MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences - Cryptome

Then why do young children, even when they are intellectually
serious, make animistic or personifying remarks
fairly often, although not so often as Piaget claimed? What
functions does the mode of reasoning behind animistic or
personifying errors have? Both Carey (1985) and Inagaki
and Hatano (1987) propose that, though young children are
able to classify entities into ontological categories, when
they have to infer an object’s unknown attributes or reactions,
the children apply their knowledge about human
beings to other animate objects or even to inanimate objects.
This is probably because they do not have rich categorical
knowledge, and thus have to rely on ANALOGY in inferences.
Because they are intimately familiar with humans,
although necessarily novices in most other domains, they
can most profitably use their knowledge about humans as a
source analogue for making analogies.
Inagaki and Hatano (1987) propose that animistic or personifying
tendencies of young children are products of their
active minds and basically adaptive natures. Young children’s
personification or person analogies may lead them to
accurate predictions for animate objects phylogenetically
similar to humans. It can also provide justification for a variety
of experiences, sometimes even with phylogenetically
less similar objects, such as trees or flowers. Young children
may have learned these heuristic values through their prior
contacts with a variety of animate objects. The analogies
young children make may involve structurally inaccurate
mapping (e.g., mapping the relation between humans and
food to that between plants and water), and induce biased
reasoning (neglect of the roles of nutrients in the soil and
photosynthesis). Although young children may carry analogy
beyond its proper limits, and produce false inferences,
they can generate “educated guesses” by analogies, relying
on their only familiar source analogue of a person (Holyoak
and Thagard 1995). Animistic errors and overattribution of
human characteristics to nonhuman animate objects should
therefore be regarded as accidental by-products of this reasoning
process. Because their personification is subject to a
variety of constraints, such as checking the plausibility of the
inference against what is known about the target, it does not
produce many personifying errors, except for assigning mental
states to nonhumans.
How can we explain animistic thinking among indigenous
adults? According to Atran (forthcoming), in cultures
throughout the world it is common to classify all entities into
four ontological categories (humans, nonhuman animals,
plants, and nonliving things, including artifacts), and to
arrange animals and plants hierarchically and more or less
accurately because such taxonomies are products of the
human mind’s natural classification scheme (see also FOLK
BIOLOGY). Because indigenous people generally possess rich
knowledge about major animals and plants in their ecological
niche, their animistic and personifying remarks cannot result
from having to rely on the person analogy, except for poorly
understood nonnatural entities like God (Barrett and Keil
1996). Such remarks seem to be products of cultural beliefs,
acquired through discourse about a specific class of entities.
Mead’s early observation (1932) that children in the Manus
tribes were less animistic than adults lends support to this
conjecture. Animistic or personifying explanations are wide-
Animism 29
spread, but they are more about the metaphysical or imaginative
universe than about the real world (Atran 1990). Even
contemporary Japanese culture, outside the science classroom
does not consider it a silly idea that large, old inanimate entities
(e.g., giant rocks, mountains) have CONSCIOUSNESS.
See also CONCEPTUAL CHANGE; CULTURAL EVOLUTION;
CULTURAL SYMBOLISM; CULTURAL VARIATION; MAGIC AND
SUPERSTITION; NATIVISM
—Giyoo Hatano
References
Atran, S. (1990). Cognitive Foundations of Natural History. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Atran, S. (Forthcoming). Folk biology and the anthropology of science:
Cognitive universals and cultural particulars. Brain and
Behavioral Sciences.
Barrett, J. L., and F. C. Keil. (1996). Conceptualizing a nonnatural
entity: Anthropomorphism in God concepts. Cognitive Psychology
31: 219–247.
Carey, S. (1985). Conceptual Change in Childhood. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Gelman, R., E. Spelke, and E. Meck. (1983). What preschoolers
know about animate and inanimate objects. In D. Rogers and J.
A. Sloboda, Eds., The Acquisition of Symbolic Skills. New
York: Plenum Press, pp. 297–326.
Gelman, S. A., J. Coley, and G. M. Gottfried. (1994). Essentialist
beliefs in children: The acquisition of concepts and theories. In
L. A. Hirschfeld and S. A. Gelman, Eds., Mapping the Mind:
Domain Specificity in Cognition and Culture. Hillsdale, NJ:
Erlbaum, pp. 341–365.
Holyoak, K. J., and P. Thagard. (1995). Mental Leaps. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Inagaki, K., and G. Hatano. (1987). Young children’s spontaneous
personification as analogy. Child Development 58: 1013–1020.
Laurendeau, M., and A. Pinard. (1962). Causal Thinking in the
Child: A Genetic and Experimental Approach. New York:
International Universities Press.
Lévy-Bruhl, L. (1910). How Natives Think. Translated by Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1985. Originally published as Les
fonctions mentales dans les sociétés inférieures. Paris: Alcan.
Mead, M. (1932). An investigation of the thought of primitive children
with special reference to animism. Journal of the Royal
Anthropological Institute 62: 173–190.
Piaget, J. (1926). The Child’s Conception of the World. Translated
by Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Allanheld, 1960. Originally published
as La représentation du monde chez l’enfant. Paris:
Presses Universitaires de France.
Richards, D. D., and R. S. Siegler. (1984). The effects of task
requirements on children’s life judgments. Child Development
55: 1687–1696.
Simons, D. J., and F. C. Keil. (1995). An abstract to concrete shift
in the development of biological thought: The inside story.
Cognition 56: 129–163.
Further Readings
Bullock, M. (1985). Animism in childhood thinking: A new look at
an old question. Developmental Psychology 21: 217–225.
Dennis, W. (1953). Animistic thinking among college and university
students. Scientific Monthly 76: 247–249.
Dolgin, K. G., and D. A. Behrend. (1984). Children’s knowledge
about animates and inanimates. Child Development 55: 1646–
1650.