Anthropomorphism also needs to be distinguished from anthropocentrism. In its most general sense, anthropocentrism refers to a bias that leads us to consider our own species as the center of the universe. It’s the tendency to think that, given that we are the most important thing from our perspective, we must be the most important thing in general.
Anthropocentrism can manifest in different ways depending on the context. Most of our cities, for instance, follow an anthropocentric urban planning, for they systematically ignore the many nonhuman species with whom we share a space; not just our pets (which are for the most part not massively taken into account either), but the thousands of wild species that inhabit and are adapted to the urban environment, as is the case of rats, cockroaches, pigeons, sparrows, squirrels, racoons, etc.
In science, anthropocentrism also manifests in various ways. Although according to its popular image science offers objective facts about the world, the truth is that this is an activity that is carried out by humans, and as such it is also a target for our biases and is heavily influenced by our values. The topics that we decide to study, the ones that have the greater chances of getting published or receiving funding, are not random, but rather obey our human interests. For this reason, the relevance of studying the mind and behavior of animals is often justified with reference to some human value, like our interest in uncovering the evolutionary origin of our psychological capacities or what distinguishes our mind from that of the remaining species.
Comparative thanatology cannot escape the influence of our human values either. In this discipline, the study of animals’ behavior and reactions surrounding death is often justified by an appeal to the importance of discovering the evolutionary origin of our own funerary practices and attitudes toward death. Even though this is of legitimate interest, it’s important to point out that a question doesn’t necessarily become more interesting when it can be explicitly related to us and our values. Perhaps you, the person reading this, find the question of how animals experience and understand death fascinating in and of itself, independently of what it can tell us about ourselves. If that is the case, welcome to the club.
In addition, we must remember that the study of other animals’ behavior doesn’t t have to give us clues about the evolution of our own capacities, even in the case of closely related species, such as the other great apes. Chimpanzees, bonobos, orangutans, and gorillas are not “less evolved” humans. They are species with whom we share common ancestors, but at no point in our evolutionary past were we chimpanzees, bonobos, orangutans, or gorillas. Consequently, even though studying them can give us some answers about our own evolution, they are not a direct window into our evolutionary history.
Anthropocentrism is a bias that leads us to believe that we are the center of the universe, but it also works like a pair of innate blinkers that prevent us from seeing beyond our own perspective. This anthropocentrism is implicit in a great deal of studies in comparative psychology, which don’t just aim to answer questions with our interests in mind, but also often follow methodologies that highlight the difficulties we have in abandoning our sapiens way of seeing the world. – Playing Possum: How Animals Understand Death by Susana Monsó