By the 21st century, the children's picture book market had expanded massively. Perhaps a majority of picture books have some kind of anthropomorphism, with popular examples being The Very Hungry Caterpillar (1969) by Eric Carle and The Gruffalo (1999) by Julia Donaldson.
Anthropomorphism in literature and other media led to a sub-culture known as furry fandom, which promotes and creates stories and artwork involving anthropomorphic animals, and the examination and interpretation of humanity through anthropomorphism. This can often be shortened in searches as "anthro", used by some as an alternative term to "furry".
Anthropomorphic characters have also been a staple of the comic book genre. The most prominent one was Neil Gaiman's the Sandman which had a huge impact on how characters that are physical embodiments are written in the fantasy genre. Archive requires scrolldown Other examples also include the mature Hellblazer (personified political and moral ideas), Fables and its spin-off series Jack of Fables, which was unique for having anthropomorphic representation of literary techniques and . Various Japanese manga and anime have used anthropomorphism as the basis of their story. Examples include Squid Girl (anthropomorphized squid), (personified countries), Upotte!! (personified guns), Arpeggio of Blue Steel and Kancolle (personified ships).
In the Pixar franchises Cars and Planes, all the characters are anthropomorphic vehicles, eds. Hannah Stark and Jon Roffe. while in Toy Story, they are anthropomorphic toys. Other Pixar franchises like Monsters, Inc features anthropomorphic monsters and Finding Nemo features anthropomorphic sea animals (like fish, sharks, and whales). Discussing anthropomorphic animals from DreamWorks franchise Madagascar, Timothy Laurie suggests that "". Other DreamWorks franchises like Shrek features fairy tale characters, and Blue Sky Studios of 20th Century Fox franchises like Ice Age features anthropomorphic extinct animals. Other characters in SpongeBob SquarePants features anthropomorphic sea animals as well (like sea sponges, starfish, octopus, crabs, whales, puffer fish, lobsters, and zooplankton).
All of the characters in Walt Disney Animation Studios' Zootopia (2016) are anthropomorphic animals, that is an entirely nonhuman civilization.
The live-action/animated franchise Alvin and the Chipmunks by 20th Century Fox centers around anthropomorphic talkative and singing . The female singing chipmunks called The Chipettes are also centered in some of the franchise's films.
In the American animated TV series Family Guy, one of the show's main characters, Brian Griffin, is a dog. Brian shows many human characteristics – he walks upright, talks, smokes, and drinks Martinis – but also acts like a normal dog in other ways; for example, he cannot resist chasing a ball and barks at the mailman, believing him to be a threat. In a similar case, BoJack Horseman, an American Netflix adult animated black comedy series, takes place in an alternate world where humans and anthropomorphic animals live side by side, and centers around the life of BoJack Horseman; a humanoid horse who was a one hit wonder on a popular 1990s sitcom Horsin' Around, living off the show's residuals in present time. Multiple main characters of the series are other animals who possess Human body and other Human behavior as well; Mr. Peanutbutter, a humanoid dog lives a mostly human lifehe speaks American English, walks upright, owns a house, drives a car, is in a Human sexuality (in this series, as animals and humans are speciesism, relationships like this are not seen as bestiality but seen as regular human sexuality), Diane Nguyen, and has a successful career in televisionhowever also exhibits Dog behavior sleeps in a human-size dog bed, gets arrested for having a drag race with the mailman and is once forced to wear a dog cone after he gets stitches in his arm.
The PBS Kids animated series Let's Go Luna! centers on an anthropomorphic female Moon who speaks, sings, and dances. She comes down out of the sky to serve as a tutor of international culture to the three main characters: a boy frog and wombat and a girl butterfly, who are supposed to be preschool children traveling a world populated by anthropomorphic animals with a circus run by their parents.
The French-Belgian animated series Mush-Mush & the Mushables takes place in a world inhabited by Mushables, which are anthropomorphic fungi, along with other critters such as , , and .
Another popular example in video games is the Super Mario series, debuting in 1985 with Super Mario Bros., of which main antagonist includes a fictional species of anthropomorphic turtle-like creatures known as Koopa Troopa. Other games in the series, as well as of other of its greater Mario franchise, spawned similar characters such as Yoshi, Donkey Kong and many others.
Fried implies an anthropomorphic connection by means of "a surrogate personthat is, a kind of statue."
The minimalist decision of "hollowness" in much of their work was also considered by Fried to be "blatantly anthropomorphic". This "hollowness" contributes to the idea of a separate inside; an idea mirrored in the human form. Fried considers the Literalist art's "hollowness" to be "biomorphic" as it references a living organism.
The practice is particularly widespread in Japan, where cities, regions, and companies all have mascots, collectively known as yuru-chara. Two of the most popular are Kumamon (a bear who represents Kumamoto Prefecture). and Funassyi (a Japanese pear who represents Funabashi, a suburb of Tokyo)..
Despite the impact of Charles Darwin's ideas in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (Konrad Lorenz in 1965 called him a "patron saint" of ethology) ethology has generally focused on behavior, not on emotion in animals.
The study of great apes in their own environment and in captivity has changed attitudes to anthropomorphism. In the 1960s the three so-called "The Trimates", Jane Goodall studying chimpanzees, Dian Fossey studying and Biruté Galdikas studying , were all accused of "that worst of ethological sins – anthropomorphism". The charge was brought about by their descriptions of the great apes in the field; it is now more widely accepted that empathy has an important part to play in research.
De Waal has written: "To endow animals with human emotions has long been a scientific taboo. But if we do not, we risk missing something fundamental, about both animals and us."Frans de Waal (1997-07). "Are We in Anthropodenial?" . Discover. pp. 50–53. Alongside this has come increasing awareness of the linguistic abilities of the great apes and the recognition that they are tool-makers and have individuality and culture.
Writing of cats in 1992, veterinarian Bruce Fogle points to the fact that "both humans and cats have identical neurochemicals and regions in the brain responsible for emotion" as evidence that "it is not anthropomorphic to credit cats with emotions such as jealousy".
One example of anthropomorphism would be to believe that one's computer is angry at them because they insulted it; another would be to believe that an intelligent robot would naturally find a woman attractive and be driven to mate with her. Scholars sometimes disagree with each other about whether a particular prediction about an artificial intelligence's behavior is logical, or whether the prediction constitutes illogical anthropomorphism. An example that might initially be considered anthropomorphism, but is in fact a logical statement about an artificial intelligence's behavior, would be the Dario Floreano experiments where certain robots spontaneously evolved a crude capacity for "deception", and tricked other robots into eating "poison" and dying: here, a trait, "deception", ordinarily associated with people rather than with machines, spontaneously evolves in a type of convergent evolution.
The conscious use of anthropomorphic metaphor is not intrinsically unwise; ascribing mental processes to the computer, under the proper circumstances, may serve the same purpose as it does when humans do it to other people: it may help persons to understand what the computer will do, how their actions will affect the computer, how to compare computers with humans, and conceivably how to design computer programs. However, inappropriate use of anthropomorphic metaphors can result in false beliefs about the behavior of computers, for example by causing people to overestimate how "flexible" computers are. According to Paul R. Cohen and Edward Feigenbaum, in order to differentiate between anthropomorphization and logical prediction of AI behavior, "the trick is to know enough about how humans and computers think to say exactly what they have in common, and, when we lack this knowledge, to use the comparison to suggest theories of human thinking or computer thinking."Cohen, Paul R., and Edward A. Feigenbaum, eds. The handbook of artificial intelligence. Vol. 3. Butterworth-Heinemann, 2014.
Computers overturn the childhood hierarchical taxonomy of "stones (non-living) → plants (living) → animals (conscious) → humans (rational)", by introducing a non-human "actor" that appears to regularly behave rationally. Much of computing terminology derives from anthropomorphic metaphors: computers can "read", "write", or "catch a virus". Information technology presents no clear correspondence with any other entities in the world besides humans; the options are either to leverage an emotional, imprecise human metaphor, or to reject imprecise metaphor and make use of more precise, domain-specific technical terms.
People often grant an unnecessary social role to computers during interactions. The underlying causes are debated; Youngme Moon and Clifford Nass propose that humans are emotionally, intellectually and physiologically biased toward social activity, and so when presented with even tiny social cues, deeply infused social responses are triggered automatically.Moon, Youngme, and Clifford Nass. "How 'real' are computer personalities? Psychological responses to personality types in human-computer interaction." Communication research 23.6 (1996): 651–674. This may allow incorporation of anthropomorphic features into computers/robots to enable more familiar "social" interactions, making them easier to use.
Alleged examples of anthropomorphism toward AI have included: Google engineer Blake Lemoine's widely derided 2022 claim that the Google LaMDA chatbot was sentient; the 2017 granting of honorary Saudi Arabian citizenship to the robot Sophia; and the reactions to the chatbot ELIZA in the 1960s.
Modern psychologists generally characterize anthropomorphism as a cognitive bias. That is, anthropomorphism is a cognitive process by which people use their schemas about other humans as a basis for inferring the properties of non-human entities in order to make efficient judgements about the environment, even if those inferences are not always accurate. Schemas about humans are used as the basis because this knowledge is acquired early in life, is more detailed than knowledge about non-human entities, and is more readily accessible in memory. Anthropomorphism can also function as a strategy to cope with loneliness when other human connections are not available.
People also tend to trust robots to do more complex tasks such as driving a car or childcare if the robot resembles humans in ways such as having a face, voice, and name; mimicking human motions; expressing emotion; and displaying some variability in behavior.
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