alt Hacker NewsI'll stop personifying objects when they stop having personalities!
The abstract seems to suggest that object personification is common with people who don't have autism too, perhaps less common than with people that have autism. This more or less tracks with my intuition that object personification is normal. People do it all the time with ships, cars, guns, computers, or whatever other machines they work with, whatever is important to them and complex enough to have a personality of its own.
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There's definitely some bias around personification. Several religions and cultures place importance on personification and/or anthropomorphism.
Perhaps like auditory hallucinations, the experience can be distressing _or not_ and we can observe that between different cultures.
I appreciate that the abstract highlighted where personification is unhelpful.
Same here, feels like a pretty normal trait, both my kids have this with their favorite toys (I had the same as well) and nowadays I do have attachment to some of my stuff, specially my kitchen utensils/devices, my kitchen aid mixer (10 years old now) even has a name.
From the summary it feels like the problem is more related to the fact they have more distressing events, I don't think i've had any recently but i can think of one or two when i was a kid and lot favorite toys.