10 Explanations For Those Strange Things You Do All The Time

Humans have a real habit of anthropomorphising the world around us. Some things get it worse than others - we almost always imagine human attributes in animals, particularly our pets. Don't feel bad about it, your pets do it too; your cat basically thinks that you're a big, weird, hairless cat.

This habit goes beyond the land of the living though, as we also have a propensity to project human feelings and emotions onto inanimate objects. This sounds mental on paper, but if you've ever felt bad about putting an item back on the shelves, throwing a piece of furniture away or if you saw the shocked face on the chair pictured above, then you've anthropomorphised an inanimate object.

The "shocked chair" effect comes from our propensity to see human faces in patterns. Researchers have found that we are also more likely to anthropomorphise something if it behaves unpredictably. One study found that toddlers were more likely to treat a robot as a human playmate if its movements were difficult to predict - they would touch it, engage with it and even put a blanket over it when it lay down to "sleep" (aww). If the robot's movements were repetitive, then they would quickly lose interest and ignore it.

Apologising for bumping into furniture is a little to do with this. The coffee table seemingly leaping into your path for you to walk into feels like fairly unpredictable behaviour after all. This is mixed with our societal emphasis on the importance of apologising and our instinct for conflict-avoidance. This is probably the same reason why you apologise when someone walks into you.

Plus, you know, it's just goddamn polite, even if it is just a coffee table.