THE POSITIVE EFFECTS OF DEHUMANIZATION IN CONSUMPTION PROCESS

Abstract

Over million years of evolution, human beings have come to the state of contemporary life with cultures, hierarchical societies, the arts and many more that perfectly serve to distinguish ourselves from the animal world. The fact that humans do not like to be associated with animals has been widely supported by many research papers over the years. Those studies suggested various reasons for that such as the very thought of mortality which humans were obsessed with or the feeling of disgust for animal-related things or a sense of superiority to animals that humans possessed and so on. Hence, dehumanization in the human world has always been considered a negative course of action. Nevertheless, this paper will contribute a new and interesting perspective into this area by examining the positive side of dehumanization in our society. In fact, we do observe such incidents as addressing humans with animalistic terms. We aim to establish the positive effect of such actions (dehumanization) by proposing that dehumanizing the consumption process increases the overall desire and pleasure for a product category or stimulus. Through experiments and different manipulations, the main findings of the paper did support the proposed hypothesis and additionally revealed about the further increase in the willingness to pay across the studied product categories. Moreover, we have also managed to prove the capability of experiencing, which is one of the two dimensions in human minds, to be a mediator of the dehumanizing process to have partially mediated the effect from the initial variable to the outcome variable. The knowledge of this topic will be helpful for business managers to have better understanding of using animalistic terms or other dehumanizing ways in marketing communications to increase pleasure and purchase intention, which might be previously thought as a controversial way.