Take a class in animal behavior and you’ll probably receive a warning: Beware of anthropomorphism. Explaining animals in terms of human motivations, emotions, or mental characteristics invites ...

As someone who has studied and written about the cognitive and emotional lives of nonhuman animals (animals) for many decades, I've read various accounts about the good, the bad, and the ugly of ...

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, ...

In the late 19th century, a strange debate raged in the journal Nature about the “reputed suicide of scorpions”. They had been seen stinging themselves in the head and deliberately self-destructing ...