Consumer and product face-to-face: Antecedents and consequences of spontaneous face-schema activation

In practice, designers sometimes give products a human-like appearance in the hope of increasing liking due to anthropomorphizing. It remains an open research question, however, whether the mere morphological shape of a product's design is sufficient to activate a human schema. To investigate the spontaneous associations that are elicited by a product's shape, we ran a lexical decision task contrasting human faces, car fronts (which may resemble faces), and car sides. We examined further the effects of anthropomorphizing on explicit product evaluations. Our results support anthropomorphizing as an automatic process that affects explicit judgments but also reveal a moderating factor.