People dress pets like humans to feel in control

Washington, Mar 7 (ANI): People tend to name their pets and cars, because they feel more in control and connected, claims a psychologist.

Psychology researcher Adam Waytz of Harvard University, insists that people anthropomorphize, the act of attributing human traits to non-humans, to feel connected to environment.

As part of his study, Waytz and his team asked people to write essays describing everyday objects as if they were humanoid.

Meanwhile, another group were requested to describe the objects as objects.

Later, those who wrote the anthropomorphic essays seemed to better understand the objects than those who wrote straightforward pieces.

Waytz admitted that people could often feel disconnected with objects surrounding them.

"One way to make sense of it is to treat it like something familiar, which is the human form," Live Science quoted him, as saying.

He added: "We have this need to belong and to affiliate. When people are deprived of connections with other humans, they'll form connections with non-humans through anthropomorphism."

The study has been published in the February issue of the journal Current Directions in Psychological Science. (ANI)