A generation raised on Siri and Alexa does not just use technology. It befriends it. That instinct has a name – and it is reshaping how the world builds and sells everything.

At the start of Elizabeth Hobson’s career as an ecologist, she knew to stick to one rule: Never anthropomorphize the animals you study. For plenty of people, assigning human characteristics to another ...

Have you ever assigned personalities to your pets and explained their behaviors in terms of human motivations, such as imagining that a cat is being stubborn? The attribution of human characteristics, ...

It’s easier to relate to someone you have something in common with; that feeling of connection can turn strangers into friends. And if those strangers belong to an entirely different species, then ...

The complexity of animal behaviour naturally prompts us to use terms that are familiar from everyday descriptions of our own actions. Charles Darwin used mentalistic terms freely when describing, for ...