Abstract
Piaget suggests that animistic thinking is a pervasive feature of children's cognition. To test this notion, 4- to 8-year-old children were shown several inanimate objects and asked to pick those which perform activities characteristic of living organisms. These activities were typified by six verbs: “eat,” “sleep,” “breathe,” “grow,” “die,”, and “be alive.” Fifty percent of the younger children responded animistically, by misattributing life processes to inanimate objects, but only 18% of their total responses were animistic. Twenty percent of the older children responded animistically, but only 20% of their responses were animistic. In Experiment II, children were shown drawings singly and asked if the object could perform activities named by one of the six verbs. Results were similar to those of Experiment I but with somewhat less animism. Experiment III required children to spontaneously name things that are alive. There were no animistic responses. It was concluded that animistic thinking is not a genuine phenomenon but linguistic confusion elicited by novel objects and unfamiliar words.
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This work was supported by NSF Grant GB 23083.
A portion of the data of Experiment I constituted a Bachelor Honors Thesis conducted by the first author under the direction of the second and submitted to Florida State University. These data were presented at the meeting of the Southeastern Psychological Association, New Orleans, April 1973.
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Holland, V.M., Rohrman, N.L. Distribution of the feature [+animate] in the lexicon of the child. J Psycholinguist Res 8, 367–378 (1979). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01067140
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01067140