Making Friends With The Cat: Anthropomorphism Is Good For You

New research from the University of Chicago, to be published in the February issue of the journal Psychological Science, finds evidence that anthropomorphism — giving human characteristics to animals, things, or supernatural beings, and forming relationships with them — provides an effective way for people to deal with loneliness.

Stereotypes abound — the lonely woman with her cats; the castaway, like Tom Hanks in the film, talking to a volleyball; the child with an imaginary friend; the lonely man forever polishing his car. One experiment showed that people, when focusing on loneliness, were more likely to believe in the supernatural (God, angels, or miracles) than when they were not feeling lonely, tying in with my recent post on a study showing correlation between supernatural beliefs and poor mental health (“Self-Focused Religious Beliefs — Poorer Mental Health?”).

The study was designed to focus specifically on loneliness — other negative emotions did not have the same effect. Loneliness is now commonly considered to be a real risk not only to happiness but to health. It seems that relating to pets, or to supernatural powers, in human ways can actually have the same beneficial effects on our well-being.

I think this is a clear case for society as a whole to stop treating these people as ‘weird’ when they are actually doing something proactive to help themselves. The researchers also pointed out that their results threw an interesting light on dehumanisation — associating the ability to dehumanise an enemy or enemy group with strongly socially connected individuals. Strong affiliation to a group tends to make us more likely to dehumanise others, for instance, in wartime.

Which I take to mean that the ’strange loners’ with their cats and their angels are in fact more than just ‘harmless’, they are more likely than ’social butterflies’ to act positively not only to their nonhuman friends but to other people too, in a disinterested and unprejudiced way. Loners of the world unite…or maybe that is what we are doing on the internet.

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