The Compulsion to Assign Personality to Unreliable Objects

There is a kettle in a shared kitchen that takes exactly four minutes longer than it should. Everyone who uses it knows this. And yet, without any formal agreement, the people in that office have begun to speak about it with a kind of resigned affection — as though the kettle has made a decision, and they respect it for sticking to the decision. "That's just how it is," someone will say, with the tone usually reserved for an elderly relative who refuses to use a smartphone.

The kettle has not made a decision. The kettle has a faulty element.

Still, the pattern is worth examining. Humans extend personality to unreliable objects with a consistency that feels almost reflexive. The car that starts on the third try becomes stubborn. The laptop that freezes during presentations becomes anxious. The elevator that skips the fourth floor becomes, in some offices, genuinely mistrusted — not just avoided, but mistrusted, as though it is keeping something from everyone. Reliability is apparently the baseline expectation, and deviation from baseline reads as character.

This makes a certain kind of sense. Character, after all, is largely what we infer from behavior that surprises us. A person who always does exactly what is expected registers as neutral, a background presence. It is the unexpected behavior — the lateness, the sudden warmth, the refusal — that we build a portrait around. Objects that malfunction hand us exactly that: a pattern of unexpected behavior, repeated, nameable. The material for a story.

What is interesting is not the anthropomorphism itself, which has been documented thoroughly enough to feel almost settled. What is interesting is that the personality assigned is almost never hostile. Stubborn, yes. Temperamental, certainly. But rarely malicious. The kettle is not trying to ruin the morning. The car just needs a moment. There is a generosity in this interpretation that seems to exceed what the situation requires.

One possibility is that assigning benign personality to unreliable objects is a way of staying in relationship with something you cannot fix and have not replaced. Malice would demand a response. Temperament can be accommodated. You can work around temperament. You can even, if you are the kind of person who names your car, feel a small warmth toward it.

Another possibility, quieter and harder to examine: that people practice on objects. That the act of holding something complicated in mild, patient regard — something that fails you on a schedule, that cannot explain itself, that you keep returning to anyway — is rehearsal for something. What exactly, it is difficult to say. But the office kettle sits there every morning, slow and unchanged, and people keep filling it.

There may be something they are working out with it.

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