I recently gave a talk to an audience of scientists and university professors during which I referred to the "personality" of dogs and the fact that dogs can experience emotions such as love and ...

People talk to their plants, pray to human-like gods, name their cars, and even dress their pets up in clothing. We have a strong tendency to give nonhuman entities human characteristics (known as ...

Take a class in animal behavior and you’ll probably receive a warning: Beware of anthropomorphism. Explaining animals in terms of human motivations, emotions, or mental characteristics invites ...

Have you ever assigned personalities to your pets and explained their behaviors in terms of human motivations, such as imagining that a cat is being stubborn? The attribution of human characteristics, ...

The complexity of animal behaviour naturally prompts us to use terms that are familiar from everyday descriptions of our own actions. Charles Darwin used mentalistic terms freely when describing, for ...

It’s easier to relate to someone you have something in common with; that feeling of connection can turn strangers into friends. And if those strangers belong to an entirely different species, then ...