In animal intelligence studies, researchers have observed that species are more keen to learn from members of their own kind. There's a great chapter in Frans de Waal's "Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?"[0] which discusses the difference between wolves and dogs. Many people believe dogs are smarter than wolves because they are more keen to listen/observe humans. However when the tests are arranged so that wolves can learn from other wolves it becomes clear that wolves are far more intelligent. It's a matter of wolves not caring a bit about humans. de Waal goes on to discuss similar testing biases inherent in comparing chimpanzees and human children, with human children getting a one-up on chimps because the testing administrators are members of their own species.

If you're interested in diving into the motivation behind storytelling and how it effects us, I'd recommend reading The Storytelling Animal by Jonathan Gottschall[1]. It's one of the most approachable book on the subject.

[0] Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are by Frans de Waal: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/oct/06/are-we-smart-e...

[1] The Storytelling Animal by Jonathan Gottschall: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/05/books/review/the-storytell...

Here are some advantages animal characters can have:

They provide enough psychological distance to allow dangerous situations or bad things to happen.

They allow stereotypes more easily without creating human prejudice.

So as the article supports, human characters may provide more immediate context, but animal characters probably allow more complex/difficult situations to be explored.

I may be missing it, but where is the discussion of blinding? If the person reading the story is the one who gives directions about sharing, then how do we know whether or not the effect was due to the experimenter?

The original journal publication is at least linked in the article [1]

but this is a very fundamental experimental design concept. I don't understand how this experiment can be run this way, let alone reviewed by peers and published.

1. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/desc.12590/epdf?s...

It's harder when using humans, though. How do you depict a slow person, two enemies etc? With animals, the turtle and the hare you instantly know have a difference in speed. The mouse removing something from the lions paw portraits two natural enemies etc.

The article interviews a few author's reactions at the end of the article which seem to indicate they either don't believe the scientific research, don't get it or don't care:

> Kes Gray, the author of the bestselling rhyming animal series Oi Frog and Friends, was unperturbed by the researchers’ findings. “Authors and illustrators have no need to panic here, as long as we keep all of the animal protagonists in all of their future stories unreservedly cuddly. Big hair, big eyes and pink twitchy noses should pretty much nail it,” he said.

Perhaps there might be a problem with these type of authors influencing large portions of the young population.

I think that using animals to impart moral lessons tends to imbue a child with the subconscious connotation that morality/ethics belong in "fairy tales", and not in the actual world of the "grownups" of their own kind.

I remember covering Jonathan Livingston Seagull in grade school. Absolutely loved the story and the message, but what I remember most clearly was the girl who stated: who cares, it's just a story about a bird.

"Moral impact" is one of those features conveniently impossible to measure, and at the same time very marketable to parents. Each little girl and boy reacts in an unique and personal way to the same stimulus and modify gradually their points of view after years of observation and experience. You can't just buy a magic book covering all possible cases to turn your little evil in an angel in a couple of hours.

The findings are interesting but perhaps the reason authors choose to include anomorphic characters is because those sell better? 'Oh my son/daughter loves [animal], I'll get this book rather than this one about human kids'

I have an inchoate theory that early moral indoctrination through children's books is basically a way of hardwiring the just-world fallacy into the broader populace such that a minority of individuals who resist this worldview grow up primed to embrace sociopathic realpolitik and advance to positions of power over the majority who accept it at face value.

I remember the animals from my children's book just as well as the humans

George Orwell disagrees.