Anthropomorphism and Anthropodenial in Our Understanding of Animals
Anthropomorphism has gathered much of our attention as an important bias to avoid, while our tendencies towards anthropodenial, especially in research, have been largely ignored... But why?
In 2016, presumably tired from a whole career of being accused of anthropomorphizing the primates he studied for daring to name them or hypothesize they might have inner selves, Frans de Waal published the book Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?, which became an instant classic in the critique of human exceptionalism -the deep-seated belief that humans are somehow “special” compared to other animals, and superior to them.
In this book, de Waal explains how “anthropomorphism”, which, in the context of animal research1 should only be used to describe unjustifiably attributing human characteristics to other animals, was leveraged throughout the 20th century to dismiss any evidence of complex cognition in animals [1]. He argues that human ego has historically made researchers prone to anthropodenial, a term he coined to describe the opposite bias to anthropomorphism: unjustifiably assuming other animals can’t resemble humans [1, 2].
The tensions between anthropomorphism and anthropodenial have shaped the study of animals since the birth of biology as a science. In the last century, dramas between different camps unfolded that could make a drag queen blush. Some insisted anthropomorphism was the product of weak, emotional and unscientific minds sympathizing too much with what should be viewed exclusively as research subjects; while the others argued that anthropodenial was but a crybaby response to feeling our fragile human egos threatened by the possibility of other animals being more alike us than we think2. What wasn’t being discussed as much is that both anthropomorphism and anthropodenial are just two currents of the same stream of thought.
The Common Ground That Sucked
Anthropodenial and anthropomorphism - that is, denying other animals can be like us or assuming they are, respectively- have something in common: they’re both a consequence of anthropocentrism [2, 3]. And I promise that’s the last pretentious Greek-derived word we’ll be using today.
Anthropocentrism is the tendency to place human beings at the center of our analysis of the world and use them as a reference point. It’s easy to see how anthropomorphism -stretching our comparisons between humans and other animals a little too much- is inherently an anthropocentric bias. After all: why would we assume other animals are similar to us before the evidence proves it, if not because we’re taking our own experiences as the reference, and drawing conclusions that might or might not be true?
The link between anthropodenial and anthropocentrism, on the other hand, might be harder to spot at first glance, but it is no weaker for it. It becomes apparent, for example, when researchers deny a certain animal can have a characteristic or skill because they don’t arrive at it through the same path as humans. And isn’t this just a different way of using humans as a necessary reference point?
Despite anthropomorphism and anthropodenial being described as opposite biases (and they often are, ideologically speaking), anthropocentrism becomes the link uniting them, which is the reason many accussations of anthropomorphism fall themselves into the very bias they’re trying to criticise [4].
“‘Fishes are neurologically equipped for unconscious nociception and emotional responses, but not conscious pain and feelings,’ seven skeptics wrote in 2014, in a paper entitled ‘Can Fish Really Feel Pain?’
Ironically, this argument is itself grossly anthropomorphic. It blithely assumes that the neocortex must be necessary for pain in all animals, since that’s the case in humans.”
- Ed Yong (2022), An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us
That being said, we shouldn’t make the mistake of assuming both facets of anthropocentrism equal either in their prevalence or their consequences. Anthropomorphism has been subjected to a level of skepticism and scrutiny far surpassing that directed and anthropodenial. Anthropocentrism, until recently, has barely been questioned a all in mainstream scientific thought.
Anthropocentrism In Action
Researchers have historically tended to avoid anthropomorphism like the plague, in no small part because being accused of anthropomorphizing research subjects is often seen as grounds for your entire work to be dismissed as biased and emotional, while the problems anthropodenial and, more broadly, anthropocentrism, cause have been largely ignored for decades [1].
One of the most flagrant examples is not considering the ways a species’ perception differs from ours before designing experiments. Alexandra Horowitz brings up in Ed Yong’s book An Immense World how, for dogs specifically, most experiments don’t control nor mention the olfactory environment at all, because we simply aren’t guided by scent to the extent they are [4]. We’ve known this species is driven by their noses for centuries, and yet the vast majority of studies performed in dogs seem to not take into account that sniffing strange dogs, stressed animals or substances used in the same facility could very well impact their responses, and thus the study results (especially when behaviour itself is the object of study). And that is just one example: dog research is plagued with studies not properly considering the dog’s point of view [5].
de Waal also called attention to some examples of flawed anthropocentric research, more specifically in the study of animal cognition, from experiments trying to measure “intelligence” in gibbons without adapting the tools given to their hands (which are shaped differently than those of other apes), to testing chimpanzees alone so they can’t read the researchers’ body language, yet comparing their results to those human children achieve when tested with their parents present (we acknowledge leaving children alone in a strange room without their caretakers is a scary experience, a consideration we don’t grant other apes, regardless of how social they are) [1].
The way anthropocentrism is constantly used to dismiss animal cognition is perfectly summed up by a Tumblr post recounting the experiments ants have performed to answer the question “Are Humans Self-Aware?”. After all, we don’t follow pheromone trails nor build impressive sand colonies, so how complex can we really be? This illustrates the absurdity of trying to measure what a species can do exclusively in the terms of another.
Some might even argue that the very notion of measuring “intelligence” -something we’re thankfully leaving behind in favour of measuring specific cognitive skills- was an anthropocentric endeavour from the very beginning [6]. “Intelligence” is, after all, a very loosely defined concept, and humanity tends to not play a very fair game when testing it anyway: we keep moving the goalpost.
The reason we’re obsessed with measuring intelligence and not, say, the ability to climb trees while holding a banana with your prehensile foot, is that humans are supposed to be better at it, and anything that humans are better at is automatically considered of more importance. “Higher”, evolutionarily3 [7]. “Intelligence” is synonymous with “humanness” for most4 [8]. This has resulted in researchers -and the rest of us- getting almost defensive when cognitive skills assumed to be exclusively within human domain are found in other animals or, God forbid, when animals are actually better at them [1, 6, 9].
If you’re old enough -and have been nerding out about animal behaviour long enough- you probably remember how tool-making used to be the thing that set humans apart [1]. Of course, all apes make use of tools, but it took a long time before researchers accepted theirs as “true tools”5. It took even longer to consider the tools animals distantly related to us make as “real”, even though utilizing and modifying items from their environment to achieve a specific goal was, realistically, never going to be an exclusively human skill [9]. Surely, humans can make a wider variety of tools with a higher degree of complexity than other animals, no one is denying that, but finally admitting what many animals do is indeed also tool-making re-frames the discussion on tool-use in, as Darwin put it, differences “of degree and not of kind” [1].
Other supposedly “human” characteristics such as complex problem-solving, abstraction or even language have gone through a similar painstaking process of research before we admit to ourselves that they are not so exclusive to us after all [1, 9]-even though some researchers still insist on adding quotation marks on animal behaviour and emotions, or insisting that what they do is, at best, a mere impersonation of what humans do6.
Some animals even outperform humans in certain cognitive skills, such as the impressive spacial memory that seed-hiding birds require to store food for the winter and remember hundreds of chosen spots [6, 9], but our response has been to largely dismiss these as “instinctive behaviours” -a largely not operationalized category we’re thankfully leaving behind and that functionally means “behaviours whose causality or mechanism we don’t understand”7. When “instinct” cannot be reasonably invoked, such as in the case of chimps consistently outperforming us in photographic memory, we simply dismiss the skill altogether, banishing it from what “true intelligence” means. After all, what is the big deal with photographic memory? Even chimps have it! [1]
All these attitudes reveal how prevalent human exceptionalism still is in research. Cognitive features are only interesting insomuch as they can be used to mark humans as “special”. We’re obsessed with being the birthday boy of the animal world.
In Are We Smart Enough, de Waal calls out our tendency to stop believing in evolution the moment its applied to cognition. Most people accept the evolution of physical characteristics as a continuum that unites all species, and even the fact that distantly related species can arrive at similar results through convergent evolution (think of how both bats and most birds can fly, despite not sharing a flying common ancestor), yet the fact that our precious intelligence and complex cognition are the result of evolution and didn’t magically appear out of animals that were mere machines driven by inputs seems to be a bridge too far. Let alone the fact that certain cognitive skills might have independently evolved in different species simply because they were advantageous (meaning that even species very distantly related to us might have them) [6, 9].
“The key point is that anthropomorphism is not always as problematic as people think. To rail against it for the sake of scientific objectivity often hides a pre-Darwinian mindset, one uncomfortable with the notion of humans as animals.”
-Frans de Waal (2016), Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?
None of this means that we should always assume complex cognition is present when studying a species. In fact, de Waal himself was, interestingly, pretty skeptical about the levels of cognition in other animals, despite being framed as an emotional monkey-lover incapable of objectivity. What it does mean, simply put, is that those pointing fingers at what they consider to be anthropomorphic biases should be careful to examine their own tendencies to fall into the much more hegemonic, and thus invisible, anthropodenial.
However, de Waal’s analysis seems at times divorced from the social environment in which anthropomorphism and anthropodenial exist8, which makes his explanation as to why anthropodenial has been so prominent, especially in Western science, borderline individualistic.
I’m sure “human ego” as he puts it, has contributed its fair share to human exceptionalism. After all, this bias has appeared in plenty of different cultures with radically different socioeconomic systems and ways of life, so I can’t just parrot the at this point classic, vaguely-leftist-and-somewhat-lazy “it’s all because of capitalism” at you. I don’t think Aristotle denied rationality to all other animals9 because of capitalism, but I also doubt the dominance of anthropodenial in Western philosophical and scientific tradition10 [8] can be explained through a character flaw.
Furthermore, as Lorraine Daston argued in a 1995 article, oppositions to anthropomorphism can have radically different motivations ranging from seeing comparisons between humans and other animals as blasphemous to a genuine call for scientific objectivity and a rejection of the anthropocentrism that’s inherent to our constant comparisons of other animals to us [3].
Nonetheless, what is still missing from de Waal’s (and others’) analysis is what anthropodenial and human exceptionalism do for us today: what purpose do they serve in our discourses -beyond appeasing our egos. After all, anthropomorphism is also part of anthropocentric thought, and as such, arguably, also a consequence of “human ego”, yet one that is not nearly as widespread or pervasive as anthropodenial has been in the last century of research.
So why has anthropodenial, and not anthropomorphism, dominated in scientific thought?
Why Anthropodenial?
Let’s take the earlier example of the article “Can Fish Really Feel Pain?”11 [10] cited in Ed Yong’s An Immense World. Yong was right to call their assumption that the pain experience must require the same morphological structures involved in pain perception in humans is one so deep into anthropodenial that it verges on accidental anthropomorphism, but the question remains: why did they think like that? What did anthropodenial do for these authors?
The first sentence in the article’s introduction is already pretty revealing:
“In the past decade, research addressing fish welfare has focused increasingly on the possibility that mental welfare is a legitimate concern,”
- Rose, J. D. et al. (2014). Can Fish Really Feel Pain?
We’re not gonna get into each argument and counter-argument about the possibility that fish experience pain, but what is clear here is that the real debate here is about animal welfare. Adding a few degrees of separation between humans and fish might certainly appease some researchers’ egos like de Waal speculated, but it is not the driving force that either manufactures nor reinforces the general tendency towards anthropodenial in the study of animal cognition. I mean, the article was published in the journal Fish and Fisheries. You can’t judge a journal by its cover but you can ask them how many fishes per unit of volume do they think it’s acceptable to have in an enclosure.
What anthropodenial does for these researchers is justify their preexisting beliefs about how animals should be treated12. If fish don’t feel pain, we don’t need to worry about the conditions of fisheries being conductive to pain. If they don’t experience “conscious feelings” [10] we don’t need to worry about the possibility we might be inflicting tremendous amounts of suffering.
The same thing is true in conversations about companion animals, particularly dogs. I’ve often seen accusations of anthropomorphism fly in a way that reads more as defensiveness than real concern about the ways anthropomorphizing them can be a problem.
And, truthfully, anthropomorphism can be a problem. The classical example given is people dressing dogs up and babying them, although I don’t think this is as common as some popular Instagram accounts would have you believe13, and I rarely see that as being the actual target of criticism anyway.
I think a much more common and perhaps damaging form of anthropomorphizing dogs is misreading their body language. A dog panting is seen as “smiling”, even though they might be stressed. A dog licking someone is seen as “kissing” them, even though that “kiss” might very well be a “go away please” signal. &c. To know the difference, one must learn as much as possible about dog body language, and try, for once, to see the world through their eyes.
Realistically, though, this is hardly ever the battle the Anti-Anthropomorphism Brigade is fighting, because, much like many researchers, they’re using anthropodenial and accusations of anthropomorphism to reinforce the status quo. As such, the usual target is anyone questioning the way dogs are currently treated, not people actually anthropomorphizing in a way that might be detrimental for the animal.
Accusing someone of anthropomorphizing has an important advantage over simply saying you’re opposed to what they advocate for: it makes you sound detached and objective. Our culture values this so much that it has become a widespread tactic among the far right to insist that “facts don’t care about [our] feelings”, hiding bigotry behind the veil of objectivity, often a pseudoscientific objectivity.
True concerns for scientific objectivity, though, should be really worried about anthropodenial. As we’ve seen, it is much more widespread than anthropomorphism, which makes anyone raging exclusively about the latter automatically sound insincere about their concerns. What is also often missed is that, broadly speaking, the consequences of anthropodenial tend to be much worse for the animals than those of anthropomorphism. Anthropomorphism might make us miss or ignore animal stress and suffering. Anthropodenial is almost certain to.
When the real conversation is about animal welfare, as it’s so often the case, animals tend to have a lot to gain by us extending a measure of sympathy towards them, and a lot to lose by us refusing to. For this reason, identifying the real conversation being had is crucial so we don’t get lost in rabbit holes about the inherent biases of studying animals from a human point of view. The debate on scientific objectivity is an important one, but only when it’s not being used to avoid talking about animal welfare in an industrialized world.
Thankfully, the last few decades have been marked by an increased awareness of anthropocentric bias in research, and the focus has been slowly shifting to the best way we can tackle it: studying how other animals experience the world.
The Cure for Human Exceptionalism
In 1980, Thomas Nagel asked himself what it would be like to be a bat [11]. Not what it would be like for him, with his (presumably) human mind, to inhabit a bat’s body, but what “being a bat” is for the bat. This remarkable call to de-center the human experience expressed, simultaneously, how insurmountable the task is.
"In so far as I can imagine [having webbed arms to fly in pursuit of insects, or hanging by one’s feet in an attic to sleep] (which is not very far), it tells me only what it would be like for me to behave as a bat behaves. But that is not the question. I want to know what it is like for a bat to be a bat. Yet if I try to imagine this, I am restricted to the resources of my own mind, and those resources are inadequate to the task."
- Thomas Nagel (1980), What Is It Like to Be a Bat?
Thanks to the work of thousands of researchers spanning decades, we keep getting closer and closer to knowing what other animals’ experiences are like, which is genuinely the best ointment against human exceptionalism I can think of. Realizing our experience of the world is just an experience, and not more objectively true than that of a cow’s, a fish’s, or, yes, a bat’s, is the first step to seeing ourselves as another piece of the natural world. A piece with almost unparalleled influence over the rest, but not for it inherently superior.
Furthermore, getting as close as we can to understanding how animals experience the world is also key to understanding their behaviour. An honest call for scientific objectivity cannot have anthropocentrism as its motivation, because anthropocentrism is diametrically opposed to understanding other animals.
We’ll never be able to know what it’s like to be a bat beyond a few educated guesses, but the response to the fundamentally unknowable nature of other animals’ experiences cannot be to use it as an excuse to dodge the question about how they should be treated. The way I see it, that question needs to be tackled head-on in a way that forces us to reckon with our position of power and capacity to harm, and what are we willing to do to minimize it.
“We are closer than ever to understanding what it is like to be another animal, but we have made it harder than ever for other animals to be.”
Ed Yong (2022), An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us
Sources
1 - De Waal, F. (2016). Are we smart enough to know how smart animals are?. WW Norton & Company.
2 - De Waal, F. B. (1999). Anthropomorphism and anthropodenial: consistency in our thinking about humans and other animals. Philosophical topics, 27(1), 255-280.
3 - Daston, L. (1995). How nature became the other: Anthropomorphism and anthropocentrism in early modern natural philosophy. In Biology as society, society as biology: metaphors (pp. 37-56). Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands.
4 - Yong, E. (2022). An immense world: How animal senses reveal the hidden realms around us. Knopf Canada.
5 - Horowitz, A., & Hecht, J. (2014). Looking at dogs: Moving from anthropocentrism to canid umwelt. In Domestic dog cognition and behavior: the scientific study of Canis familiaris (pp. 201-219). Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer Berlin Heidelberg.
6 - Bräuer, J., Hanus, D., Pika, S., Gray, R., & Uomini, N. (2020). Old and new approaches to animal cognition: there is not “one cognition”. Journal of Intelligence, 8(3), 28.
7 - Wendler, H. (2020). Philosophical primatology: Reflections on theses of anthropological difference, the logic of anthropomorphism and anthropodenial, and the self-other category mistake within the scope of cognitive primate research. Biological Theory, 15(2), 61-82.
8 - Steiner, G. (2005). Anthropocentrism and its discontents: The moral status of animals in the history of western philosophy. University of Pittsburgh Pre.
9 - Shettleworth, S. J. (2009). Cognition, evolution, and behavior. Oxford university press.
10 - Rose, J. D., Arlinghaus, R., Cooke, S. J., Diggles, B. K., Sawynok, W., Stevens, E. D., & Wynne, C. D. (2014). Can fish really feel pain?. Fish and Fisheries, 15(1), 97-133.
11 - Nagel, T. (1980). What is it like to be a bat?. In The language and thought series (pp. 159-168). Harvard University Press.
12 - Kirk, R., & Raven, J. E. (1983). Schofield, The Presocratic Philosophers. n, 4, 409.
13 - De Waal, F. (2022). Different: Gender through the eyes of a primatologist. WW Norton & Company.
14 - Borden Sharkey, S., & Borden Sharkey, S. (2016). Why Aristotle Was Not a Feminist. An Aristotelian Feminism, 81-111.
More generally, “anthropomorphism” can also mean attributing human qualities to anything non-human. In fact, our first recorded anti-anthropomorphism rant is by none other than a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher: Xenophanes (570 – 478 BC), who used the term to describe how foolish he thought it to assume Gods would necessarily look like humans in any way, shape or form. Based.
“[I]f cattle and horses or lions had hands, or were able to draw with their hands and do the works that men can do, horses would draw the forms of the gods like horses, and cattle like cattle, and they would make their bodies such as they each had themselves.”
- Xenophanes, as quoted in Kirk, Raven, & Schofield, The Pre-Socratic Philosophers [12]
Okay, de Waal might have never used those words, but I’m trying to keep it real.
This is, of course, nonsense. Evolution doesn’t go from “less evolved” or “lower” to “more evolved” or “higher”. It is simply a process of adaptation to a particular environment. You’re exactly as “evolved” as the spider that is right behind you as you read this, but don’t look now.
Which is a deeply ableist framework, as many Disability justice writers have pointed out. If you’re unfamiliar with Disability justice and want to expand on this I’d recommend reading the works of Dr Devon Price and Patty Berne, both of whom have a lot of free-to-access resources posted online.
As opposed to fake tools, such as Jordan Peterson.
The funniest (and simultaneously saddest) iteration of this I’ve seen was actually not applied to animals, but children. The book Anthropocentrism and Its Discontents: The Moral Status of Animals in the History of Western Philosophy is plagued with examples of philosophers and researchers likening only children to other animals, not so we think more highly of the latter, but to reinforce our control over the former. Many argued that prepubescent children are not capable of true abstraction or forming concepts. This is, of course, demonstratively false: children are capable, for example, of picking up triangles from a box of shapes at a relatively early age. However, some modern psychologists argue that they do so by using the “pseudoconcept” of “triangle”, not a “true concept” like adults do when presented with the same task (which would imply “true” abstraction). I’ve never seen the difference explained satisfactorily.
A few sentences after introducing the terminology of “pseudoconcepts”, the book proceeds: “The functional equivalence of the child’s pseudoconcepts and the adult’s concepts, (…)”. I rest my case.
"Instinct” is to ethology -the study of animal behaviour- what “ritual” is to archeology. That is to say, it usually means “I don’t know why they do this please stop asking me questions”. Many things we’ve called “instinctive” over the years have turned out to simply be driven by other animals perceiving the world differently [4, 9]. Ethologist have moved away from calling things “instincts” because no behaviour is purely inherited nor purely learned [1], but I think it’s important to acknowledge how this wasn’t just a random mistake: we’ve tended to attribute things to inheritance when we didn’t understand how other animals experience the world because of anthropocentric biases.
Some of his later work showed more of this uncanny ability cultivated and perfected by many researchers of writing about the world while seemingly not living in it in any meaningful way. Like when he called queer activists “paranoid” for thinking pseudoscientific arguments would be used in a queerphobic way whenever researchers investigated the ever-evasive “cause” of homosexuality [13]. Which is a bit like calling someone paranoid for seeing clouds and thinking it might rain.
The guy also liked to say women have fewer teeth than men [14], so maybe we should take his claims with a grain of salt anyway.
Beware not to make the mistake of assuming everyone who lived before the past couple of centuries was any more prone to anthropodenial than we are. There were plenty of people who believed we have more in common with other animals than not, including in Classical Greece. Some philosophers of the time were even vegetarian [8]. Yes, before non-dairy pumpkin spice lattes for 10€ were a thing. R.I.P. Plutarch, you would have loved gentrification.
Right before publishing this essay I realized one of the authors is the same guy who just published some extremely questionable research on the use of shock collars in dogs (and who, by the way, didn’t answer my questions about said research when I reached out). I’m just pointing it out so you know I hated him before it was cool.
Of course, not all forms of anthropocentrism and anthropodenial are so nefarious. For example, a very common one, especially when discussing mental health, is saying that “animals live exclusively in the present”. This is said with the best of intentions to help people through anxiety, but sorry to burst your bubble: animals absolutely do not live in the present what are you talking about. Behaviour in itself is a form of predictably influencing the environment in the future [9], even if near. The fact that this belief that the ability to look beyond the next two seconds is an exclusively human skill is so widespread proves that, even if not always ill-intentioned, human exceptionalism is everywhere.
The fact that, specifically, the most common way this example is presented is “a woman dressing her Chihuahua in tiny dresses” has nothing to do with misogyny don’tevenworryaboutit.