Although Americans parted with nearly 700,000 old vehicles in last year’s Cash for Clunkers program, many of them probably had a hard time letting go, U-M researchers say.
Blame it on anthropomorphism — the tendency to ascribe human attributes to an inanimate object.
“Everyone knows someone with a beat-up old car that they just can’t bear to get rid of, even as the car becomes unreliable and begins to act with ‘a mind of its own,’” says Norbert Schwarz, a professor of marketing at the Stephen M. Ross School of Business, professor of psychology in LSA and research professor at the Institute for Social Research.
“Although most people know that cars and other objects like computers are inanimate, at times they treat them as if they were alive,” says Jesse Chandler, a doctoral student in social psychology. “Most of us at some point have argued or pled with a computer, felt attached to a favorite sweater or expressed love for a car.”
New research in April’s Journal of Consumer Psychology by Schwarz and Chandler finds that even incidental cues suggesting that a product might be alive can make people feel reluctant to replace it. Furthermore, people induced to think of their cars as alive no longer care about how well they run when deciding whether or not to replace them.
“Much as people are reluctant to replace friends as they become old and cranky, they are also reluctant to replace ‘living’ products that no longer work properly,” Chandler says.
The researchers conducted two studies to test how anthropomorphic thought affects consumers’ product replacement intentions.
“Just as people prefer other people who are interpersonally warm over people who are interpersonally cold, participants were also less willing to replace a ‘warm’ car than a ‘cold’ car when they had thought about the car’s personality,” Chandler says. “Hence, owners of a blue car were less willing to replace it when its color was named ‘summer sky’ rather than ‘blizzard blue.’”
The researchers say their findings demonstrate that subtle anthropomorphic cues can influence how people think about their cars, and illustrate the potential power of marketing campaigns that depict products as alive. However, they also suggest that anthropomorphic beliefs may be somewhat of a mixed blessing for businesses and consumers.
“Anthropomorphic beliefs may potentially increase consumers’ maintenance costs beyond economically defensible levels while reducing producers’ sales,” Schwarz says. “Further, anthropomorphic cues may direct attention away from some features and toward others, and could thus hurt products of superior technical quality, while benefiting competitors with more appealing ‘interpersonal’ features.
“Finally, consumers who spontaneously think of their cars in interpersonal terms, and give it a name and a gender, may spontaneously show the same hesitation to replace them.”
