Denée Buchko

So just conceptually, if this is the way we always refer to them and we don't do that for other animals, they're different and different sometimes means scary.

The other thing is using negative language towards these animals.

slimy, slithering fangs, things like this.

Exactly.

Exactly.

Yeah.

So one of the things that we saw in the study that we did is that parents did at least 50%, around 50% of parents tended to say at least one negative thing about snakes when they were looking at that picture book.

And these negative statements about snakes do influence how children think about them, which is another finding.

So speaking about them negatively, oh, that one might bite you, even though you're looking at a picture.

Speaking about them in objectifying ways, ways that also deny them any kind of just even basic mental states like, oh, she's hungry or she's afraid.

So let's talk about what you did with kids to get them to be not scared of them.

You sort of anthropomorphize snakes.

You wrote children's books that, you know, gave them a personhood and gave them positive narratives, things like this.

So yes, anthropomorphism in a very mild sense, because we're dealing with a still very biologically accurate book.

So the book doesn't attribute any uniquely, exclusively human properties.

for snakes, but it does make the message, according to lots of research, a little bit easier to digest and kind of integrate.

So rather than saying, the snake woke up, the snake drank water, the snake hid under a rock, we would say, she woke up, she was thirsty, she found some water, she was afraid, so she hid under a rock.

Nothing super anthropomorphic, just a different way of talking with them, the way we usually talk about other animals.

And when you did that, what did you find children ended up feeling about snakes?

So when we use language like this, if we avoid negative language, if we use non-objectifying language, we find that children are much more likely to think about snakes as being similar to other animals, where if we don't have these kinds of interventions, they tend to think about snakes as being very different from other animals.