Parent-Child Talk about the Birds and Bees: Anthropocentric, Anthropomorphic Thinking in a Virtual Zoo

• In Event: Anthropomorphism and its Effects on Conceptual and Moral Understanding of the World

Abstract

Children’s everyday lives are filled with opportunities to learn about animals through direct experience and culturally-informed ways of understanding. Throughout, they face three challenges: (1) learning that all animals share certain key properties, despite radical differences in behavior and bodily morphology; (2) grasping the place of humans relative to other animals, especially that humans are but one animal among many; and (3) recognizing the ways that one’s culture organizes the highly varied and diverse set of non-human animals. The solutions to these challenges can sometimes be at odds. Cultural sources of knowledge (e.g., media) may organize the animal domain in non-biological ways, such as relying on anthropocentric reasoning which begets anthropomorphic reasoning (Epley, Waytz, & Cacioppio, 2007). Indeed, work investigating how children grapple with these issues reveals both age-related and cultural differences in scientific, anthropocentric and anthropomorphic thinking. It is important to understand how sources of knowledge may contribute to organization of the animal domain. Here we investigate one important source: parent-child conversation. Previous work finds that parent talk provides cues that may inform children’s reasoning about animals. For example, parents differentiated between between animal and non-animal kinds in their discussion of biological and psychological properties (Jipson et al., 2016); they produced generics to indicate relatedness among animals of the same kind (Gelman et al., 1998); and they differentially used gendered and neuter pronouns when talking about typical vs. atypical animals at an aquarium (Rigney & Callanan, 2011). The present study expands on such research by examining parent-child conversations about a variety of animals, including humans. 41 parent-child dyads (range: 3-7 years old) “visited” to a virtual zoo in which dyads talked while observing short videos of seven different types of animals (humans, chimps, rhinos, beavers, owls, fish, and bees). Conversations were coded for mention of biological, psychological, and sensory properties; use of gendered and neuter pronouns; and use of generics. ANOVAs indicate that parents positioned humans as both distinct from (e.g., use of gendered pronouns, generics) and similar to (e.g., mention of biological, psychological, sensory properties) non-human animals. Within non-human animals, chimps, rhinos, and beavers were systematically treated alike whereas parents often set fish and bees apart, ps < .01. These broader sets do not map onto standard taxonomic groupings, instead reflecting a distinction among animals based on similarity to humans. Results will be discussed as they relate to parents’ and children’s inferences in a subsequent property projection task and their willingness to attribute psychological and novel human properties to other animals. One clear contribution of this work is that it establishes that typical interactions between parents and children are brimming with information relevant to conceptual learning about animals. Parents share information that is scientifically accurate alongside information that may encourage anthropomorphic and anthropocentric reasoning about animals. We propose possible downstream consequences of this finding for broader behaviors and beliefs (e.g., vegetarianism, humane treatment of animals, environmental stewardship such as concern about hive collapse).

Authors

• Danielle Labotka, University of Michigan - Ann Arbor
  Presenting Author

• Susan A Gelman, University of Michigan - Ann Arbor
  Non-Presenting Author

• Jennifer Jipson, California Polytechnic State University - San Luis Obispo
  Non-Presenting Author