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Pictures and videos of all sorts of animals regularly go viral these days because people connect with the apparent joy, friendship and playfulness of these animals. Unfortunately, the initial enthusiasm of these posts is often squashed by someone rightly noting that the animal’s reaction is not joy or pleasure, but fear, anger or pain.

The reason we often get cases like this wrong is that we interpret the emotional content of many behaviors automatically and unconsciously. This is a version of anthropomorphism: interpreting animals as we would interpret another human. The standard view has been that anthropomorphism is primarily an error of overestimating the intelligence of animals. In recent decades, many authors have pushed back against this attitude towards anthropomorphism, arguing animals are a lot like us and that many “anthropomorphic” claims about animals are actually true.

Instead of getting caught in a black-and-white debate, however, I want a more complicated, informed discussion of competing ideas. Once we agree that animals do, in fact, have emotions, we can acknowledge that the anthropomorphic mistake is not seeing emotion where there is none—it is seeing the wrong emotion.

Each of us has a set of perceptual, emotional and cognitive capacities that allow us to engage and understand one another socially. These capacities help guide and structure all sorts of interactions, and we are generally not even aware we are using them. They are generally, but not perfectly, tuned for human interaction. Things can get messy, though, when we use them to interpret animals. Perhaps the best-studied version of this is the primate “grin” (灵长类动物的咧嘴笑). The animal is not happy, it turns out. The exact signaling function varies by species, but it usually signals something more like fear or anxiety, often by a submissive individual in a tense social situation. This is, in fact, anthropomorphism, because you are interpreting an animal’s behavior in the same way we would interpret human behavior. This kind of anthropomorphism is a form of cognitive bias (偏见) resulting from shortcuts taken by our reasoning processes, usually without our awareness.

We should approach the topic of anthropomorphism from the angle of bias. Traditionally, assumptions about how and when people anthropomorphise have been so fixed that the psychology did not seem worth investigating. Slightly different attitudes can be found. For example, even though they advocate for anthropomorphic views of animals, the zoologists Jesús Rivas and Gordon Burghardt memorably note that it can be tricky: “Anthropomorphism comes in many forms and can catch you off guard!” While the recognition of “many forms” is progress, it makes the need for evidence-based research only more pressing. By focusing on implicit (隐性的) anthropomorphism, we shift attention from debating specific “humanlike” features to examining the deeper psychological mechanisms that make anthropomorphism so slippery. This, I believe, is the most challenging and most significant dimension of the problem.