The association between consumers' chronic concerns about infectious disease and anthropomorphism
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Assigning human characteristics to products and brands (i.e., anthropomorphism) is a tactic commonly adopted by marketers. However, researchers have recently highlighted the importance of better understanding which consumers will be more (or less) responsive to these cues. Drawing on the behavioral immune system and anthropomorphism literatures, we hypothesize that consumers who are chronically concerned about their susceptibility to infectious disease will have a greater tendency to anthropomorphize nonhuman entities (e.g., nature, technology, and consumer products) because doing so creates relatively pathogen‐free sources of social connection. Importantly, we also predict that this tendency will be muted when consumers are highly germ averse. To test these predictions, we examined the relationships between perceived infectability and germ aversion, the two subscales of the established Perceived Vulnerability to Disease scale, and three different measures of consumers' tendency to anthropomorphize nonhuman entities. The results of four studies, including a preregistered, high‐powered replication, support our hypotheses and offer the first evidence of a context wherein perceived infectability and germ aversion interact.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 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) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
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".