Does Cognitive Load Affect Explicit Anthropomorphism?

People tend to attribute human traits to non-human entities, such as animals, God or robots. This tendency, referred to as anthropomorphism, is seen as a natural, automatic inclination. Within the framework of Dual Process Theories, some researchers have proposed a model of anthropomorphism that distinguishes between implicit and explicit processes. This model states that implicit anthropomorphism is a result of Type 1, intuitive processing, while explicit anthropomorphism is a result of Type 2, deliberative processing. The results obtained so far seem to corroborate this model. Although perfectly well founded, we believe that this model’s clear separation between indirect measures – intended to measure implicit anthropomorphism – and direct measures – intended to measure explicit anthropomorphism – is a questionable premise from both a theoretical and a practical point of view. Contrary to these previous studies, we thus recommend testing the automaticity of anthropomorphism toward robots by manipulating the concurrent cognitive load while participants give their explicit attributions. Our hypotheses are that, since we believe anthropomorphism to be an automatic and implicit process, cognitive load will either (i) lead to an increase of the anthropomorphism attributions or (ii) result in an absence of difference between the different condition of load, proving that Type 2 processes are pointless in the anthropomorphizing course. We discuss and propose a paradigm aimed at testing our hypothesis.