Anthropocentric Thinking

Anthropocentric thinking, in cognitive psychology, is the tendency to reason about an unfamiliar biological species or process by analogy to humans, treating human biology and behavior as the default template for understanding other living things. The reasoning strategy can produce systematic misconceptions, such as assuming that death is universally undesirable for every organism, when in some species and ecological contexts death serves an essential function at the level of the cell or the ecosystem. Research finds that anthropocentric thinking is not present from birth but emerges as an acquired way of reasoning between roughly three and five years of age, and that children raised in rural environments, who have more direct familiarity with a variety of species, use it less than children raised in urban settings. Indigenous children from the Americas studied by researchers showed especially little anthropocentric thinking, instead reasoning about other organisms in terms of their perceived taxonomic similarities and their ecological relationships to one another.