Autism, Anthropomorphism and Theory of Mind

Seeing More Than Human

Anthropomorphism, or seeing the non-human human, is one of our most natural social inclinations. By making the non-human human, we can better predict and understand behaviours, as we are ‘familiarising’ the unfamiliar. In this way, anthropomorphising is essentially an extension of theory of mind. Given this connection, many researchers have proposed that autistic people may not anthropomorphise as much as non-autistic people. However, a great deal of work now shows that this is not the case. Autistic people engage in anthropomorphism at the same or even a greater extent than non-autistic people. A growing body of research shows that they may be better at taking the perspective of anthropomorphic agents.

Our work in this area started with a qualitative studyinvestigating how autistic adolescents engaged in a theory of mind (or social perspective-taking) task. We found that interviewees often described their experiences in anthropomorphic ways. Our review of this topic uncovered a clear link between autism and anthropomorphism. We found that autistic individuals showed a penchant for anthropomorphic characters and agents, suggesting a possible strength in interacting with and evaluating these agents.

From here, we investigated how autistic people and those with high levels of autistic traits perform on various theory of mind and perspective-taking tasks with anthropomorphic agents. To do this, we developed anthropomorphic versions of popular theory of mind tasks like a cartoon version of the reading the mind in the eyes task and an animal version of the faux pas task.

Our results show that autistic children and adults perform better on these anthropomorphic versions of the task than the standard one, as do people with higher levels of autistic traits. In some cases, autistic people even outperform their neurotypical counterparts.