Anthropocentrism - Born Or Made?

In the book, and in many of my recent posts, I have ground on about our innate human propensity for attributing human cognition to animals - anthropomorphism - and the way it bedevils comparative cognitive research. But where does such an ingrained cognitive bias come from? Are we born with it, or do we acquire it during child development? Most psychologists have assumed that anthropocentrism - favouring a human vantage point when it comes to comparing us to the animals and them to us - is a default position hardwired into babies and thence young children, but recent research, reported here, by a team of scientists from Northwestern University, challenges that view. They maintain that 3 year- olds do not have this anthropocentric bias, but, that by the time URBAN children are 5+, they do. The conclusion is that anthropocentrism is thrust upon developing children by the attitudes they are surrounded by as they grow up, and the biased way animal behaviour is represented in the media - tv programmes and kiddies books etc.