How to Reduce Anthropomorphism When Roleplaying Uplifts?

Question

A handful of science fiction and even some fantasy settings include animal uplifts. However, there's often a problem with roleplaying members of such species: excessive¹ anthropomorphism.

This is a problem, because even though uplifts are quantitatively either approaching or on the level of human intelligence (depending on setting), qualitatively their minds are not the same, not having undergone the same psych-evolutionary paths, and/or having undergone some artificial neurological workarounds that humans lack.

This seems to happen (though to a lesser extent) even with players and GMs who have done some research on the subject species (e.g. someone whose knowledge of dolphins doesn't all come from Hollywood). And sure, Most Players Are Human, just like most writers. But surely just as some writers seem more skilled at avoiding the stereotype of human-like intelligence, so can roleplayers improve their technique at depicting such characters.

Thus the question:
How can one improve one's ability to roleplay uplifts, and to portray them as 'aliens from the same planet', as dolphins and octopodes gifted with increased intelligence, rather than as humans in animal suits? What roleplaying techniques can aid in achieving this goal? How can one become better at extrapolating theoretical knowledge about real animals (and their differences from humans) to practical skill at roleplaying their derivative uplifts?

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¹ There are some phenomena that have been dismissed as anthropomorphism in the past, such as signs of linguistic capabilities or the level of complexity of social interactions, but that current observations seem to indicate are real at least to some extent, and thus either no longer classed as unambiguously anthropomorphic, or deemed to be 'reasonable' anthropomorphism. I'm not talking about those.

Answer 1

First of all, have a critical re-read of whatever game system you're using. There is the possibility that either:

1. It is deliberately telling your players to anthropomorphise. If it's packed full of stereotypes of animals (owls are wise, foxes are cunning, cats are elegant and self-centred), then the game doesn't really care about real animal psychology. It wants humans in animal suits.
2. It is accidentally telling your players to anthropomorphise. Uplifted octopuses in Eclipse Phase are an example of this. Real octopuses are like pacific salmon - they spawn and then die. The males die quite quickly after the breeding season, the females hang around a bit to guard their eggs before dropping dead. They are also very reluctant to eat dead food. And they are decidedly anti-social and can be cannibalistic. (I used to study cephalopods). By not mentioning this, Eclipse Phase is encouraging octopus characters to have human attitudes to sex, food, social activities and eating your opponent after a fight to the death...

So, assuming the game as written isn't encouraging anthropomorphism, I'd suggest doing a bit of research and finding a few very not-like-humans behaviours or physical limitations for each of your animals, and centring your roleplaying around these to give a non-human flavour.

Back to Eclipse Phase. I told a friend about the spawn-and-die of octopuses. So he's playing an uplifted octopus who is "saving himself" for the right female octopus - he's only going to get to do it once, so she'd better be special. And he gets agitated when the human PCs go off to get laid - don't they know they might die? :-)

Animal Diversity Web is a good place to get summaries of each species' behaviour.

Be warned... a lot of the differences will be about 'anti-social' things like eating their own poo, scent marking with urine, cannibalism, infanticide, siblicide, and animals beating the crap out of each other over the right to mate. The socially acceptable stuff might be about raising offspring, which doesn't usually feature heavily in RPGs.

You could research a bit deeper on things like senses, to get things like species which prefer to be active at twilight, or who can pick the criminal out of the line up by scent.