Does Earth Watch Over Her Animals? Anthropomorphized Nature and its Relationship to Environmental Moral Reasoning

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

Abstract

Findings suggest that adults who anthropomorphize natural phenomena–by attributing cognitive-psychological agency to them–show elevated moral concerns about nature (Waytz, Cacioppo & Epley, 2010). Consistent with this, our prior adult research has found that a video describing the Earth as a thinking-feeling person can prompt more anthropomorphic individuals to make more severe judgements of environmentally damaging acts. However, there is little research exploring how anthropomorphism relates to children’s moral concerns about nature (see Gebhard, Nevers and Billmann-Mahecha, 2003) and, to our knowledge, none that explores the effect of distinct kinds of agency attributions¬¬ (e.g., vital-biological versus anthropomorphic-psychological attributions¬). This is perhaps because the adult anthropomorphism literature generally does not distinguish vitalist and psychological modes of construal (Waytz et al., 2010) even as child research suggests they are distinct from 6-years onwards (Carey, 1995; Inagaki, 1997). This research therefore explored how cognitive-psychological versus vitalist agency attributions relate to children’s environmental moral reasoning.
Six- to -7-year-old children (N = 91) were assigned to one of three conditions in which they watched a video about the Earth’s history. In the Vitalist condition, the video described Earth as a living thing with physiological needs (e.g. “The Earth has always needed light and warmth”). In the Psychological condition, Earth was described as a person with psychological states like feelings and desires (e.g. “She has always loved light and warmth”). In the Control Object condition, Earth was described as a physical-mechanical object. The video visuals were the same across conditions.
Participants then heard four environmental damage scenarios (e.g. logging), subsequently providing judgments of moral severity (0-4 scale) and spontaneous justifications for their judgments. These were coded for the presence of biocentric reasoning (i.e., which assumes nature has intrinsic value) and anthropocentric reasoning (i.e., which assumes nature exists for human purposes). Later, children completed an assessment of vital (0-3) and psychological (0-4) attributions to the Earth.
Analyses found no effects of video condition on moral severity judgments. Furthermore, in contrast to prior adult patterns, children’s psychological attributions to the Earth negatively predicted their judgements of the moral severity of environmental damage (b = -0.10, F(1, 89) =4.17, p = .04), and biocentric justifications (b =- 0.21, F(1, 88) = 5.30, p = .02). Despite findings that psychological attributions reduced children’s environmental concern, others suggested that vitalist attributions increased it. Children who made spontaneous vitalist attributions to natural phenomena (including Earth) in their judgement justifications had harsher judgements of the severity of environmentally damaging acts (p<.001) and this was particularly true when they had seen the vitalist video (β=.26, p<.03).
These results suggest that, unlike adult patterns, psychological attributions to the Earth reduce children’s concerns about environmental damage while recognition of the vital nature of living things increases them, especially after exposure to a video that treats the Earth as alive. In short, during a period when children’s intuitive biological reasoning is becoming robust, vitalism rather than anthropomorphism can be manipulated to foster environmental concern. Reasons for this and relationships to additional adult findings will be discussed.

Authors

• Lizette Pizza, Boston University
  Presenting Author

• Deb Kelemen, Boston University
  Non-Presenting Author