The number of devices you can talk to is multiplying—first it was your phone, then your car, and now you can boss around your appliances. Children are likely to grow up thinking everything is alive, or at least interactive. One app developer told The Washington that his son started talking to cup mats. But even without chatty devices, research suggests that under certain circumstances, people personify everyday products.

Sometimes we see things as human because we’re lonely. In one experiment, people who reported feeling isolated were more likely than others to attribute free will and consciousness to various devices. In turn, feeling being related to objects can reduce loneliness. When college students were reminded of a time they’d been excluded socially, they made it up by exaggerating their number of friends on social media - unless they were first given tasks that caused them to interact with their phone as if it had human qualities. The phone apparently stood in for real friends.

At other times, we personify products in an effort to understand them. One study found that three in four respondents shouted at their computer and the more their computer gave them problems, the more likely they were to report that it had “its own beliefs and desires”.

When we personify products, they become harder to cast off. After being asked to evaluate their car’s personality, people were less likely to say they intended to replace it soon. And personifying objects is associated with a tendency to hoard.

So how do people assign characteristics to an object? In part, we rely on looks. On humans, wide faces are associated with dominance. Similarly, people rated cars, clocks, and watches with wide faces as more dominant looking than narrow-faced ones and preferred them. An analysis of car sales in Germany found that cars with grilles that were upturned like smiles and headlights like narrowed eyes sold best. The purchasers saw these features as increasing a car’s friendliness and aggressiveness, respectively.

It’s little wonder so many companies use mascots to bring brands to life. A classification of 1,151 brand characters found symbols that were human or humanlike to be widespread: People were most popular, accounting for 21 percent of mascots, followed by birds, domesticated animals, wild animals, and various plants.

Personifying products and brands can backfire, however. When a coffee maker was personified in an ad (“I am Aroma” versus just “Aroma”), men, but not women, felt betrayed by increases in its price. Now that speech- enabled coffee makers are on the market, maybe the machines can sweet-talk their way back into men’s hearts.

Most of us marry creativity to our concept of self either we're "creative" or we aren't much of a middle ground. "I'm just not a creative person!” a frustrated student might say in art class, while another might blame her talent at painting for her difficulties in math, giving a comment such as, “I’m very right-brained."

Dr. Pillay, a tech entrepreneur and an assistant professor at Harvard University, has been challenging these ideas. He believes that the key to unlocking your creative potential is to ignore the traditional advice that urges you to “believe in yourself.” In fact, you should do the opposite: Believe you are someone else.

Dr. Pillay points to a 2016 study demonstrating the impact of stereotypes on one's behavior. The authors, educational psychologists Denis Dumas and Kevin Dunbar, divided their college student subjects into three groups, instructing the members of one to think of themselves as "romantic poets" and the members of another to imagine they were "serious librarians" (the third group was the control). The researchers then presented all the participants with ten ordinary objects, including a fork, a carrot, and a pair of pants, and asked them to come up with as many different uses as possible for each one. Those who were asked to imagine themselves as romantic poets came up with the widest range of ideas, whereas those in the serious-librarian group had the fewest. Meanwhile, the researchers found only small differences in students' creativity levels across academic majors.

These results suggest that creativity is not a fixed individual characteristic but a malleable product of context and perspective, as long as he or she feels like a creative person. Dr. Pillay argues that, besides identifying yourself as creative, taking the bold, creative step of imagining you are somebody else is even more powerful. So, wish you were more creative? Just pretend!

A new study has found that experiencing nature, such as taking a walk in a park or even just viewing photos of a natural setting, encourages healthier food choices.

“We found that exposure to nature increases the importance that people attach to health compared to taste or other properties when making food choices,” explained Maria Langlois, assistant professor at Southern Methodist University and first author of the study.

Gathering evidence from hundreds of participants from five different studies across three countries over seven years, Langlois examined the food choices made after both real-world and virtual experiences of nature. In the first study conducted in France, participants took a twenty-minute long walk through either a large green park or the city, taking photos along the way. Afterwards, they could choose what they wanted to eat from a snack buffet. Those who walked in nature ate healthier snacks compared to the urban city walkers.

But was it the nature or the photo that did the trick? The researchers moved online, and took on more participants. One group were shown a photo of a hotel room with a window view of a natural setting while the other group had a window view of an urban setting. A third control group had no window view — they had closed curtains. Those exposed to “nature” in this way were found to make healthier food choices compared to both the control and urban groups. “By including a control condition in our work, this research shows that it is not exposure to urban environments that is driving unhealthy food choices, but really exposure to natural environments that is driving healthier food choices,” said Langlois.

With almost 70% of the world’s population expected to live in urbanized areas by 2050, this research could provide urban planners important insight into the health implications of their designs. It is also hoped that highlighting benefits of nature may promote environmental conservation efforts as people realize, we need nature.