【問題１】
次の英文は John Bradshaw による The Animals Among Us (2017年) に基づいている。これを読んで以下の設問に答えなさい。
(I) ( 1 ) に入るもっとも適切な語を下から選び,記号で答えなさい。
(A) deliberate
(B) logical
(C) psychological
(D) putative
(II) 下線部( 2 )を it の内容がわかるように,日本語に訳しなさい。
(III) 下線部 ( 3 ) such deliberate choices が示す内容を35字以内の日本語で説明しなさい。
(IV) 下線部( 4 ) laziness が示す内容を40字以内の日本語で説明しなさい。
(V) 下線部( 5 )を日本語に訳しなさい。
(VI) 下線部( 6 ) it が示す語を下から選び,記号で答えなさい。
(ア) expression
(イ) psychological framework
(ウ) projection
(エ) uncertainty
(VII-A) 下の選択肢の中から,「強い擬人化」の例として最適なものをひとつ選び, 記号で答えなさい。
(a) The computer saved my data.
(b) The printer adamantly refused to cooperate.
(c) The shredder chewed up my documents.
(d) The TV suddenly died yesterday.
(VII-B) VII-A の答えにいたった理由を,本文中で説明される「弱い擬人化」と「強い擬人化」の差にもとづき,100字以上120字以内の日本語で説明しなさい。
(VIII) 次の日本語を英語に訳しなさい。
少し考えれば作り事だとわかるのだが,われわれは心地よい物語を信じてしまう傾向がある。
As a ubiquitous feature of modern life that dates back to the dawn of our species, pet-keeping must have roots in the workings of our brains. And yet we have been telling ourselves a different story. Over the past half-century or so, scientists have devoted much effort to examining instead the ( 1 ) benefits of pet ownership: alleviating stress, extending our lifespans, healing those with disabilities, making our children kinder people, filling the gaps in our ever-shrinking families. Many of these benefits have proved largely imaginary, or at least far less substantial than promised. So why, then, do many of us feel the urge to keep dogs and cats at all? And why are so many of us inclined to believe that these animals can have such profound effects on our well-being?
The answers to these questions must lie in biases intrinsic to our psychology, and as a biologist by training, I'm inclined to seek evolutionary explanations for them. We react to animals quite differently from how we respond to other features of our environment, and despite a great deal of overlap in the nature of our interactions with animals and with people, there are differences—some obvious, others subtle. A conversation with a cat or a dog is far more one-sided than one with a person, which may indeed be part of its appeal: ( 2 ) it allows the owner to imagine the “unconditional support” that the pet supposedly provides.
Why do we project so much onto our pets? We have a strong tendency to invoke human thoughts and feelings in all kinds of situations—not just those involving animals—where there's no immediate evidence that another human mind is actually involved. This “anthropomorphism” is evidently a part of human nature, and although it probably did not evolve specifically so that we might share our lives with animals, nowadays it probably finds its most common expression in our relationships with pets.
Anthropomorphism appears to be a by-product of the uniquely human habit of guessing what other people are thinking. When we do so, we make the reasonable assumption that they have minds like ours. When trying to guess an animal's intentions, we tend to fall back on the same mechanisms, unless we know the animal well and can base our predictions on its behavior in similar situations in the past. We anthropomorphize animals, and most of the time the process works well enough, even though we know that their worlds are not identical to our own and therefore their thoughts and motivations must differ in some ways from ours. In more superstitious times, we also imagined that an assortment of important yet (at that time) unpredictable entities had minds and intentions: the sea, the weather, the seasons. But today our pets are the chief target of our instinctive attribution of humanlike thought processes to anything and everything that appears to have a mind of its own.
In August 2011, gangs rampaged through the streets of the Tottenham area of London, looting shops and setting fire to commercial buildings. “Copycat” riots instantly sprung up in other parts of the capital and also in major cities such as Birmingham, Nottingham, Bristol, Lincoln, and Manchester. Five civilians died, and many were injured; over several days almost two hundred police officers, as well as five police dogs, were wounded during the struggle to contain the rioters. One of those dogs was subsequently awarded a medal from a UK-based charity that provides free veterinary care for low-income pet owners. Ten police horses also received identical medals. Even cats occasionally receive recognition: in 2015 the Los Angeles Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals handed its annual “Hero Dog” award to Tara (a cat) who appeared (on video) to have stopped a dog from attacking a child innocently riding his bike in his front yard.
Can animals really be “heroes," or are their seeming heroics entirely a figment of our imagination? Citing animals for bravery evidently incorporates the kind of feel-good factor that animal charities like, and if it helps them raise funds for animal welfare, then perhaps there's no harm done. However, this degree of personification of animals has risks—most significantly, that the general public will unwittingly be persuaded that their pets think just like humans do. Surely the use of the word “heroism” implies that the animal has consciously decided to take a brave course of action with the potential for injury and rejected a cowardly but safe alternative. Yet none of the recent research into how dogs' (or cats') minds work has so much as suggested that they might be able to make ( 3 ) such deliberate choices. They appear to live almost entirely in the present, reacting to events as they unfold, never stopping to reflect on which course of action might be the safest. Tara was probably just a feisty cat reacting instinctively to the snarling of the neighbor's dog. In the riots, the police dog was doing what he'd been trained to do (evidently, very well), and very sadly he was seriously injured as a consequence. If this dog had understood that he had alternatives—either grab a rioter and have his skull staved in with a brick or bark ferociously from around the edge of his handler's riot shield—which do you think he'd have chosen?
Routinely—and often without any conscious thought—we speak of animals as if their brains worked the same way as ours. This habit stems from deep within our psyches. We speak this way equally about animals that are “part of the family” and those we have never met; we also apply similar thinking to anything around us that appears to have some kind of life of its own-robots, computers, even the weather. This could reflect ( 4 ) laziness on our part, compounded by a dearth of language specific to the description of animal minds. We call pets “family” because we lack an alternative word.
The legend of Greyfriars Bobby shows just how prepared people are to believe that “man's best friend” is almost human. The story goes that Bobby, a terrier, refused to leave the Edinburgh grave of his former master-a policeman called John Gray-for no less than fourteen years. In 1873, the year after Bobby (supposedly) died, a statue and fountain were erected in his honor, both of which stand to this day. The inscription reads, “A tribute to the affectionate fidelity of Greyfriars Bobby. In 1858 this faithful dog followed the remains of his master to Greyfriars Churchyard and lingered near the spot until his death in 1872.” It now seems likely that “Bobby” was in fact a stray belonging to the curator of the cemetery, who fabricated the story in collusion with the owner of a local hostelry to attract and then profit from sentimental tourists; indeed, ( 5 ) this ploy was so successful that when the original “Bobby” died after nine years, a similar dog was substituted to keep the scam going for a further five.
Our projection of minds onto animals and inanimate objects alike is the expression of a psychological framework that we evolved to cope with uncertainty in the many forms ( 6 ) it presents itself: what an animal is going to do next, when the next storm will arrive, or whether the winter will ever end. Before science, it was our best way of dealing with everything unpredictable and uncontrollable. According to one theory, it even gave rise to belief in the supernatural and hence triggered superstition and, subsequently, religious belief. Hence, while not unique to our dealings with pets, anthropomorphism is an essential component of how we relate to them.
We routinely and almost without thinking speak about the world around us as if it had thoughts, feelings, and intentions, even when a moment's reflection might easily persuade us that this is implausible. Broadly grouped under the umbrella (and tongue-twisting) rubric of “anthropomorphisms,” such self-evident errors go virtually unnoticed in everyday life. Most of us have at some time begged our cars to start on a cold, wet morning, even though a nagging voice in the back of our minds reminds that the car is blameless; rather, we should have taken the trouble to replace the battery before winter set in. When an office computer slows to a crawl or crashes, we castigate it shamelessly for its errant ways, even in front of our co-workers.
Other times we may ascribe words or emotions to the “minds” of machines simply due to the biases embedded in our language. Such so-called “weak” anthropomorphism occurs when we wish to offload responsibility for our actions onto some inanimate object, but we don't expect the object to talk back. It may make us feel better to shout at our computer when it's just “lost” a file that we neglected to back up, but we don't for a minute think that we have hurt its feelings. Alternatively, we may simply be using everyday language to describe something efficiently, which we expect other people to understand because we know that their imaginations work roughly the same way as ours do.
The “strong” form of anthropomorphism occurs when we automatically ascribe to objects or animals minds of their own. This is also highly instinctive, triggered by more or less hardwired mechanisms in our brains. For example, anything that looks remotely like a face immediately grabs our attention, activating a specialized area in the visual part of our brain: the fusiform face area. But it takes more than a pair of eyes and a mouth to convince our brains that something is alive. That requires movement particularly movement that appears purposeful. The classic 1944 experiments of Fritz Heider and Marianne Simmel perhaps awoke science to this phenomenon for the first time. They showed their subjects short animated films that depicted simple geometric shapes (triangles, circles, and squares) interacting in apparently intentional ways. For example, one person described the sequence shown as follows: “The large triangle chases the small triangle while the circle watches nervously from the door of the house,” imputing both intention and emotion to simple geometric shapes that could not possibly beget either. This description represents an anthropomorphic use of language-not a serious attribution of human thoughts and feelings to objects in a film. Perhaps the way an object moves sometimes parallels the way people behave, allowing us to describe its actions using words that we can assume others will understand or that allow us to be more concise.
Thus, our anthropomorphism of animals is a result of how our brains are constructed. We have every reason to suppose that our ancestors were imputing human thoughts to the beasts around them ever since our species first evolved. Although perhaps exaggerated by mawkish indulgence, anthropomorphism is not merely the product of sentiment. Moreover, its associated meaning-making has made pet keeping possible: had we not been inclined to imbue our pets' minds and actions with human-like characteristics, we would have had no other way of understanding them, since scientific understanding of cats' and dogs' minds has only come about recently and is still not universally appreciated. It is difficult to see how, without anthropomorphism, a bond between humans and their animal companions could have arisen.
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