Anthropomorphize means attributing human-like intelligence, reasoning, emotions, or thought processes to non-human entities—in this case, an animal.
When applied to the story of Clever Hans, it highlights a fundamental human tendency: we project our own cognitive patterns onto what we observe.
How It Functions in the Clever Hans?
Quotation from the book
The story of Clever Hans is compelling from many angles: the relationship between desire, illusion, and action, the business of spectacles, how we anthropomorphize the nonhuman, how biases emerge, and the politics of intelligence.
In the context of the story, anthropomorphism worked through a two-step illusion:
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The Projection: When Hans tapped his hoof five times in response to “What is 2 + 3?”, the audience and his owner assumed Hans was thinking like a human—interpreting symbols, performing arithmetic in his head, and choosing to communicate the sum.
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The Reality: Hans was actually exhibiting horse behavior—he was a master of reading body language, watching for tiny shifts in human posture, breathing, and eye movement to know when to stop tapping.
The passage pairs anthropomorphism with desire, illusion, and bias because people wanted to believe Hans had a human-like mind. His audience wasn’t just observing a horse; they were projecting their own mental world onto him, mistaking a sophisticated reaction to physical cues for human mathematical reasoning.
Why This Matters Today for AI?
This line in the text remains particularly relevant because anthropomorphism is the exact same lens through which we often view modern artificial intelligence:
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When a Large Language Model uses words like “I think”, “I feel”, or “I understand”, users naturally anthropomorphize it—assuming the system possesses human awareness or intent.
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Just as with Clever Hans, the output looks remarkably human on the surface, making it easy to overlook the non-human mechanism (statistical pattern matching and loss minimization) running underneath.
Reference
Crawford, K. (2021). Atlas of AI: Power, politics, and the planetary costs of artificial intelligence. Yale University Press.