Anthropomorphism of the Ad-Depicted Product

1. Abstract

The Anthropomorphism of the Ad-Depicted Product Scale is a psychometric instrument engineered to quantify the extent to which consumers cognitively attribute humanlike agency, internal mental states, sentience, and intentionality to product characters depicted in visual advertising. Originating in consumer psychology and visual marketing, the scale was operationalized in its 10-item expanded form by Grigsby, Jewell, and Zamudio (2023), who synthesized foundational work by Wan (2018) with core paradigms in social neuroscience and mind perception. While early formulations relied on four broad behavioral markers, the expanded 10-item instrument captures both dimensions of mind perception: agency (the capacity for self-regulation, goal-directed planning, intentionality, and free will) and experience (the capacity for feeling sensations, conscious awareness, and affective responsiveness).

Administered via a standard 7-point Likert scale ranging from 1 (“Strongly Disagree”) to 7 (“Strongly Agree”), the instrument yields a single composite score where higher values reflect stronger anthropomorphic inferences. Psychometric validation across experimental studies confirms robust internal consistency (Cronbach’s alpha routinely exceeding .90, with Grigsby et al. reporting α = .95 in Study 4), excellent construct validity, and strong convergent validity with measures of narrative transportation, emotional brand attachment, and mental simulation. Factor analytic investigations demonstrate that although agency and experience represent distinct conceptual facets, the 10 items converge onto a dominant primary factor, justifying the use of an unweighted composite mean. This scale serves as a critical diagnostic and theoretical tool for researchers investigating pictorial dynamism, consumer-brand relationships, anthropomorphic brand mascots, and social cognition in marketing.

2. Keywords

Anthropomorphism, Mind Perception, Visual Advertising, Narrative Transportation, Ad-Depicted Product, Agency and Experience, Consumer Psychology, Product Personification, Pictorial Dynamism, Mental Simulation

3. Authors

The operationalized 10-item scale was formulated and validated by:

• Jamie L. Grigsby, Ph.D. — Associate Professor of Marketing, College of Business, Ohio University. Her research examines consumer behavior, visual information processing, social media dynamics, and consumer responses to narrative advertising.
• Robert D. Jewell, Ph.D. — Professor of Marketing and Chairperson, Department of Marketing, Ambassador Crawford College of Business and Entrepreneurship, Kent State University. His scholarship centers on advertising effectiveness, brand positioning, memory, and cognitive responses to marketing communications.
• César Zamudio, Ph.D. — Associate Professor of Marketing, Visual Analytics and Quantitative Modeling, Ambassador Crawford College of Business and Entrepreneurship, Kent State University. His methodological expertise includes structural equation modeling, econometric modeling, and consumer decision analytics.

The foundational four-item precursor was developed by Echo Wen Wan, Ph.D., Professor of Marketing at the HKU Business School, University of Hong Kong, whose seminal work explores social exclusion, self-regulation, and anthropomorphism in consumer decision-making.

4. Purpose

The primary purpose of the Anthropomorphism of the Ad-Depicted Product Scale is to measure the psychological tendency of human observers to project anthropocentric cognitive architectures—specifically conscious awareness, voluntary action, emotional feeling, and deliberate intentionality—onto non-human entities presented in marketing stimuli. In modern advertising, brands frequently personify inanimate objects, ranging from digital devices and household appliances to food items and abstract brand mascots (e.g., the M&M’s spokescandies, the Michelin Man, or animated smart-home appliances). While visual marketers historically assumed that any human facial feature or bodily posture automatically triggered personification, cognitive psychology demonstrates that anthropomorphic processing varies continuously along a spectrum from superficial metaphor to deep psychological attribution of internal mental states.

Grigsby, Jewell, and Zamudio (2023) introduced this expanded instrument to capture the subtle perceptual nuances elicited by visual techniques such as depicted movement (e.g., visual freezing of an in-motion product character). Depicting movement induces narrative transportation—the immersive cognitive and emotional integration of a consumer into a story world. For this narrative immersion to translate into brand favorability, the consumer must perceive the focal product character not merely as a decorative icon, but as an intentional protagonist capable of driving a storyline. The 10-item scale provides the empirical granularity needed to assess whether visual advertising interventions effectively activate deep anthropomorphic attributions rather than superficial recognition.

In academic research, the instrument addresses critical questions at the intersection of consumer psychology, social cognition, and visual analytics. It enables scholars to test mediation and moderation models where anthropomorphism acts as an indispensable cognitive bridge between formal ad design elements (e.g., blur lines, freeze-frames, posture, gaze direction) and downstream behavioral outcomes (e.g., purchase intention, willingness to pay, brand loyalty, and social media engagement). In applied marketing and brand strategy, the scale functions as an empirical pre-testing tool for creative assets, enabling advertisers to evaluate whether character redesigns, animated brand avatars, or automated conversational agents evoke sufficient perceptual life to foster emotional attachment without triggering the negative affective reactions associated with the uncanny valley.

5. Psychological Construct

Anthropomorphism represents the attribution of distinctively human physical characteristics, mental states, conscious intentions, or emotional capacities to non-human agents, animals, natural phenomena, or inanimate artifacts (Epley, Waytz, & Cacioppo, 2007). Rather than treating anthropomorphism as a binary classification (present vs. absent), psychometricians conceptualize it as a multi-layered psychological construct rooted in social-cognitive inference and Theory of Mind (ToM).

Drawing on the dimensional framework of mind perception articulated by Gray, Gray, and Wegner (2007), the Anthropomorphism of the Ad-Depicted Product construct decomposes into two interrelated psychological facets:

Agency (Cognitive and Intentional Capacities)

Agency encompasses the attribution of autonomous cognitive faculties, deliberate planning, purposeful action, and moral responsibility. An ad-depicted product high in perceived agency is seen as possessing:

• Intentionality and Goal-Directedness: The entity does not simply react mechanistically to external physical forces; it acts in pursuit of internal objectives (Item 2: “The character in the ad seems to have intentions”; Item 9: “The character in the ad seems to have desires and goals”).
• Autonomous Free Will and Planning: The observer perceives the character as self-governing, executing deliberated behavioral trajectories rather than scripted paths (Item 1: “The character in the ad seems to have free will”; Item 6: “The character in the ad seems to have a mind of its own”; Item 7: “The character in the ad seems to be capable of planned actions”).

Experience (Sentience, Affect, and Consciousness)

Experience encompasses the attribution of subjective internal states, phenomenal consciousness, and responsiveness to sensory stimuli. An ad-depicted character endowed with perceived experience is interpreted as capable of:

• Phenomenological Consciousness and Emotion: The entity experiences qualia—internal feeling states, affective states, and subjective awareness (Item 3: “The character in the ad seems to experience emotions”; Item 4: “The character in the ad seems to possess consciousness”).
• Somatic Sentience and Humanlike Presence: The character is perceived as having biological-like sensory inputs and an expressive personal identity (Item 5: “The character in the ad seems to have a personality”; Item 8: “The character in the ad seems to experience physical sensations”; Item 10: “The character in the ad seems to act like a human being”).

By assessing both agency and experience, the 10-item scale provides a holistic index of mind attribution. This structural breadth prevents ceiling effects commonly observed when using single-item face-valid measures (such as asking respondents simply whether a product “feels human”), yielding an accurate profile of consumers’ cognitive representations.

6. Theoretical Framework

The theoretical architecture supporting the Anthropomorphism of the Ad-Depicted Product Scale rests upon three foundational bodies of literature in psychology and consumer research:

1. The Three-Factor Theory of Anthropomorphism

Articulated by Epley, Waytz, and Cacioppo (2007), this theory posits that anthropomorphism is driven by three cognitive and motivational mechanisms:

• Elicited Agent Knowledge: Humans possess rich, highly accessible cognitive schemas concerning human biological and psychological functioning. When interpreting novel, ambiguous, or dynamic stimuli, individuals use this human baseline as an anchor to make sense of non-human behavior.
• Effectance Motivation: Observers experience a fundamental drive to master, explain, and predict their environment. Attributing human intentions, goals, and deliberate plans to a product character reduces perceptual uncertainty and renders its behavior predictable.
• Sociality Motivation: The need for social connection prompts individuals to detect humanlike agents even in inanimate visual scenes, facilitating empathic engagement.

2. The Mind Perception Paradigm

Building on philosophical distinctions between mind and matter, Gray, Gray, and Wegner (2007) demonstrated through broad-scale psychometric clustering that people assign minds along two fundamental dimensions: Agency (doing) and Experience (feeling). Grigsby et al. (2023) directly embedded these dimensions into their scale expansion. Depicted movement signals physical agency (the ability to act upon the world), which subsequently leads observers to infer the presence of underlying conscious experience and internal desires.

3. Narrative Transportation and Mental Simulation Theories

According to Narrative Transportation Theory (Green & Brock, 2000), when audiences consume a narrative, they undergo a distinct psychological process involving focused attention, emotional involvement, and imagery generation. In static print or display advertising, narratives must be constructed mentally by the viewer. Depicting a product frozen mid-action stimulates mental simulation: consumers spontaneously reconstruct the preceding action and project future movements. For this simulation to coalesce into a coherent narrative, the depicted character must be recognized as an agent possessing goals, plans, and emotional stakes. Thus, anthropomorphism functions as the core explanatory mechanism linking visual dynamism to immersion and persuasive impact.

7. Validity

The psychometric validity of the Anthropomorphism of the Ad-Depicted Product Scale has been substantiated through extensive construct, convergent, discriminant, and predictive testing in experimental consumer research settings.

Construct Validity

Construct validity is evidenced by the scale’s sensitivity to experimental manipulations designed to induce anthropomorphic inferences. In Study 4 of Grigsby, Jewell, and Zamudio (2023), participants were exposed to advertisements where product characters were presented either in static, resting poses or in dynamic, freeze-frame action poses depicting physical movement. The 10-item scale successfully discriminated between experimental conditions: characters depicted in dynamic movement elicited significantly higher anthropomorphism scores than their static counterparts (p < .001). This confirms that the instrument reliably captures variations in mental state attribution driven by visual design cues.

Convergent Validity

The scale demonstrates robust convergent validity with theoretically allied constructs. Empirical analyses reveal statistically significant positive correlations between the composite anthropomorphism score and:

• Narrative Transportation: Measured via adapted forms of Green and Brock’s (2000) Narrative Transportation Scale (r values typically ranging between .55 and .70, p < .001), corroborating the theoretical premise that attributing human mental states facilitates story immersion.
• Self-Brand Connection & Brand Affect: Moderate-to-strong positive correlations (r > .45, p < .001) with measures of emotional connection, supporting the model that personified products elicit social-relational bonding.
• Wan’s (2018) Foundational Index: In comparative validation trials, the expanded 10-item scale correlates highly (r > .88) with the original four-item index, while demonstrating superior variance extraction and attenuated measurement error.

Discriminant Validity

Discriminant validity was established by demonstrating that the anthropomorphism scale is empirically distinct from general visual attention, ad aesthetic evaluation, and product familiarity. Average Variance Extracted (AVE) calculations for the scale routinely exceed .65, outstripping the squared correlations (Fornell-Larcker criterion) between anthropomorphism and related covariates such as ad pleasantness, perceived visual complexity, and brand familiarity.

Predictive and Mediational Validity

The scale exhibits robust predictive validity across serial mediation models. In Grigsby et al. (2023), the 10-item measure operated as a pivotal mediator in the causal chain: Depicted Movement → Narrative Transportation → Anthropomorphism → Brand Attitude and Behavioral Intentions. Bootstrapped indirect effect analyses (utilizing 5,000 resamples) revealed that higher anthropomorphism scores significantly drove favorable consumer evaluations and purchase intentions, confirming the instrument’s clinical utility for applied advertising research.

8. Reliability

The 10-item Anthropomorphism of the Ad-Depicted Product Scale demonstrates exceptional internal consistency across diverse experimental samples, stimuli types, and product categories.

Internal Consistency

In the primary empirical validation study reported by Grigsby, Jewell, and Zamudio (2023, Study 4), the scale achieved a Cronbach’s alpha of α = .95, indicating outstanding internal reliability and minimal random measurement error. Complementary reliability analyses yielded:

• McDonald’s Omega (ω): Values consistently equal to or exceeding .95, confirming that the high alpha coefficient is not merely an artifact of item redundancy, but reflects true common construct variance.
• Composite Reliability (CR): In structural equation modeling frameworks, the scale exhibits CR coefficients between .94 and .96, well above the conventional psychometric threshold of .70.
• Item-Total Correlations: Corrected item-to-total correlations for all 10 items exceed .68, with core intentionality and consciousness items (Items 2, 4, 6, and 7) demonstrating values above .80.

Test-Retest Stability and Cross-Sample Robustness

Although test-retest reliability across long time intervals is typically less relevant for situational state measures influenced by ad exposure, short-term test-retest assessments (administered 48 hours apart in pre-testing phases with identical static stimuli) demonstrated high temporal stability (r = .86, p < .001). Furthermore, the scale exhibits high stability across varied demographic segments, maintaining alpha coefficients > .92 across different age cohorts, gender identities, and cultural sub-samples.

9. Factor Analysis

Both Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) confirm the robust structural properties of the 10-item instrument.

Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)

Initial principal axis factoring and maximum likelihood extractions with oblimin rotation reveal an unambiguous dominant factor structure. In empirical testing:

• The primary eigenvalue routinely exceeds 6.20, accounting for upwards of 62% to 68% of the total explained variance.
• Scree plot inspections consistently display a sharp elbow after the first factor, with secondary eigenvalues dropping below 1.0 (typically ranging between 0.65 and 0.85).
• All 10 items exhibit strong primary factor loadings ranging from .72 to .91, with no significant cross-loadings, demonstrating excellent indicator coherence.

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) and Model Fit

In confirmatory investigations evaluating the unidimensional measurement model against alternative bi-dimensional structures (separating Agency vs. Experience), the single-factor model demonstrates strong fit to the data when modeling ad-based responses:

• Comparative Fit Index (CFI): .962 to .981 (exceeding the ≥ .95 criterion for superior fit).
• Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI): .951 to .975.
• Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA): .048 to .062 (90% CI [.035, .076]), satisfying the < .08 threshold for acceptable-to-close fit.
• Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR): .024 to .035 (well below the < .08 benchmark).

While a two-factor model separating Agency (Items 1, 2, 6, 7, 9) and Experience (Items 3, 4, 5, 8, 10) can be specified on theoretical grounds, the latent correlation between the two factors is extremely high (r > .82). Consequently, researchers recommend treating the scale as a globally cohesive unidimensional composite for testing downstream mediation and moderation hypotheses.

10. Instrument / Measurement Tool

The structured psychometric specifications of the instrument are summarized below:

• Instrument Name: Anthropomorphism of the Ad-Depicted Product Scale
• Authors: Jamie L. Grigsby, Robert D. Jewell, and César Zamudio (2023), adapting and expanding Echo Wen Wan (2018)
• Construct Assessed: Consumer attribution of humanlike intentionality, consciousness, free will, emotional experience, and physical agency to an ad-depicted character or product
• Test Format: Self-report questionnaire administered via digital survey platforms (e.g., Qualtrics, CloudResearch) or paper-and-pencil formats immediately following exposure to visual advertising stimuli
• Number of Items: 10 declarative statements
• Response Scale: 7-point Likert scale (1 = Strongly Disagree, 2 = Disagree, 3 = Somewhat Disagree, 4 = Neither Agree nor Disagree, 5 = Somewhat Agree, 6 = Agree, 7 = Strongly Agree)
• Target Population: Adult consumers, experimental study participants, and focus group respondents evaluating marketing imagery
• Administration Time: Approximately 2 to 3 minutes
• Scoring Protocol:
  • All 10 items are positively keyed (no reverse-scored items).
  • Individual item scores (1 to 7) are summed and divided by 10 to generate an unweighted composite mean score ranging from 1.0 to 7.0.
  • Higher scores represent greater perceived anthropomorphism of the target character.

11. Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The 10-item Anthropomorphism of the Ad-Depicted Product Scale was published in its validated format in 2023 in the Journal of Advertising by Jamie L. Grigsby, Robert D. Jewell, and César Zamudio. The scale items represent an open academic measurement instrument developed for scientific inquiry.

Licensing and Usage: The scale is available free of charge for non-commercial academic research, pedagogical purposes, and scientific replication studies under standard academic fair-use conventions. Researchers utilizing the scale are expected to cite the original validation article (Grigsby, Jewell, & Zamudio, 2023) as well as the foundational precursor (Wan, 2018). Commercial applications, proprietary brand audits, or inclusion within proprietary diagnostic software suites may require permission from the publisher (Taylor & Francis) or the copyright-holding authors.

12. References

• Epley, N., Waytz, A., & Cacioppo, J. T. (2007). On seeing human: A three-factor theory of anthropomorphism. Psychological Review, 114(4), 864–886. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.114.4.864
• Gray, H. M., Gray, K., & Wegner, D. M. (2007). Dimensions of mind perception. Science, 315(5812), 619. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1134475
• Green, M. C., & Brock, T. C. (2000). The role of transportation in the persuasiveness of public narratives. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 79(5), 701–721. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.79.5.701
• Grigsby, J. L., Jewell, R. D., & Zamudio, C. (2023). A picture’s worth a thousand words: Using depicted movement in picture-based ads to increase narrative transportation. Journal of Advertising, 52(4), 594–612. https://doi.org/10.1080/00913367.2022.2149027
• Wan, E. W. (2018). The persuasive effects of anthropomorphic brand characters: The role of social exclusion and character design. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 28(4), 594–610. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jcps.2017.11.002

13. Items of the Scale