Anthropomorphism as Symbolic Interaction: The Demographics of Purgatory
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract In this chapter, I take a symbolic interactionist look at the anthropomorphic projections of 38 people in four large Canadian cities who report having encountered ghosts. As part of a larger project on perceived encounters with ghosts, I interviewed these people using audiotape, transcribed the interviews, and identified themes within them. Together, they mentioned 195 ghosts and described their appearances and actions. I identified anthropomorphic projections in four areas: (1) Physicality – pertaining to the bodies of the ghosts, (2) Relational – pertaining to kinship ties, e.g., mothers, fathers, grandmothers, (3) Rational – the ghosts' motivations and justifications, and (4) Affective – pertaining to the ghosts' emotions. These anthropomorphic projections were the respondents' efforts at sense making after having encountered what they believed to be phantasmal.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.022 | 0.004 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".