http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=646
An interesting post on language in general, but I think there's a much more interesting point about human psychology in there (emphasis mine):
The ranking of the politicians and the IT firms puzzled me a bit at first. But then I conjectured that perhaps the scale is measuring a sort of unpredictable agency — what you might call the "Maverick factor". Maybe by changing all their connectors every 18 months, and building laptops that freeze up every other time you plug them into a projector, Apple gains in (this measure) of animacy, just as a cantankerous old car comes to seem more alive every time you have to beg it to start. On this theory Google and Obama, by being more reliable, seem a bit less agentive.
This makes sense, as less predictable things—and especially those with greater agency—warrant more attention. The correlation between unpredictability and agency is strong in living things, I think, and that would explain why people assign agency to unpredictable things when the mechanism isn't clear—for example, Zeus and lightning. Once the mechanism behind those things becomes clearer (e.g., weather conditions, electricity, etc.), the less agency it appears to have.
