The 3 C's of anthropomorphism: Connection, comprehension, and competition
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Anthropomorphism, or imbuing nonhuman entities with human traits, is widely prevalent in the marketplace. The last decade of consumer research demonstrates that when imbued with human characteristics, anthropomorphized brands and products become active participants in the consumption experience and are viewed and treated fundamentally differently than those viewed simply as objects. We identify three dimensions around how consumers relate to anthropomorphized entities: connection, comprehension, and competition. The first two C's highlight how anthropomorphized brands and products benefit consumers by fulfilling belongingness needs (connection) and helping consumers understand unfamiliar situations and products (comprehension). In contrast, the competition dimension highlights how anthropomorphized brands and products are perceived as adversaries or potential threats to consumers’ individual goals. By identifying competition as the third C, we illuminate self‐protection as an additional motivation that shapes consumers’ responses to anthropomorphized entities—a motivation that has not been directly accounted for in previous theorizing.
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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) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
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".