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COVID-19 has impacted the world in ways we never even thought imaginable. Personally, for me, the spring semester was supposed to be a more easy-going semester. The weather is getting warmer, beaches are opening soon, flowers are blooming… but here we are: stuck indoors. We’re forced to get creative doing things we didn't know we'd been able to be before. When we were first locked down, we expected it to only last for a week or two. That quickly turned into a third week, a month, two months and honestly who knows how much longer it might be. People are forced to reconnect with themselves and in turn are picking up new hobbies and new ways to keep busy. People have started baking, painting, exercising, practicing yoga, and doing so much more activities. While it is important that we stimulate our minds and stay physically active, we as a society are realizing just how important human interaction is no matter how meaningless it might seem. Have you ever watched the movie Cast Away with Tom Hanks? You know, the one where he makes a friend out of a volleyball and has conversations with it as if it were a real human friend. That is anthropomorphism.
Earlier in the semester we had a guest speaker that talked about anthropomorphism in relation to COVID-19. Toisha Tucker dove into the topic of anthropomorphic relationships with technologies in our homes and how these relationships are becoming increasingly important in this day and age, and so much more now in the era of COVID-19. Technology has become so ingrained in our lives that we’ve almost given it a personality. Have you ever referred to your laptop as “she” or to your appliances as “they”? Something that is more common that people do is name their cars. Toisha shared an experience in which they began to call their robot vacuum Oreo and saw it basically as a domesticated pet even if it is a robot that can be shut on and off.
Toisha’s presentation the need of humans to have some sort of communication and interaction with other humans. I am fortunate enough to have been quarantined at home with my little brother and parents. Just like every regular family we argue and fight from time to time. We don’t always get along and we walk in on each other’s zoom classes (purposely sometimes) embarrassing each other. Even though it can be annoying sometimes, it is evident to me now that in-person communication is extremely valuable and important to me. I truly believe it is what has kept me from going crazy. Unfortunately, however, when quarantine became mandatory some people were quarantined alone for various reasons and for them, quarantine has been a completely different experience so far. Perhaps the first week felt like nothing and the second week was still bearable but on day 50 of quarantine, we are really missing human interaction. Streaming and video call services are experiencing the bright side of this quarantine. The uses of services such as Zoom, Skype, FaceTime, etc. have skyrocketed as people want to satisfy their need for communication. The authors of “Keywords for Today” define communication and its evolution through time. As technology continues to improve, humans have found alternative ways to have some form of human interaction seeing as it is cited as one of today’s most important skills (Keywords for Today: A 21st Century Vocabulary, 61).
Just online communication, however, is not enough and so people start making friends with their home appliances and technologies, giving them pronouns and personalities. This, of course, isn't something new. Like Toisha, many people have given some sense of humanity to their Roombas and other appliances. This is something that Urquiza-Haas and Kortschal refer to as “interpretative anthropomorphism”, personifying non-human objects or animals based on behavior, as opposed to “imaginative anthropomorphism”, representing non-human objects or animals as having human-like features. Urquiza-Haas and Kortschal discuss the way in which humans anthropomorphize and how one’s mental state plays a big role in that. How we personify things is affected by many environmental factors such as our reactions to them and emotions we may be feeling at the time. In their article, “Service Robots in the Domestic Environment”, Jodi Forlizzi and Carl DiSalvo discuss how anthropomorphic relationships can develop to ease a little bit of social discomfort when one is home with an appliance. They studied how different families reacted to having a service robot such as a Roomba, and how they would slowly start giving them names and human-like personalities. In one of the families, they pointed out that one of the members would say “excuse me” to the vacuum if she bumped into it when walking through the house” (Forlizzi and DiSalvo). In starting to anthropomorphize non-human products like Roombas, it can allow people to feel like they’re still having that human contact they are used to on a day to day and can help them feel less lonely especially in a time like this.
As I mentioned earlier, the idea of anthropomorphic relationships isn't a new concept. As humans it is in our nature to give “human-hood” to nonhuman and inanimate objects. In an article, Davies states that we do this because we see human traits and behaviors that cause us to think of non-human objects as pseudo-human (Davies). Even in the science of microbiology scientists have classified bacteria as a male and female because they participate in “sexual” mating. It makes certain things easier to understand and study. Psychologists, however, have theorized and studied why and how such relationships develop and one thing they found is that people tend to do this more in times of loneliness (“Thinking of Loved Ones Lessens Our Need to ‘Reconnect’ Through Anthropomorphism”).
Many people who have had to quarantine alone may unknowingly be doing this since it is hard and in some cases impossible to visit loved ones for health fears. Once again, as mentioned earlier, when people began to really understand the severity of this current pandemic and the realities of an extended quarantine, many ran to buy different communication devices and even game consoles to keep busy. One of the hottest items out right now is the Nintendo Switch. Many people who were able to acquire one before they became sold out everywhere jumped on the Animal Crossing: New Horizons fad. This game has become very famous (and important!) to everyone that has a Nintendo switch and that is currently quarantined. In this game, you get to make a virtual island of your own. You make your house, you go fishing and you can even visit friends on their islands.
I always said that I would never give in to the fad yet here I am with a Nintendo switch playing Animal Crossing almost every night before I go to sleep making sure I can visit my island and say hi to all my animal neighbors that have names and all the human qualities. I thought it was funny when I was playing with my little brother and as we were going to sleep turning everything off at night, he didn't even talk to me rather he went to my Switch telling it “goodnight! Same time tomorrow?” I laughed at first until I realized I do this to quite a lot too and so do many other people. In a NYT article, Imad Khan talks about this insane rise of this game to many gamers on lockdown. You can’t “win” this game, there are no levels to pass, and more importantly: YOU CAN’T LOSE! It's a fun way to escape reality, to feel a sense of “empowerment and community, particularly at a moment when many are being told to stay at home” (Khan). As Imad continues to point out, many people who are experiencing anxiety and loneliness find comfort in this game since they are able to communicate with other human animals on the islands and this seems to satisfy the human need for interaction and communication. Supporting this point, the authors of “When We Need A Human: Motivational Determinants of Anthropomorphism” conduct studies that lead them to conclude that “those who are momentarily or chronically lonely should thus anthropomorphize more than those who are connected.” In their study, Epley, Waytz, Akalis, and Cacioppo conducted different studies to understand and study how people viewed animals, specifically their pets, and then to understand how they felt about having different levels of control in their lives. One of the biggest findings was that people tend to “ attribute humanlike characteristics to nonhuman agents” when they had feelings of sadness of loneliness.
Toisha Tucker truly sparked my interest with the topic of anthropomorphism and how different environmental factors can cause the need to anthropomorphize to spike. I have found that in my daily life, even before the pandemic, I have unknowingly given a personality and human qualities to inanimate objects. When my phone battery is low or the phone starts acting up and not letting me do basic tasks I would sometimes say “Oh my phone is just tired of me!” as if it can feel emotions. Going back to Animal Crossing, I realize that many times I do find comfort in interacting and talking to the other characters in the game. Now more than ever, I feel that anthropomorphism is important and can be a good coping mechanism to get through these tough times. Despite the facts that we live in a modern world with all this great tech, nothing can truly satisfy the need for human interaction.
Bibliography
Davies, Julian. “Anthropomorphism in Science.” EMBO Reports, Nature Publishing Group, Oct. 2010, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2948194/.
Forlizzi, Jodi, and Carl DiSalvo. "Service robots in the domestic environment: a study of the roomba vacuum in the home." Proceedings of the 1st ACM SIGCHI/SIGART conference on Human-robot interaction. 2006.
Keywords for Today: A 21st Century Vocabulary, edited by Keywords Project, The Keywords The, et al., Oxford University Press, Incorporated, 2018. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral-proquest-com.proxy.library.nyu.edu/lib/nyulibrary-ebooks/detail.action?docID=5497189.
Khan, Imad. “Why Animal Crossing Is the Game for the Coronavirus Moment.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 7 Apr. 2020, www.nytimes.com/2020/04/07/arts/animal-crossing-covid-coronavirus-popularity-millennials.html.
Nicholas Epley, Adam Waytz, Scott Akalis, and John T. Cacioppo (2008). When We Need A Human: Motivational Determinants of Anthropomorphism. Social Cognition: Vol. 26, Special Issue: Missing Links in Social Cognition, pp. 143-155. https://guilfordjournals.com/doi/pdfplus/10.1521/soco.2008.26.2.143
“Thinking of Loved Ones Lessens Our Need to ‘Reconnect’ Through Anthropomorphism.” Association for Psychological Science - APS, www.psychologicalscience.org/news/releases/thinking-of-loved-ones-lessens-our-need-to-reconnect-through-anthropomorphism.html.
Urquiza-Haas, Esmeralda G., and Kurt Kotrschal. “The Mind behind Anthropomorphic Thinking: Attribution of Mental States to Other Species.” Animal Behaviour, Academic Press, 21 Sept. 2015, www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0003347215003085.