Object personification in autism: This paper will be sad if you don't read (2018)
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov115 points by oliverkwebb 15 days ago
115 points by oliverkwebb 15 days ago
I don't have access to the full text, but based on the abstract I think it's likely that I relate to this phenomenon (I am autistic).
My experience is not so much the attribution of human characteristics to non-human objects, but I understand why this might be the only accessible language of expression. For me, if a useful object is damaged or otherwise loses its usefulness through neglect or malice, I experience something like an emotional response. A good example would be a dull knife. There's something "sad" about an object whose nature or purpose it is to be sharp to lose or lack that sharpness.
Or perhaps a more subtle example would be a room whose contents are haphazard or in disarray. In that situation I would sense a lack of care or attention and there might be an emotional feeling that these objects had not been respected or appreciated.
It's (usually) easy for most people to care about other people. It's a little less easy, though still pretty common, for people to care about animals. The further away from recognizably human you get, the less people seem to care: e.g. insects, plants, bacteria, viruses, etc. For me there is something that "scales" down all the way to inanimate objects.
I like the Japanese concept of Tsukumogami[0], where certain objects that live to be 100 years old become imbued with a soul.
It's easy to get sentimental over neglected things because I seem to have an innate appreciation and sense of duty toward objects that are designed to help people. It only seems fair that the contract includes care and maintenance from the user.
I live in an aging neighborhood and weep for some of these homes. I visited an abandoned unit just this weekend and went through the spectrum of sadness and anger that such a beautiful building had been allowed to fall into such disrepair. The unit was unsafe to live in, the foundation is cracking in two, one wall has a crack so large that you can see the outside and in several places, the floor is close to caving in. But the outside of the building is so nice. :(
We just bought a house in the neighborhood that is in mostly good shape considering its owners were older and lived there for over 20 years. I look forward to shaping her up, replacing the roof, refinishing the floors, repairing the foundation, fixing some water damage, etc. She's a great little home and it pains me to see her not at her best.
Yes, Tsukumogami is I believe an instance of animism [1].
AFAIK I am not affected by autism, but I distinctly remember when as a child I refused to eat something because that thing didn't "want" to be eaten. I guess that from my parent's perspective, it was just their child's whim-of-the-day.
But that memory makes me think that animism is something natural - perhaps some sort "bug" in the system that make us attribute intentions [2] to others.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animism [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_mind_in_animals#Attr...
Thank you for sharing your experience.
I remember a similar experience as a child when I started crying because my dad would pop a balloon; because I believed that it was not meant to be burst and asked him to repair it afterwards.
I can now take some comfort in the fact that I was not in fact, too weird :)
> I like the Japanese concept of Tsukumogami[0], where certain objects that live to be 100 years old become imbued with a soul.
I feel like cars tend to do it much, much sooner, given how short their life is. :-)
My personal and private belief is that once I have owned an item for a while, I give it a portion of my own soul. The "personality" doesn't have to match mine, or have any desirable traits, but it is there, it is because I am, and I'm shaping the thing by my own usage patterns.
I relate to this easily. My family finds it so strange that I can look at a flat tire and say something like "aw, poor thing". And I'm half-joking, yet... Well, it gives me an emotional response. I think a lot of people can relate to that example in particular because there is a sort of 'deflated' sense of self most people can experience, but not so much with the dull knife or a rock being split in half.
Something I found which coincides somewhat well with what you're saying: it seems like a disproportionate number of vegans are not neurotypical. I'm mostly plant-based because I can't separate animals from humans enough. It feels wrong to eat them. Not that I lower humans to animal level, though. I raise animals, or the hierarchy is flatter. I also find insects so much more amazing—and neurologically salient I suppose—than virtually everyone I know. Yet in the isopod collecting hobby, you'll find plenty of people who love insects and arachnids and so on, and they seem to lean towards neurodivergence as well.
my recent experience as an adept tool user/maker and repairer of all things mundane is that my emotional response is sufficient and planing or thinking about what I am doing isn't realy ressesary...unless it's something potentialy dangerous or deadly I am doing, and then I mainly stay out of gravitys way and/or any line of potential failure involving a lot of mass and torque living in a rural maritime area, many objects are personified and gendered, mostly female here,but the pennsylvania side of the family says "he's a good truck!" which is completely different from outport fisherfolk who refer to anything manufactured as a machine, "bring me that blue machine der you" refering to a plastic bucket, which was a common attitude in pre industrial societies that were rubbing up against the manufactured world, where everything in there world was personified by the person (who they know) who made it echos of this, everywhere diagnosible now....
> A good example would be a dull knife. There's something "sad" about an object whose nature or purpose it is to be sharp to lose or lack that sharpness.
Interesting - I think you've just explained "Tear-Water Tea" [1] (Arnold Lobel's classic childrens story) for me.
[1] https://archive.org/details/Tear-waterTea-English-ArnoldLobe...
> It's (usually) easy for most people to care about other people. It's a little less easy, though still pretty common, for people to care about animals. The further away from recognizably human you get, the less people seem to care
I think this also explains a lot about how normal people behave. They not only care mostly about humans but mostly about their tribe. The operation of some system which is designed to protect everyone is only important when it's protecting their own people and can be disregarded when that isn't the case. Whereas people whose empathy extends past their own walls can feel a harm to the whole society when that happens.
Even now I'm sure there are people reading this and thinking "yes, the other tribe does that all the time! They're such hypocrites!" But that's the easy one. The hard thing is to recognize it and stop it when you're doing it.
I relate to that. I wouldn't say I attribute human characteristics to non-human objects, but I definitely feel emotional distress when I see objects destroyed harmed, throw away, etc.
For me, I think a big part of it is a sense of waste or lost potential. If the object hadn't been broken, it could have had longer useful life, and it upsets me that that was cut short.
I don't find this surprising at all. Humans are tool-users, and valuing an object's utility and experiencing a feeling of something like loss when it's neglected or loses efficacy would seem to be an advantageous trait.
For me, even software running on devices can make the device "content" or "unhappy". It's like the software is in line with how the silicon wants to be. Its not design, it's something deeper. Like a kind of flow state for bits.
One large scale example could be linux vs windows on a server. Linux seems to be more attuned to how the system wants to run. With reflection this might be me combining anthropomorphising and my own prejudices and likes and biases with a projection of my personality onto the software.
But I remember certain Windows applications felt they run better than others - even ones with worse design or that were proprietary. With more consideration this might be when computers had visual blinking LEDs and audible HD clicks and subliminal capacitor whine. If that's the case then in my feeling, software that made conservative use of CPU and HD beyond looking nice might be "happier" than more popular applications.
Writing the above I'm reminded of Terry Davis's TempleOS but I'm not sure what to make of that feeling!
This doesn't sound exclusive to autistic people to me at all, more like normal human behaviour. Though I would imagine the average person is more likely to get angry about the dull knife for wasting their time.
I remember in the 1990's when I felt very strongly that in chess, rook pawns could be advanced far more often than they were in Grandmaster games. And in recent years modern computers confirm that (it has been called "the rook pawn revolution"). Looking back on it a bit later, I realized I had no logical, left-brain systems support for it, only one of the strongest "systems" feelings I can remember ever having. I also grew up on the spectrum, with a side of moderately severe anxiety disorder, and extreme difficulty sleeping.
I agree, it's more like empathy for objects directly rather than assigning human anything to objects. For instance, I don't perceive objects as human, honestly if I can help it I don't even perceive humans as human. I have empathy for concepts that have nothing to do with humanity or with assigning things humanity or human characteristics. Nothing I do or feel is human-centric. I don't even identify human myself (I am otherkin)
Oh dang, so the others do walk among us?
Hehe :) in that sense I'm not sure if I exist in the physical world at all. It's more of an in-my-head thing. I perceive the outer body as entirely separate from my actual self. Maybe that's due to my dissociative disorder, I dunno for sure.
Here's where you can find the full paper.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/326979070_Object_pe...
It's pretty short and was basically just a survey monkey survey of ~100 people (400 total) who report having autism.
I don't know but maybe it helps if you try to look at things from the other perspective.
For example in your dull knife example, maybe you could think: "the knife can now be happy because it doesn't need to be so dangerous anymore and it can make friends with the other cutlery in the drawer"
It sounds silly, buy maybe it helps.
Object personification is if you would feel that the knife itself is sad, is hurting, etc., and you’d feel for it. If, on the other hand, you’re just sad yourself that the knife is dull, because that’s not how a knife is supposed to be, then that’s not personifying the knife, it’s more an aesthetic judgement about a state of affairs. Similarly for the room example. You feel emotional about the state of affairs that other people haven’t respected it, but you don’t think the room itself is emotional about it.
Another example is if one is sad that a favorite software or service has become enshittified. One doesn’t attribute emotion to the software or service itself, rather one feels emotional about the state the software or service is in.
Those are completely neurotypical emotional reactions.
It's hard to convey precisely what I mean, of course, but to try to clarify further I would say the emotion is experienced on behalf of the object itself in a direct way that does not involve my personal sense of self. I do not mind a dull knife at all, I feel no personal emotion in that sense. Either I sharpen it because it's mine or not. That's neutral.
So it's much closer to object personification because it's the same mechanism by which I empathize with other people, animals, etc. In my description I've tried to generalize because to me it's not accurate to say that I feel the knife is sad, but the experience is almost as if that were the case.
Something I've wondered that's maybe related: How many people "feel" systems?
Like, if you're designing, building, or managing a large and complex system, and there are concerns in different aspects of it, and you have maybe a kind of emotional coprocessor about it, e.g., keeping track of all the parts that bother you, and how much they bother you? (Also, parts that you like.)
I'm pretty sure that not all people have nearly the same capacity for this, but I don't know the distribution.
I relate to this quite a lot, and I've met a few different people over my career that I feel have the same gut intuition or instinct for systems.
You know almost instantly when you meet them in the field, often within a few sentences. It's really eye opening moving between areas of high and low densities people like this.
I did used to think it was normal and common but I've definitely come to doubt that as I've got older. I think it's been a hindrance at times though, particularly in some business environments that aren't producing systems that feel nice. Although there's a certain satisfaction and special sense of achievement in making an unhappy feeling system do amazing things.
> You know almost instantly when you meet them in the field, often within a few sentences.
Exactly. But don't let the interview people know that, or it will become another ritual that everyone checkboxes and fakes. :)
About half of my time spent coding is making the code "feel good."
It's really important, too. That's how the code becomes maintainable for the next person.
> "feel" systems
I used to play a tcg a bit too seriously, and sometimes seeing incorrect game states would trigger something. Part of tracking game states and derivations I guess. Only sometimes helpful in software.
Decidedly relatable to me to the point where I have a custom field on our ClickUps called ” Pain ” at my work
This is a good example of research that is too preliminary for anyone to form any conclusions about.
It was 400 people, 100 of whom report having autism. And it was conducted by posting links to the survey monkey survey on social media.
It might have some interesting follow up studies, but I find no reason to really take this for much other than an indicator that further study should be done.
It sounds that the paper indetified that autistic people do this at the same ratio everyone else?
""" Together, our results indicate that object personification occurs commonly among autistic individuals, and perhaps more often (and later in life) than in the general population. """
I had this to a significant degree as a child, back in the world where "autism" only meant "profoundly non verbal" and such a diagnosis had nothing to do with me (and yes it could be distressing. Even to this day I sometimes feel sad about deleting text in documents and replacing it with similar text, experiencing the desperation of a perfectly fine word about to no longer exist. I told a therapist about this like ten years ago and she looked me blankly. I guess I still have this). I wrote a whole essay called "The Floor's Opinion" in grade school and I was hailed as a creative genius.
In that recent story in the NYT about dating agencies for people on the spectrum, so many of the comments (in the NYT, not here) were very angry at how the definition of autism has been so greatly expanded in recent decades to include people who are high functioning. The commenters felt it took away from their own children's diagnoses, not just in name but also in terms of competition for resources, and didnt see what the point was for people who were low on the spectrum.
But I will say when they identify specific traits that I've always wondered about and even told clueless therapists about, it feels way better to know a little bit of the reasoning for why you have some freakish habit.
I always had the impression it was the other way around, non autistic 'normal' people personifies non human objects. Anyway I always had a pet theory that the reason some people are fooled into thinking LLM text output is a real human with feelings, and some aren't, comes down to this difference in brains. (Personally I never feel like the LLM is a real human and I'm kind of autistic too.)
I think there's different kinds of autism, which imv, you could spread across a schizophrenia axis -- "low reality" and "high reality" sorts. My own classification system:
The more schizophrenic kind imparts a fantasy framing on everything which can give rise to a disorganised imparting of mental capacities that I think is fairly uniform across objects, including people. This appears as "too few mental capacities" on people, and too much to objects. This a "living in their own world, dreaming" type. Dreamer-type.
At the other extreme, it's a difficulty in establishing any kind of fantasy framing (without significant support, eg., in video games / films). This is an officious, "the rules really exist, and we must follow them" type. Officious-type.
Incidentally, imv, there's a third sort you might call dissociative, where irony is the main mode of relation to the world and others. This is an unstable blending of the two perspectives: the ironic performative frame is at once a kind of fantasy, but a sort of fantasy which seeks to make the very adopting of fantasy impossible. Irony-type.
I think quite a lot of "high-engagement culture" (ie., the type which requires a lot of its audience) is really autistic culture of these varieties in interaction.
Interesting that you use some kind of schizophrenia axis.
There is actually some scientists that hypothesize schizophrenia and autism are exact opposites of each other. It's call the predictive coding hypothesis of autism.
In essence the predictive coding hypothesis assumes that large parts of our brain function like a modern video codec. Always predicting the next states and reducing information by only picking up on prediction errors that need to be encoded separatedly.
Under this hypothesis schizophrenia arises, if there is a very strong predictive coding and very little influence of the prediction errors. You hear voices out of noise, because your prediction mechanism tries to encode these noises as something sensible.
On the other hand in autism you have very little prediction and high external influence (i.e. the normal information reduction doesn't take place).
There are some studies that try to pick up the prediction vs. error components in simple cognitive tasks that support this idea.
I was using one aspect of schizophrenia, which isn't this "salience disregulation" feature you're talking about -- but something more schizotypal, a general feeling of being slighly askew from reality, ie., a kind of magical thinking. Maybe better put as "the qualitative feeling of being around someone schizotypical", than exactly the clinical issue.
I would say in dreamer-type autism, the magical thinking doesnt have the same character -- it's more abstract, typically. In schizotypalism you have a literal sort of paranoia often behind this. However, I think the clinical study of autism very often focuses on the literal-minded type, i think who are probably more common amongst the low-functioning -- but I don't believe this exhausts the autistic.
One common feature of autism, imv, is a stickyness to one's own context and a resistance/difficulty in "social contextual osmosis" which is common both to schizotypals and autists (, schizoprhenics of course, but by way of severe impairments of functioning that would apply to any extreme mental disorder ).
In any case, one of my "clinical cultural analysis hot-takes" is that a lot of intellectual culture war issues are schizophrenics arguing with literal autists -- that was my analysis of the "richard dawkins vs. jordan peterson" youtube debate/video which you can find. If you attend to peterson's trains of though, he's barely able to obtain any deductive depth. At one point i think he manages two sequential premises, before another tangent. Highly characteristic of flight-of-ideas thinking.
Whereas dawkins is basically wholly deductive and literalist in his thinking, anti-wonder and anti-free-association. It make the "debate" primarily interesting as a clinical case study.
It's just another retred of the eternal war between these modes of thought.
I think socrates is a worthwhile case study of someone i'd say of a mixed schizophrenic-autistic type, fully in the dissociative category i outlined -- an ironist. Though, that he's so fully in that ironic category, the alleged schizoprehnic elements to his psychology could simply be a performative ploy to indict his audience -- using their own commitment to the divine against them.
One can see socrates' internal compulsion to question those around him as this dissociative-mode autism at work, ie., an inability to exist in the social-fantasy context of others, but an ability to impose a kind of (ironic-)fantasy context of his own. "I know that I know nothing" is this ironic self-characterisation which kinda stages both contexts at once: I (literally) know that... + (fictionally,) I know nothing.
In a sense, in this mode of autism, you have Richard Dawkins in one ear in war with Jordan Peterson in the other.
> I think quite a lot of "high-engagement culture" (ie., the type which requires a lot of its audience) is really autistic culture of these varieties in interaction.
What is an example of "high-engagement culture?"
Echoing the other comments here, you should write down your classification system and share it.
Maybe others would benefit from understanding your intuition about this.
> I always had the impression it was the other way around, non autistic 'normal' people personifies non human objects.
The paper says, they do!
The surprising part is that autist do it too, at approximately the same rates, which was unexpected.
Not at the same rates, but at higher rates than the general population and even stronger:
""" Together, our results indicate that object personification occurs commonly among autistic individuals, and perhaps more often (and later in life) than in the general population. """
This is well known for many autistic people. "I put this thing there, and now it has to stay at that position, because otherwise it will be very sad."
The surprising part is not that autistic people do have empathy for inanimate objects (this is so well known, it's even covered in some diagnostic tests), but rather to find further confirmation and compare it to the general population. Mostly because this is surprising, as in general autism is related to empathy disfunction, so it is surprising to observe empathy at higher rates (see below).
However, as many researchers have pointed out that is exactely what would be expected. Empathy disfunction is incorrectly interpreted by many as "lack of empathy". But empathy means understanding and representing the emotional state of another living creature. Assigning emotional states to inanimate objects is by definition an empathy disfunction, because you are mentally representing something that is not there in the real world. Same with over-empathy that is reported by some autistics. Since these are over-representing the emotional states of others, this is also a disfunction (i.e. a mismatch between observed subject and the representation).
So the article builds strongly on the false equivalence between empathy disfunction and lack of empathy.
Some scientists believe that autistic people have different levels of empathy than allistic people. Sometimes this manifests as higher levels of empathy for objects and animals, or higher emotional empathy.
I'm dx'd autistic, and I am someone who will weep openly or experience unbridled joy alongside, say, a movie about a bunch of animals surviving tough times. But if I see an adult human make a poor choice and suffer consequences I feel nothing. I have to teach myself that my values are that we should care for everyone -- even the people I feel no intrinsic empathy towards.
In speaking with my doc about it, it's apparently not at all uncommon for autistic folks to have this sort of extremely strong empathy response in some cases, while a totally flat empathy response in others.
> it's apparently not at all uncommon for autistic folks to have this sort of extremely strong empathy response in some cases, while a totally flat empathy response in others
to add another datapoint to this, the only movie that's ever made me cry is Wall-E. I felt so sad for him at the beginning of it, all alone and trying to complete an impossible, unappreciated task.
I'm sure there are objectively sadder movies out there, but not for me.
I'm not fooled whatsoever into thinking LLMs are human, but I am polite in how I interact with them because the language that I use impacts my experience. Same goes with how I interact with anything, linguistically or not.
The normal version is anthropomorphizing - projecting humanity onto something (state of mind, emotions, reactions).
The autistic version is interpreting the state of objects emotionally, which is closer to synesthesia.
The normal version is practice for interacting with people, the autistic version is consuming emotional attention that could otherwise be used for people.
I'll stop personifying objects when they stop having personalities!
The abstract seems to suggest that object personification is common with people who don't have autism too, perhaps less common than with people that have autism. This more or less tracks with my intuition that object personification is normal. People do it all the time with ships, cars, guns, computers, or whatever other machines they work with, whatever is important to them and complex enough to have a personality of its own.
Same here, feels like a pretty normal trait, both my kids have this with their favorite toys (I had the same as well) and nowadays I do have attachment to some of my stuff, specially my kitchen utensils/devices, my kitchen aid mixer (10 years old now) even has a name.
From the summary it feels like the problem is more related to the fact they have more distressing events, I don't think i've had any recently but i can think of one or two when i was a kid and lot favorite toys.
There's definitely some bias around personification. Several religions and cultures place importance on personification and/or anthropomorphism.
Perhaps like auditory hallucinations, the experience can be distressing _or not_ and we can observe that between different cultures.
I appreciate that the abstract highlighted where personification is unhelpful.
Yes, I found that part interesting. It never occurred to me that some people might find object personification to be distressing.
Take this with a grain of salt because I am not autistic but my first intuition when reading the paper wasn't that autistic people antropomorphize objects, but maybe its the other way around. Namely that they have less of a subjective or interior view on people, how other people see them and maybe how they see themselves (there's some comments to that effect in this thread)
Again because I don't have direct experience with it I don't want to lean too much into stereotypes, but it seems possible to me that people with autism have a more monistic, or at least less dualistic view on these things because the kind of thing that makes other people distinguish between subjects and objects is less present in people with autism.
I always thought this was something I got from watching The Brave Little Toaster and similar content when I was tiny.
Fun fact: The Brave Little Toaster is based on a story by Thomas M. Disch, who is a pretty interesting sci-fi writer:
Better than Toy Story, but Toy Story is much better known and does the same thing
Yeah..except that The Brave Little Toaster has a specific anti consumerism slant..
I can't imagine why the toy based story that was designed from the get-go to shovel plastic into kids via emotional hooks took off better and was better supported by the industry...
I can't take this kind of pressure
I must confess one more dusty road
Would be just a road too long
Worthless
IYKYK. A few touches:
- "I just can't / I just can't / I just can't seem to get started" mimics a car trying to turn over
- Pairing the wedding and the funeral
Available here: https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:edc2de03-af02-4dd4-8851-e5... [PDF]
This is neither here nor there, but it's interesting that the only personification made more often by non-autistic people is gender. Demographics may explain this but I wonder if there are more broad differences in how autistic people view identity.
Lot of languages assign gender to objects.
One should control for foreign language knowledge.
A lot of languages assign nouns to a noun class. They are (usually) not ascribing a biological gender to an object. "Gender" is a horrendously bad name for the concept.
"Gender" referred only to grammar before it gained its modern meaning. The modern meaning was introduced in the 1950s/60s to differentiate social aspects (gender) from biological (sex). Of course people then started using it to just mean "sex", but if you use social definition I don't think it's a bad name for the concept.
Are you sure? That’s almost the opposite of what I heard, which was that “gender” being used to refer to -inity arose as a euphemism to avoid using the word “sex”, because the word “sex” came to be more associated with specifically “sex-acts” (and that prior to it being used as a euphemism in this way, it essentially meant something like kind/type/sort), and only after “gender” began being used as a euphemism in this way, did people begin using it to distinguish between “gender roles” and “sexes”.
It's not the worst name for the concept when you include "a male" and "a female" as prominent nouns in that noun class. If you adjust your language depending on whether you are addressing a man or a woman (or speaking about a man or woman), then it's definitely also social gender (as well as grammatical gender), even if those two concepts are separate.
Except there's no mandate that "a male" and "a female" are of different noun classes, nor are the nouns for man/woman abnormally privileged in most cases. I know Dutch has fused masculine/feminine nouns into a "common" gender, leaving the language with effectively only the common and neuter genders. If I remember correctly, a similar thing has happened in Swedish and Danish. Some languages have various concepts of animacy driving the system. Some languages have shitloads of noun classes.
You can adjust your language depending on the biological gender of who you're addressing in English, but English doesn't have grammatical gender in any meaningful way. The concepts are largely orthogonal.
Calling it gender really is just a bad, misleading name in the grand scheme of things.
Except for all the languages that actually call the grammatical concept: gender
Edit: see German example: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_gender_in_German
Yeah man, I know that it's traditionally called gender, and I know that German has a gender and case system. I don't understand what the link you've posted has to do with my point, I'm really not sure what there is to misunderstand about what I'm saying.
To come all the way back to what my original comment was about -- a German speaker is not ascribing any sort of sociological femininity to words like Freiheit or Bundesanstalt, nor any sort of sociological masculinity to Anschluss or Wein, nor any lack thereof to Sicherheitsrelais or Volk. The objects in the language have a grammatical gender, not a sociological one. It would be interesting seeing research on what sociological gender speakers of a language with a gender system choose for an object they're personifying (especially inanimate ones), but I don't think a German necessarily thinks "I'm personifying this key, and it's a man because the noun is masculine". Does anybody here have any anecdotes?
Link was used to establish that this concept is usually called “gender”. (I felt there was a dispute on that; might be my projection)
Regarding anecdotes:
In my native language all objects have grammatical gender (feminine and masculine).
If I would write a children book natively, about objects that come to life, I would automatically assign their social gender based on grammatical gender.
Because language hints it that way. Pronouns, adjectives, participles, all must be adjusted based on objects gender (exactly like it would be done when talking about a person).
There is some research that goes in the opposite direction. I.e. that especially in german the lack gender in the word for girls ("das Mädchen") is actually quite problematic and can lead to girls not thinking they really have a gender before they grow up. At least up to a certain age, where children learn to separate between grammatical gender and social gender or biological sex.
French and Spanish literally use a contraction of the Latin for he and she for different objects though. This is also done in Swedish.
Hon slår tolv. 'She strikes twelve', referring to the clock currently striking.
Are you talking about direct object pronouns? At least in the case of Spanish, lo/la is the pronoun for a masculine or feminine noun. It would obviously follow that it's the pronoun for a man and woman, respectively, the same way they would be the pronoun for any other masculine or feminine noun. I don't see how addressing men and women (as a noun) the same as you would any other noun in the language (save some irregularities) means that the cart is pulling the horse.
le/el/il = ille, la = illa.
It literally means he and she in Latin. Then people started using these to indicate that something was a specific object instead of an object in general.
So proof that the OOO crowd is autistic!
Reminds me of a theme in the cult classic Shooting Fish where the more technical-minded con artist was accused of repairing old household appliances out of pity.
You see this used even as diagnostic criteria yet when people attribute malice to their computer or car its considered normal. To me this is just normal anthropomorphization and the confusion regarding emotions in autism. I honestly am convinced there is nothing but communication going wrong here
This topic has been of interest to me but I've approached it from different directions: Japanese Shintoism, the idea that objects can be numinous and panpsychism.
I wonder if the "sadness" referenced in the paper's title stems not from object personification itself, but from living in a culture that lacks frameworks for these experiences.
In cultures with concepts like Shinto kami (where objects can have spiritual essence) or similar animistic traditions, someone who senses that their broken tool has been "disrespected" or feels that a neglected room carries emotional weight wouldn't be pathologized. These experiences would have cultural validation and shared language.
I feel a very deep, apparently irrational reluctance to throw away objects I no longer need, especially if those objects are well-crafted. I feel that doing so is disrespectful of the love and effort the object's creator invested in them.
I also relate - but have not received a formal diagnosis other than ADD.
- I remember feeling sorry for cars in a car dealership on a hot summer day as a child: "they must be miserable in this heat!"
- I frequently to this day personify my childrens stuffed animals & dolls & action figures: "They must feel so lonely not being played with anymore!"
- I was inordinately attached to my own stuffed animals / toys as a kid. I remember when one got taken away during a schoolday, that I felt like someone had kidnapped a family member - and I was inconsolable.
It's fantastic to see that this is now being investigated in the literature.
Something I’ve been thinking about is whether it’s partly because people sometimes don’t really know how to describe what they’re feeling, so they end up putting those emotions onto objects. It kind of helps make sense of feelings that are hard to explain.
At the same time, I wonder if it’s always a good thing. Like, what happens if you lose or break something you’ve gotten really attached to? Could that make the anxiety worse?
Curious if anyone here has seen this or has any personal experience.
Yes, this is very common. Autistic people can easily go into meltdown if they loose an object that they assign emotional states to.
In severe cases it can be sufficient if the object is slightly moved to trigger a meltdown, and there are reports that support those exact thinking patterns.
Please don’t anthropomorphise research papers - they hate it.
My small daughter is mildly autistic. Very friendly but overly obsessed with the life of bugs and very concerned about human like tendencies in bugs. She personifies other objects but it seems hard to tell if that’s just a child thing or one of her symptoms.
Even with the bugs I’m always wondering if that’s a kid thing too, but the fact the other kids her age couldn’t care less about bugs makes me wonder if it’s autism related.
It's both. Child neurological development goes through a lot of mirroring the environments they observe in play, and mapping them onto stuffed animals, dolls, bugs, pets, toys, etc. There's an age where kids are developing interiority (children do not have an "inner voice" and do not develop it until 5-7, typically) and during that time, a lot of their play is them learning the rules and developing empathy (children do not have a concept of being able to put themselves in others shoes until age 3-7, typically).
Autistic children are often times very interested in learning rules and applying them in other settings. Autistic young women, especially, are navigating a complicated social environment that strongly encourages them to understand the rules of what it means to be a woman in society. Learning those rules and then saying, "Ok little (bugs|stuffed animals|toys), here's how things work" is both a thing kids do and a thing autistic kids do.
Couple that with special interests (dinosaurs, trains, bugs, bones, whatever), and you'll often see autistic kids getting WAY into one particular thing and then mapping the world they experience onto that thing.
"Normal people" do it, too - ask a sailor about ship. Some people name and gender their vehicles. To a certain extent, it comes from close association with object.
I'm the guy who drives around with a cartoon drawing of a robot in his car that will utterly destroy anyone who tries to steal it, so I ought to know.
Sailors, at least the ones I know, are often superstitious because 1) marine tradition is filled with legends and beliefs 2) the sea is cruel and unforgiving.
No one wants to be sinking while remembering that they forgot to christen the boat , they just killed a seabird, and they stepped onto the boat with their left foot.
My point: I see marine superstition as a cultural affect rather than a sign of any such other psychology.
This sounds fascinating. Too bad the paper is not freely available.
Side note: Be sure to check out Unpaywall[1][2] which allows you to (legally!!!) read research papers for free.
I don’t experience that at all, but definitely do associatively recall all the nontrivial uses / interactions I’ve had with items. It makes organizing stuff a mentally exhausting activity unless I’m in the right head space.
Reminds me of Spike Jonze’s famous IKEA lamp ad:
Inanimate objects won't berate you in response to ascribing a state of being to them against their will.
I’m glad to see more research into this phenomena. Not the best data out there, sure, but it’s a start that could incentivize further research with proper sample sizes and procedures.
This is an issue I’m acutely familiar with. Everything of import is, to a degree, personified. Not everything gets a name, necessarily, but everything has an “identity” which helps me to process events and interactions with it.
AVR crashes? “Oh, she’s being pissy today.”
Car taking a little longer to start in the morning? “I know girl, I’m tired too.”
This extends to treatment: the more personified the object, the better its treatment. Stuffed animals get names and apologies, as does Siri (though the voice assistants also get a tongue lashing when they’re non-performant). When I retire something, I try to find it a good home before trashing it (which is why an old Pioneer HDMI 2.0 AVR is still sitting in a box, alone and unloved by a new owner). I treat objects with the same reverence I treat people, which earns me the occasional eyeroll.
I’d love to know more about why this phenomena is so prevalent in autistic people, and what the benefits or harms of it are. Here’s hoping another team takes up this baton and runs with it some more.
Yeah, decluttering is torture.
<Date Everything! has entered the chat>
> We carried out an online survey, administered via Survey Monkey
This type of thing, where they do some statistics on survey data, seems to be fairly typical in psychology research. But I find it hard to believe that you can actually get good data from self-reporting in surveys.
There must be selection effects: "The survey was advertised on social media and through the researchers’ own networks".
And the questions may not be interpreted by the respondents as imagined. What does it mean if you select "None of the above" in their core question? That you think that objects have no attributes whatsoever? "Do you ever view objects as having: Gender / Human-like attributes / Feelings / Other / None of the above"
See also "replication crisis". Psychology is at the center of it.
Forget the quality of the data, you can give the same data to different researchers and get wildly different conclusions. [1, from 2, from 3]
(Disclaimer: not my area of expertise.)
[1] N. Breznau et al., “Observing many researchers using the same data and hypothesis reveals a hidden universe of uncertainty,” PNAS, October 2022, URL: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2203150119
[2] B. Klaas, “The Crisis of Zombie Social Science.” The Garden of Forking Paths. https://www.forkingpaths.co/p/the-crisis-of-zombie-social-sc...
[3] The crisis of zombie social science (20 points, 2 days ago) – https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44272057
Yup. There's so much pressure to publish something that we consistently see attempts to extract data from noise.
> I find it hard to believe that you can get actually get good data from self-reporting in surveys.
Especially when you consider the Lizardman's Constant of 4%
https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/12/noisy-poll-results-and...
This article was written in 2013. The Internet has become a significantly more toxic place since then, and I would imagine the constant is closer to 15-20% these days.
> […] I would imagine the constant is closer to 15-20% these days.
On what basis?
On basis of spending a lot of my teenage time browsing 4chan, I'd say it's not 15%, but closer to 69% or even whole 420%. You just loose faith in humanity from spending too much time on the internet.
So we're writing off the methodologies of the entire field of psychology on the basis of numbers pulled out of your--on the basis of your gut feeling?
Don't you know this is HN? A hand wave here is worth more than any methodical research.
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