Growing Up Rich and Insecure Makes Objects Seem Human: Childhood Material and Social Environments Predict Anthropomorphism

The socioeconomic environments in which people grow up have a lasting influence on how they think and behave. Of unique interest to this research, social class can influence people’s preferred strategies of coping with environmental threats and stressors. In particular, people who grow up wealthy are taught to prioritize the self over community, independence over interdependence, and autonomy over relatedness (see Markus and Kitayama 2003 for a review), and their preferred coping strategies reflect these lessons. But, what if these same people also grow up with unmet relationship needs? How do they simultaneously protect their prized autonomy and fulfil their need for relatedness—a motivational quandary that, theoretically, does not exist for people growing up with fewer material resources and more community-oriented models of agency? Here, we propose that anthropomorphism may be an especially attractive coping strategy for people who grew up wealthy and insecure in their personal relationships. Anthropomorphism refers to the attribution of human-like characteristics, motivations, or mental states to nonhuman entities (for a review, see Epley, Waytz, and Cacioppo 2007). From gadgets to brands, people frequently treat nonhuman agents as human-like. Although anthropomorphized objects may seem like inferior relationship partners because they lack human interaction, research has shown that engaging with anthropomorphized objects can not only help people cope with unmet social needs (Chen, Wan, and Levy 2017; Mourey, Olson, and Yoon 2017), but also, some people may actually prefer relationships with objects precisely because they do not require human intimacy (Price and Arnould 1999; Thomson and Johnson 2006; Whelan et al. 2016).