But even without gadgets that understand our spoken commands, research suggests that, as bizarre as it sounds, under certain circumstances, people regularly ascribe human traits to everyday objects.
Now that the first flush of his anger had paled he was disinclined to ascribe to her more than an indiscreet friendship with Wildeve, for there had not appeared in her manner the signs of dishonour.
These symbols were created in what I consider to be a very bottom-up manner: they were made by people for people and then shared for free among people to honor the higher power that they ascribed to.
The social scientists ascribe such thinking to the fact that a cold spell or heat wave prompts memories of other similar weather events and thus makes one more or less likely to believe in global warming at that moment.
" Familiar as the voice of the mind is to each, the highest merit we ascribe to Moses, Plato and Milton is that they set at naught books and traditions, and spoke not what men, but what they thought."
I suspect that most of them ascribe these books' unexpected success to unpredictable and deplorable lapses into good taste on the part of the reading public.
Pliny ascribes to the Emperor Nero the invention of the ice bucket, as a method of cooling wine without diluting it with ice that had been stored in pungent straw and cloth.
But as if perceiving this stratagem, Moby Dick, with that malicious intelligence ascribed to him, sidelingly transplanted himself, as it were, in an instant, shooting his pleated head lengthwise beneath the boat.
A related bias, the " well-travelled-road effect" , describes the tendency of people to ascribe shorter travelling times to familiar routes than is actually the case.
Most of the examples cited come out of South Korea, but there are more fatalities ascribed to fan death in South Korea every year than are pinned on game addiction.
On October 7th an open letter from a clutch of student groups at Harvard University vaguely described the " unfolding violence" in Israel without ascribing blame to Hamas.