Ascribing human characteristics to nonhuman entities and disavowing them from humans are two instantiations of the same process. The former is called anthropomorphism, and the latter is known as dehumanization. Although leading authors recognized that these phenomena are two ends of the same continuum, there has been little effort to empirically link and integrate them. Moreover these processes have been explored in different contexts. In order to address these questions we ran six studies with an objective to systematically explore the attribution of humanness to a human and to a non-human entity when they are conjointly presented: advertisement. We hypothesized that the advertisement context will facilitate the dehumanization of a person and anthropomorphism of a product/brand. Furthermore we hypothesized that this attribution of humanness will mediate the overall attitude toward a target of evaluation. Although mixed, results are encouraging for our hypothesis and show that attribution of humanness plays an important role in attitude toward the object of evaluation, whether it is a person or a product/brand.

** Iskra Herak is a PhD student at the Université Catholique de Louvain in Belgium.