Anthropomorphic media exposure and preschoolers’ anthropomorphic thinking in China

ABSTRACT

Children’s media is replete with human-like portrayals of animals and objects that wear clothing, speak, drive cars, and experience human emotions. Recent research has shown that anthropomorphic portrayals of animals in books lead children to think anthropomorphically about real animals. Here we asked whether this is also the case for an inanimate object. Specifically, does exposure to an anthropomorphized train, as compared to a real train, increase children’s tendency to make anthropomorphic attributions to real trains? We also investigated whether this effect with books extends to another common medium of presentation: video. Chinese preschoolers (n = 258) ages 4–6 were randomly assigned to watch a video or listen to a book about either a real or an anthropomorphized train. Before and after this exposure, children completed a modified Anthropomorphism Questionnaire–Child Form (IDAQ-CF), which included questions about trains. Children who were exposed to the anthropomorphic book significantly increased in their tendency to view real trains as having human-like qualities, as compared to control children who had no exposure. Video exposure had no effect on the anthropomorphism of trains.

KEYWORDS:

• Anthropomorphism
• video
• book
• media exposure
• train
• preschoolers
• thinking

Acknowledgments

This research was funded by National Science Foundation grant #1024293, a Brady Education Foundation grant, and Sir John Templeton Foundation grant #56225 to ASL, and National Natural Science Foundation of China (No.31700968), a China Postdoctoral Science Foundation Funded Project (No. 2015M580210), and a China International Postdoctoral Exchange Fellowship (No. 20160054) to HL. This research was also supported by the Institute of Education Sciences, US Department of Education (#R305B140026) to the Rectors and Visitors of the University of Virginia, SE. During this research, SE was a pre-doctoral fellow of the International Max Planck Research School on the Life Course.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [31700968, 31771236]; National Science Foundation [1024293]; Sir John Templeton Foundation [56225].

Notes on contributors

Hui Li

Hui Li is an Associate Professor at the Central China Normal University. Her research interests include the effect of media on children’s cognitive development and reality judgment. Hui has also had her research published in Child Development, Frontiers in Psychology, Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, etc.

Sierra Eisen

Sierra Eisen (M.A.) is an Institute for Education Sciences predoctoral fellow and doctoral candidate in Developmental Psychology at the University of Virginia. Her research focuses on how young children learn from digital media and educational apps. Her dissertation examines digital and physical spatial play and links to children's early spatial abilities and was awarded two American Psychological Association dissertation awards.

Angeline S. Lillard

Angeline S. Lillard (PhD Stanford University, 1991), Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia, is an elected Fellow of the American Psychological Association and the Association for Psychological Science whose main research interests include children's pretend play and Montessori education. She received the American Psychological Association's Boyd McCandless Award for early career contributions to developmental psychology, she has been a Cattell Fellow and a fellow of the British Psychology Society, and her Montessori: The Science Behind the Genius (Oxford University Press, 3rd edition) received the Cognitive Development Society Book Award. She was formerly editor of the Journal of Cognition and Development.