Anthropomorphize

Developmental perspective

Children appear to anthropomorphize and use egocentric reasoning from an early age and use it more frequently than adults. Examples of this are describing a storm cloud as "angry" or drawing flowers with faces. This penchant for anthropomorphism is likely because children have acquired vast amounts of socialization, but not as much experience with specific non-human entities, so thus they have less developed alternative schemas for their environment. In contrast, autistic children may tend to describe anthropomorphized objects in purely mechanical terms (that is, in terms of what they do) because they have difficulties with theory of mind (ToM) according to past research. A 2018 study has shown that autistic people are more prone to object personification, suggesting that autistic empathy and ToM may be not only more complex but also more all-encompassing. The double empathy problem challenges the notion that autistic people have difficulties with ToM.