The brain has the ability to differentiate action from event. That is - a happening that results from an intention of an agent (a stone thrown by someone), and something that happens without anyone intending it (a rock rolling from a mountain). This knowledge is based on the ToM (Theory of Mind) knowledge, that the other is another individual with the ability to act on her own knowledge. Many animals have a ToM, and many differentiate action from event.
This recognition has a very obvious advantage in survival: if someone throws a stone at me, I should realize that there is an enemy around who should be faced (fight), avoided (flight), or tricked away (freeze). It is also obvious that the bias should be defaulted as action, that is, one is better off mistaking a happening for an action that an event, because if we mistakenly think the stone was an action, i.e. thrown by an enemy, all we loose is some unnecessary fight movements, while if we mistake it for an event we might loose our life.
The bias to over-assign TOM to things comes to the fore very often in narratives. We find it in modern and ancient stories, in our everyday speech, and we make a point of telling it to our children. It is surprising how ofter we find in children books inanimate objects that speak, feel, and interact among themselves and with animals or humans. If asked, we tend to say that it is 'natural' for the children to think of objects as minded-entities, but this, in fact, is not true. Children, as many other mammals, have the natural ability to differentiate objects and people.
What is it, then, that we do when we present the inanimate world to our children as a "human(ized) society"?
It is an act of semiosis, of endowing perception with meaning. By personifying a tree, a stone, or a cat, we signal to our children that these are important, as important as humans. This is called 'costly signaling', and it makes sure our children know to include these object in their semiosphere, as they are also embedded in ours. We teach them to recognize and be attendant to trees and animals, sea, wind, and sun.
(picture from: http://www.dumbening.com/RSS/7-1-07.html)
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