Exploring how harming and helping behaviors drive prediction and explanation during anthropomorphism

ABSTRACT

Cacioppo and colleagues advanced the study of anthropomorphism by positing three motives that moderated the occurrence of this phenomenon; belonging, effectance, and explanation. Here, we further this literature by exploring the extent to which the valence of a target’s behavior influences its anthropomorphism when perceivers attempt to explain and predict that target’s behavior, and the involvement of brain regions associated with explanation and prediction in such anthropomorphism. Participants viewed videos of varying visually complex agents - geometric shapes, computer generated (CG) faces, and greebles - in nonrandom motion performing harming and helping behaviors. Across two studies, participants reported a narrative that explained the observed behavior (both studies) while we recorded brain activity (study one), and participants predicted future behavior of the protagonist shapes (study two). Brain regions implicated in prediction error (striatum), not language generation (inferior frontal gyrus; IFG) engaged more to harming than helping behaviors during the anthropomorphism of such stimuli. Behaviorally, we found greater anthropomorphism in explanations of harming rather than helping behaviors, but the opposite pattern when participants predicted the agents’ behavior. Together, these studies build upon the anthropomorphism literature by exploring how the valence of behavior drives explanation and prediction.

KEYWORDS:

• Anthropomorphism
• social cognition
• belonging
• narrative
• prediction
• explanation

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Beatrice Capestany and Alyssa Fowers for building the animations, and Beatrice Capestany for collecting and assisting with analyzing the fMRI data. This work was funded by start-up funds to the first author by Duke University, and an award to the second author by Leiden University. The second study comprised the second author’s MSc thesis.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Duke University; Universiteit Leiden.