[News] Why we personify threatening events

[FRIDAY THE 13]

 

How do you picture a menace that creeps into your home unannounced and takes your loved ones?

In plague-infested Europe, the answer was the skeletal, hooded figure that we have come to know as the Grim Reaper. He first emerged in the 14th Century, during the time of the Black Death, as wave after wave of the infection (caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis) swept across the continent and killed half its population.

The exact form of this macabre being may vary from country to country – "Death" may be young or old, male or female, dressed in white or black – but most folklores across history represent illness and death in a human form.

Following the scientific Enlightenment, you might think we would avoid personifying natural phenomena and imbuing them with conscious intent. Yet a quick look at the imagery people used to describe Covid-19 suggests otherwise, with many commentators describing the virus if it had the conscious intention to destroy humanity. Cartoons depicted the virus with arms, legs and an evil grin, while US President Donald Trump spoke of it as "tough and smart". Some scientists have even started giving the different variants nicknames inspired by mythology.

Our responses to extreme weather reveal the same tendency. We give hurricanes and storms the same names we might give our children, and describe their actions in the humanising language of wrath and vengeance. We can even see it in our angry reactions to IT issues – every time we curse our computers or cajole our smartphones, we are demonstrating the automatic urge to anthropomorphise inanimate objects.

According to recent scientific research, our penchant for personification is a natural human reaction to unpredictable event, and while it is often harmless, it can sometimes lead us to underplay the real risks of the situation. It all depends on the specific characters that we create and the features we give them.

Loved-up triangles

The foundations of this scientific theory can be traced to the Scottish philosopher David Hume. "There is a universal tendency among mankind to consider all beings like themselves, and to transfer to every object, those qualities, with which they are familiarly acquaintance, and of which they are intimately conscious," he wrote in The Natural History of Religion, published in 1757. "We find human faces in the moon, armies in the clouds; and by a natural propensity, if not corrected by experience and reflection, ascribe malice and good will to everything that hurts or pleases us."

 

link : https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20230914-why-we-personify-threatening-events