If you’ve ever had a pet of your own, you know just how close of a bond you can form with them.
Anyone who grew up with a dog knows that they can quickly become your best friend in the whole world. You go outside and play together, you sit and watch television together and you generally form a very close friendship. Along with that closeness comes the habit of talking to your animals and asking them questions as if they were a person, which can strike some people as strange.
Fortunately, it turns out that science is on the side of people who do this!
Some of the support for this came from a study out of the University of Chicago.
The paper was called “On Seeing Human: A Three-Factor Theory of Anthropomorphism,” and it addresses a whole lot more than simply talking to your pets. To put it in simple terms, anthropomorphism is the tendency that humans have to view non-human things as human. Whether we’re talking about trees in the park, our favorite stuffed animals or our favorite furry pets, this tendency is just a basic fact of life. When it comes to pets, this only makes even more sense.
Beyond that, though, the scientists also found that this habit could be predicted by a series of interrelated factors.
In general, the main factors are when a situation seems close in some way to a human one, when trying to achieve a social goal and when feeling lonely.
Though the way these things relate to one another is complex, the basic takeaway is simple: not only is it not weird to speak to your animals this way, it may actually be a sign that you’re socially intelligent and well-adjusted! As the paper argues, humans tend to use a knowledge of their own inner states and experience and use that to project onto other sentient creatures and animals.
In addition to these benefits, it may also say something about our own natural curiosity if we talk to our pets.
Let’s face it: the world outside of us is complicated and it’s hard to know our own minds, let alone the minds of others (and other animals)!
If you meet someone who is inherently not willing to talk to an animal or engage with it in a way that treats it more like an object than a living thing, that could be a good sign that they aren’t very curious about its inner life. Similarly, when we care about our pets and recognize that they’re similar enough to us to try to connect with them, we’re going to try hard to talk to them! It only makes sense!
Still, the third factor in this research is the one that some pet owners may want to watch out for.
Although everything we’ve covered so far is positive, excessively talking to your pets could be a sign that you’re a little lonely.
According to the research, that increased need to anthropomorphize the things around us could mean that we’re lacking some social connection. Obviously, there’s a range to this—it’s better to hang out with a group of dogs than to hang out with a bunch of cans of soup in your kitchen, for instance. Still, there’s some interesting insight to be gained there. When we go into isolation, we still stick out feelers out for social connection wherever we can find it. If we’re all alone on an island, we might talk to a volleyball. Weirdly enough, something like this same mechanism may explain why monks and other spiritual people purposefully seek isolation to get in touch with God! Who knew?
The long and short of it is: talking to your pets is pretty normal in most circumstances.
Regardless of if you do this or not, the article from the scientists at University of Chicago is a particularly interesting read.
Although we don’t think about it consciously, humans tend to think that humans are the center of the universe—in some ways, we just can’t help it. Although that doesn’t necessarily mean that we treat everything else around us like it’s less important than we are always, it does in the sense that our whole cognition seems to work that way. To communicate with other non-human things and beings, we do it in a human way. Above all though, we say that anything that brings you closer to your furry friends is a positive evolutionary adaptation.
Keep talking to your animals, animal lovers!
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