Dehumanization: Coping with Embarrassment in Consumer Purchases

Consumers often find themselves in encounters with service providers that can spark feelings of embarrassment. For example, they may need to speak to a pharmacist or a doctor about an embarrassing health condition. They may need to purchase embarrassing personal products (Blair and Roese 2013). In situations such, consumers employ coping strategies to deal with the feelings of embarrassment, such as buying additional non-embarrassing items (Blair and Roese 2013; Lewittes and Simmons 1975), shopping in less crowded environments, or avoiding salespeople (Brackett 2004). The current research considers another way that consumers cope with embarrassing interactions with service professionals: dehumanization. Given that thoughts about what others are thinking leads to embarrassment (Dahl, Manchanda, and Argo 2001), a strategy to cope with embarrassment is perceiving others to be lacking in thoughts or feelings (Epley and Waytz 2010). For example, when buying condoms, consumers may feel embarrassed if they believe that the cashier infers they are promiscuous (Dahl et al. 2005). We propose that consumers in such situations reduce self-consciousness by thinking of the service provider as less like a human being and more like a robot who is simply “doing the job”. Someone who is not fully human should be more focused on the task and less likely to think about the consumer and the potentially embarrassing events that may have led the consumer to need the particular product or service. Thus, by perceiving the service provider as more robotic and less human, the embarrassment of the situation can be mitigated. In this paper, we investigate this subtle form of dehumanization as a coping mechanism consumers employ when buying socially embarrassing products or seeking embarrassing services.