Personifying the impersonal
Do we ever take our mental shortcuts too far?
The human mind is surprisingly adept at finding faces in clouds, electrical sockets, cheese graters, rock formations — you name it, someone somewhere has probably convinced themselves of seeing a face that wasn’t truly there.
It’s a well-documented phenomenon called ‘pareidolia,’ and it’s likely an evolutionary relic from our ancient days — when the difference between a friendly face and a not-friendly face could easily be life or death. Better to err on the side of caution.
As a result, we’ve become incredibly sensitive to that oh-so-meaningful positioning of eyes, nose, and mouth in just about any context.
And it goes even deeper than that. If the “mouth” is slightly upturned, the thing is happy. If the “eyes” tip downward, the thing is sad. Without trying, we can intuit deep, human feeling from a lifeless rock or a stray bit of cloud.
Often, we don’t even need the illusion of a face to recognize something of ourselves in admittedly mindless everyday objects. There’s an interesting (and now, relatively old) experiment where participants watched a video of a circle and triangle moving around the screen with a larger triangle moving among them.
It’s a simple video of drifting geometric shapes — and yet, the people viewing it saw a story with clearly defined characters. They saw a triangle with cruel intentions, a smaller circle and triangle reacting out of fear. The shapes were no longer shapes, but human-like entities with very human-like minds.
Unboxing the mystery of another’s mind
While fascinating in this foreign context, this tendency is nothing new. It’s a capability that we develop early in life (around two years old) that lets us peek into others’ minds, take a guess at their thoughts, and then predict how they might behave.
We hone this “theory of mind” capability over time — so thoroughly that we can develop deep relationships and form complex organizations that fundamentally depend on a shared understanding of what it’s like to be a person.
We know that smiles suggest happiness, tears sadness. We know generally how people will react to weddings, promotions, deaths, and divorces. We can learn a handful of details about a person and have a pretty good sense of how they might be feeling.
And thanks to these pseudo-mind-reading powers, we can navigate many social situations unscathed, avoiding pitfalls and embracing good moments — because we can, in a way, predict other people’s behavior. Or at least explain it pretty well.
Without our tendency to find facial expressions and intentions and agency and goal-oriented behavior in the world around us, we’d be at a loss to explain the cacophony of human activity that surrounds us at any moment. We couldn’t parse through it and predict anything meaningful. We’d be fully at the mercy of our precarious environments.
Personification: The next level
And so, over time, as the world has gotten more and more complex, these rudimentary tendencies have adapted with us. We’ve learned to rely on them in novel situations.
In a strange and parochial way, we’ve begun to view entire human organizations as agents with the capacity for thought, intention, and goal-directed action: business corporations, national governments, universities, sports teams.
Just as seamlessly as we’ve attributed agency to the simplest geometric shapes, we’ve done the same to our world’s most complicated entities. Without much thought, we start to see that government as its own independent agent, capable of complex thought and action.
Even more subtly, we view that government not as an ever-changing conglomeration of individuals with varying levels of interest, dedication, experience, and talent, but as a unified whole that represents an entire territory’s worth of even more diverse individuals.
It’s this part that’s so dangerous — this increasingly dismissive heuristic of assuming that an entity’s temporary representatives are the thing itself. As humans, we have a very strong and overpowering urge to personify the things around us so that we can make sense of their strange and irregular behavior.
Why would that company decide to do that? The government is getting crazy. These thoughts stem from our primordial impulse to view organizations of people as singular, integrated wholes that persist over time.
But that’s not at all how these organizations work. The people that make them up are shifting on a day-to-day basis; the leadership that reigns over them, while somewhat more stable, is still awfully capricious. They come and go — land a better job offer, resign due to ignominy, get forced out by revolts.
In the modern era, where there’s little loyalty to one’s profession or place of work, this coming-and-going can be particularly disheartening. Your beloved sports team or business or school is simply a product of whichever people happen to make it up at that moment. Poor leadership can run your favorite group into the ground, while strong leadership can take it to the sky — and often, that trajectory has nothing to do with the thing itself.
The entity that we’ve unconsciously convinced ourselves is a single, personified thing is nothing more than an illusion — a trick of effective brand marketing. The magical thinking part of us wants to believe in some fundamental essence that belongs exclusively to our favorite sports team or company — but, eventually, we come to realize it just isn’t there. Essence is simply a convincing illusion.
In the words of Steven Pinker, “We’re intuitive essentialists, sensing that living things contain an invisible essence or lifeblood that gives them their form and powers.” It doesn’t take much to extend this intuition to the big, ungainly structures that our tired minds distill down to a single, roll-off-the-tongue brand name. How else can you truly describe your favorite sports team or alma mater?
These persistent illusions show us just how powerful our concepts of identity and selfhood and intrinsic essence are to us. We parse the world with an eye for fellow beings — whether in the clouds or in the ever-changing conglomeration of a government. This is simply how we make sense of the chaos that surrounds us at any given moment.
Lest this all sound overly abstract, our intuitive mental jumps can quickly become all too consequential. The controversial Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission Supreme Court decision in the U.S. ultimately came down to how we conceive of entities like major corporations — how much individual agency we’re willing to grant them when it comes to election campaign donations.
And the result matched our evolved intuition: an organization ought to have the right to express its viewpoints, to act on its beliefs, to enjoy the right to free speech. A decision with large-scale social and political impacts.
When we view an entity as a personified being, have we gone too far? Are we still celebrating and reprimanding the appropriate players? Or is this another of our evolutionary legacies run amok? Are we simply spotting faces in the passing clouds?
While personification may seem harmless or silly, it depends on a less rational, more primal mental process when taken to these extremes. It primes us to be dismissive and arrogant — or blindly loving and loyal — because we fail to see the whole picture. We see only its essence.
When we conflate human agency with an entity’s obscure “essence,” we can lead ourselves astray. Organizations are loose, flexible things. When you try to pin them down, you’ll likely find that you’re looking at a different thing.
We do ourselves a favor when we bypass those pesky, engrained shortcuts and accept things for what they really are.
And thus, we’re left with the perennial and extremely challenging task of taking all the mental stuff we’ve inherited and inspecting it closely under the light. Even when it hurts or feels counterintuitive or wears away our nostalgia or leaves us a little flat and disillusioned.
Because that’s the gift and the curse of being human: the awareness to precisely know our faults without the precise tools to fix them.
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Love this topic. I always see faces on cars but my husband doesn't 😄
That's actually in a place called 野柳 (Yeliu), it's more like the exposed area of a little fishing town. Beautiful geology there, windy. I have a lot of pictures of it. The face is real!