A second life for second-hand products: the role of anthropomorphism and taboo trade-offs
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Purpose Trade-offs that involve secular values of money and sacred human values are often seen as taboo. This paper aims to examine how consumers avoid making taboo trade-offs with anthropomorphized products, by choosing options that ensure the well-being of the humanized products, even at a financial cost to themselves. Design/methodology/approach The authors conducted five experiments, across different marketplace contexts (i.e. repairing, buying and selling), to test the broad generalizability of the extent to which consumers are willing to incur a financial cost due to concern for the well-being of anthropomorphized products. Findings The results reveal that consumers are willing to accept financially inferior options to protect the humanness endowed upon anthropomorphized products. The effect is mediated by consumers’ concern for the treatment of the anthropomorphized product. The effect is moderated by consumers’ trait empathy level, such that those low in empathy are willing to sacrifice human value for the sake of greater financial gain. Research limitations/implications Future research could examine, in the context of anthropomorphized products, if there are types of human values that are less inviolable, leading consumers to be more willing to trade them off for monetary gains. Practical implications The findings have direct implications for second-hand markets. For potential buyers of anthropomorphized products, they should signal concern for the product; for sellers, anthropomorphizing their products can reduce haggling behavior. From a sustainability perspective, consumers may be more motivated to repair or recycle their products if it is framed as “infusing new life” into their products. Originality/value This work highlights a novel effect of anthropomorphism: when marketplace decisions are involved, anthropomorphizing a product can introduce a tension between secular monetary values and sacred human values. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this work is the first to show that consumers are willing to incur a monetary loss to protect the humanness of anthropomorphized product, driven by their concern for the proper treatment of such humanized products.
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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 | 0.004 | 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 | 0.000 | 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 | 0.000 |
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".