C O N S U M E R R E S P O N S E T O B I G I N N OV A T I O N S

Human or Robot? Consumer Responses

to Radical Cognitive Enhancement Products
N OA H C A S T E L O , B E R N D S C H M I T T , A N D M I K L O S SA R V A R Y

AB STR ACT Human enhancement products allow consumers to radically enhance their mental abilities. Focusing on
cognitive enhancements, we introduce and study a novel factor—dehumanization (i.e., denying a person emotional
ability and likening them to a robot)—which plays a key role in consumers’ reluctance to use enhancement products.
In study 1, consumers who enhance their mental abilities beyond normal levels were dehumanized, whereas consumers
who use the same products to restore lost abilities were not. Moreover, dehumanization decreased prospective consum-
ers’ interest in using the enhancement products themselves. Study 2 shows that emphasizing how the motivation to
use an enhancement product can be prosocial (i.e., helping other people) inoculates the consumer against dehuman-
ization, and study 3 supports this positioning strategy in an online advertising campaign. Together, these studies un-
cover dehumanization as an important obstacle to consumer adoption of enhancement products and demonstrate how
to overcome this obstacle with a prosocial positioning strategy.

F
or millennia, humans have used natural products and
techniques such as herbs and teas, vitamins and nat-
ural supplements, yoga and meditation, to enhance
the mind. In modern consumer society, such products have
been marketed successfully for many decades and have be-
come a significant part of the “human enhancement indus-
try.” The human enhancement industry today is large and
diverse and likely to grow significantly in the near future.
Drugs such as Ritalin and Adderall, which were originally de-
veloped to treat mental disorders such as attention deficit
hyperactivity disorder, are widely used by healthy consumers
in order to enhance their normal cognitive abilities (Greely
et al. 2008). Nonprescription sales of cognitive enhancement
compounds alone exceed $1 billion annually (Chinthapalli
2015).
Moreover, an emerging set of more radical and innovative
products and processes have entered the market or are on the
verge of being commercialized over the next few years: for ex-
ample, transcranial direct-current stimulation (tDCS), which
stimulates the brain with electricity to improve its function-
ing; genetic engineering techniques like CRISPR, which allow
scientists to turn on and off specific combinations of genes
that control mental abilities (Ledford 2015); and brain-
computer interfaces, which allow users to connect to com-
puters and the Internet using only their thoughts (Urban
2017). These emerging technologies are poised to create
new customer value in a variety of multibillion dollar indus-
tries, including military operations, healthcare, and educa-
tion (Roco and Bainbridge 2003; Greely et al. 2008; Parasidis
2011). However, consumers often seem skeptical of enhance-
ment technologies and reluctant to use them, which limits
their potential to realize this value. This article explores
one source of this reluctance: the perception that enhance-
ment technologies are dehumanizing.
R E S E A R C H I N G B I G I N N OV A T I O N S
T HAT ENHANCE T H E HU MA N M IND
Innovation research in consumer behavior and marketing
has focused on consumer adoption of a wide range of innova-
tions in many industries, ranging from innovative hygiene
and food products to new kinds of cameras and electric cars
(Nowlis and Simonson 1996; Moreau, Lehmann, and Mark-
man 2001). In our digital age, such research has investigated
consumers’ attitudes and behaviors around new mobile de-
vices, social media platforms, and online shopping (Hoffman
and Novak 1996; Yoon et al. 2013). More recent research has
begun exploring consumer attitudes toward emerging tech-
nologies such as the “Internet of Things” and driverless cars

Noah Castelo (noahcastelo216@gmail.com) is an assistant professor of marketing at the University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, T6G 2R3, Canada. Bernd
Schmitt (bhs1@gsb.columbia.edu) is the Robert D. Calkins Professor of International Business at Columbia University, New York, NY 10025. Miklos Sarvary
(miklos.sarvary@columbia.edu) is the Carson Family Professor of Business at Columbia University, New York, NY 10025. The authors thank Nick Fitz for his
contributions to an earlier version of this project.

Correction: This article was reposted on May 31, 2019, to change the x-axis label in figure 2 from “Selfless” to “Prosocial.”
JACR, volume 4, number 3. Published online May 20, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/703462
© 2019 the Association for Consumer Research. All rights reserved. 2378-1815/2019/0403-0045$10.00

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218 Human or Robot? Castelo, Schmitt, and Sarvary
(Waytz, Heafner, and Epley 2014; Hsu and Lin 2016; Ng and
Wakenshaw 2017; Hoffman and Novak 2018). The bulk of
this research has focused on innovations that are external
to the human body and do not directly change the function-
ing of the human body and mind. The little research that has
explored enhancement products for the mind has focused on
relatively familiar products such as pharmaceuticals.
For example, Riis, Simmons, and Goodwin (2008) found
that consumers are less comfortable using a pill to enhance
abilities that are seen as more “fundamental” to the self, which
they note are often emotional abilities. Participants in their
studies were least willing to enhance kindness and empathy,
which were rated as highly fundamental to a person’s iden-
tity, and most willing to enhance wakefulness and rote
memory, which were rated as least fundamental to a per-
son’s identity. Riis et al. (2008) also found that interest in
nonfundamental enhancement was low overall as well; only
53% of their participants were willing to enhance wakeful-
ness and 51% to enhance rote memory.
Focusing on cognitive enhancement, Scheske and Schnall
(2012) found that concerns about health, fairness, and nat-
uralness are important determinants of consumers’ judg-
ments regarding the moral acceptability of enhancement.
For example, prior to learning any details about the en-
hancement, participants judged the use of cognitive enhance-
ment to be between “somewhat” and “very wrong,” suggest-
ing negative views toward cognitive enhancement (Scheske
and Schnall 2012). Judgments of wrongness increased after
learning that the enhancement was harmful for one’s health,
was only affordable to the wealthy, was used by very few peo-
ple, and was “artificial” rather than “herbal.” However, the
correlation between the moral acceptability of enhancement
and consumers’ own interest in using enhancement them-
selves was small: moral concerns did not predict consumers’
interest in using the enhancement themselves (Riis et al.
2008), and consumers judged the fairness of enhancement
differently, depending on whether another consumer or
they themselves are using it (Williams and Steffel 2014).
Understanding the moral concerns surrounding enhance-
ment may therefore be unhelpful for explaining consum-
ers’ interest in actually using enhancement themselves.
Research has also shown that consumers are less com-
fortable with “embellishing” abilities beyond a perceived
“true level,” than they are with “enabling” abilities up to that
“true level” (Williams and Steffel 2014). This distinction has
also been made in the bioethics literature, where it is often
called “restoration versus enhancement.” For example, the
President’s Council on Bioethics (2003, 13) defined restora-
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tion as any intervention designed “to treat individuals with
known diseases, disabilities, or impairments, in an attempt
to restore them to a normal state of health and fitness,” and
enhancement as any intervention designed to “augment or
improve their native capacities.” Framing an enhancement
as allowing consumers to “become who you are” increases
interest in the enhancement compared to allowing them
to “become more than who you are” (Riis et al. 2008), which
further suggests that the degree to which an enhancement
is seen as enabling versus embellishing or restoring versus
enhancing the user’s “true abilities” is an important factor
in shaping consumers’ attitudes toward enhancement.
In sum, while prior research has established some of the
key constructs—such as cognitive versus emotional enhance-
ment and enhancing versus restoring abilities—and offered
some insight into certain familiar forms of enhancements,
what is still missing is a more detailed, conceptual under-
standing of why the observed effects occurred and, if so de-
sired by consumers and society, how to effectively increase
consumers’ interest in enhancement, especially as these rad-
ical enhancements are starting to appear on the consumer
marketplace. For example, why is interest in enhancement
generally relatively low, even for cognitive abilities? Do per-
ceptions of humanness have a role to play in the previously
observed reluctance to enhance? What is the relationship
between how enhanced consumers are perceived and other
consumers’ interest in using enhancement themselves? Most
importantly, what is the process underlying consumers’ per-
ceptions of enhancement and the consequences that those
perceptions have for marketing outcomes? In this article
we show that dehumanization plays a key role in understand-
ing consumers’ perceptions of and interest in using radical
enhancement technologies and demonstrate how the mar-
keting of enhancement products can be improved by under-
standing this process.
Given the fact that the enhancement technologies that
we study focus on enhancing human traits and capabilities,
we move beyond existing research by focusing on how such
technologies impact the perceived humanness of the user.
A central feature of emerging enhancement technologies
is that they directly affect abilities commonly seen as com-
prising humanness, such as the cognitive abilities that sep-
arate humans from other animals and the emotional abili-
ties that separate humans from machines (Haslam et al.
2008). Indeed, terms such as “transhuman,” “superhuman,”
“subhuman,” and “inhuman” illustrate that perceived hu-
manness is not merely biologically defined (e.g., based on
the core genetic makeup of Homo sapiens) but is instead

malleable and subject to psychological processes. As a re-
sult, we expect that consumers adopting such technology
would be judged along common cognitive and affective di-
mensions of humanness and, consequently, be seen as “less”
human—a phenomenon referred to as dehumanization (Has-
lam and Loughnan 2014).
We propose that a wide range of products, both familiar
and unfamiliar, will be seen as dehumanizing when they are
used to enhance cognitive abilities beyond the normal human
range. Specifically, we show that enhancing cognitive abilities
leads people to deny the enhanced consumer emotional abil-
ities and to liken them to a robot. We further demonstrate
that this dehumanization has important consequences, in-
cluding social stigma for the dehumanized consumer and
weakened interest in using the enhancement among pro-
spective consumers. Moreover, we show that a product posi-
tioning that emphasizes prosocial motivations for using the
enhancement inoculates the enhanced consumer against de-
humanization. Finally, using a real advertising campaign on
Facebook, we demonstrate how marketers can overcome this
obstacle to consumer adoption of enhancement technologies.
The technologies that we study are capable of enhancing
traits and abilities that are widely considered to be constitu-
ent components of humanness (Haslam, Bastian, and Bissett
2004; Santarnecchi et al. 2015). We focus specifically on rad-
ical enhancement products that target cognitive abilities for
several reasons. First, because we theoretically examine the
perceived relationship between cognitive and emotional abil-
ities that trigger dehumanization, this focus excludes purely
physical enhancements, such as the steroids commonly used
by athletes. While consumers may indeed dehumanize the
users of such physical enhancements—either by perceiving
them as animalistic or as machinelike—the psychological
processes that we focus on in this article (i.e., the perception
that extremely high cognitive abilities trigger a perceived
lack of emotional abilities) are not directly relevant to such
enhancements, so we leave the exploration of these ques-
tions to future research. Second, we do not focus on emo-
tional abilities because to our knowledge there are no prod-
ucts that explicitly attempt to enhance emotional abilities;
antidepressants and anti-anxiety pharmaceuticals, for ex-
ample, attempt to restore dysfunctional emotional experi-
ences to a “normal” or “healthy” level but are not commonly
used to enhance emotional abilities beyond normal levels.
The market for cognitive enhancements, on the other hand,
is already vast and growing.
Finally, there is a broad range of products that might be
construed as “enhancement” products that we also excluded
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Volume 4 Number 3 2019 219
from our analysis—such as global positioning system (GPS)
devices that allow humans to easily navigate spatial envi-
ronments, telephones that allow humans to communicate
across vast distances, and even the Internet that allows ac-
cess to virtually the sum total of human knowledge. While
such products undoubtedly enhance human capabilities in
many ways, they are clearly external to the body and mind
and do not enhance traits that could be considered part of
one’s self. Prior research has demonstrated that the degree
to which a given trait is considered central to the self is a
strong predictor of reluctance to enhance that trait (Riis
et al. 2008), and while the cognitive abilities that we study
in this article were found to be less central to the self than
more emotional abilities, they are nevertheless clearly more
central to the self than rote memory or navigation abilities
that address books and GPS can enhance. We therefore pro-
pose that such products would be unlikely to be seen as de-
humanizing because they enhance traits or abilities that are
clearly not central to the enhanced user’s self and because
they are clearly external to one’s body and mind. Further-
more, the familiarity of these products, built over many
years or decades of widespread use, also decreases the like-
lihood that they would be seen as dehumanizing.
T HEO RET IC A L D EVE LO PM EN T
AND HYPOTHE SES
Perceived Humanness
Psychologists have extensively studied what abilities lay peo-
ple believe constitute humanness and when and how people
perceive others as less than human—a process known as de-
humanization (Haslam 2006). Theories of dehumanization
argue that humanness consists of a collection of traits and
abilities, such as creativity, self-control, and interpersonal
warmth, and that we see others as less human (or nonhu-
man) when we deny them these constitutive abilities or as-
cribe them fewer such abilities (Haslam and Loughnan 2014).
Thus, if a technology allows one to improve traits and abili-
ties that constitute humanness, then the result should be
an improved human, perhaps even making the enhanced per-
son seem more human (or “superhuman” or “transhuman”)
compared to their preenhancement state (Savulescu 2005;
Waytz, Hoffman, and Trawalter 2015). In other words, these
theories suggest that enhancing the abilities that constitute
humanness should not be dehumanizing at all.
In contrast, we propose instead that consumers will per-
ceive enhancement technologies as dehumanizing. Research
has shown that people perceive two distinct components of
humanness. Although different authors have used different
220 Human or Robot? Castelo, Schmitt, and Sarvary
names for these components, they broadly correspond to
cognition and emotion (Waytz and Norton 2014). For ex-
ample, Gray, Gray, and Wegner (2007) show that people per-
ceive agency (the capacity for thought and intention) and
experience (the capacity for feeling and emotion) to be the
two primary dimensions of the mind; robots have relatively
high agency but low experience, whereas animals have rela-
tively high experience but low agency. Similarly, Haslam et al.
(2008) and Haslam and Loughnan (2014) call the two di-
mensions “human uniqueness” (abilities that may be shared
with machines but not with other animals, such as rational-
ity and logic) and “human nature” (abilities that may be
shared with other animals but not with machines, such as
emotional responsiveness and warmth). Furthermore, in
the social perception and stereotype literature, a fundamen-
tal distinction has been drawn between agency (typically a
self-focused, cognitive orientation) and communion (typi-
cally an other-focused, emotional orientation; Kervyn, Yzerbyt,
and Judd 2010). Thus, while each individual person might
include different specific abilities in their definition of hu-
manness (Loughnan et al. 2010), a generalization can be
made that lay people perceive humanness along the two pri-
mary dimensions of cognitive abilities and emotional abili-
ties.
Existing theories suggest that the two dimensions of hu-
manness are associated with two distinct forms of dehuman-
ization. Denying someone cognitive abilities creates “animal-
istic dehumanization,” or likening someone to an animal,
whereas denying someone emotional abilities creates “mech-
anistic dehumanization,” or likening a person to a robot
(Haslam 2006; Haslam et al. 2008). We suggest that radical
cognitive enhancement will trigger the perception that the
enhanced consumer lacks emotional abilities, thereby creat-
ing mechanistic dehumanization.
Support for this prediction comes from research suggest-
ing that people tend to think in terms of trade-offs (or com-
pensations) regarding the two dimensions of humanness.
For example, a stay-at home mother might be seen as warm
and caring but may not be sought out for career advice,
whereas a successful businessman might be seen as compe-
tent and intelligent but may not be the first choice for emo-
tional support (Kervyn et al. 2010). Similarly, increasing the
degree to which a person is seen as having agency decreases
the degree to which they are seen as being vulnerable to ex-
perience and vice versa (Gray and Wegner 2009). Using the
same logic of stereotypical trade-offs, considering a consumer
who has used an enhancement product to achieve highly ad-
vanced cognitive abilities will likely trigger associations of low
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emotional abilities and, in turn, associations with computers
or robots, resulting in mechanistic dehumanization.
As discussed earlier, research has shown that consumers
are more comfortable with the idea of restoring an ability than
enhancing it. Therefore, an important caveat to the above hy-
pothesized process of dehumanization is that we do not ex-
pect dehumanization to occur when a technology is being used
explicitly for restoration rather than for enhancement. En-
hancing cognitive abilities to levels that are unobtainable
without enhancement should elicit stereotypical associations
such that the user is seen as lacking emotional abilities and, in
turn, is likened to a robot. However, using a technology for
restoring abilities that were lost (i.e., to disease or injury)
should not elicit these associations and therefore not be de-
humanizing, because a previously attainable (unenhanced)
level of ability is simply being restored to that previous, nor-
mal level. Thus, we expect
H1: Consumers enhancing (compared to restoring)
their cognitive abilities will be seen by others as pos-
sessing fewer emotional abilities and as being more
robotic.
Consequences of Dehumanization
As prior research has shown, consumer attitudes toward
and interest in using enhancement products is largely neg-
ative (Riis et al. 2008; Scheske and Schnall 2012). We argue
that these effects occur, in part, because the process of de-
humanization has social consequences for the dehuman-
ized consumer, which in turn affect prospective consumers’
interest in using the enhancement technology themselves.
People who are dehumanized are treated badly (Cuddy, Rock,
and Norton 2007; Henkel et al. 2018), and dehumanization
has been linked to an increase in perceived distance between
the dehumanized and the dehumanizer and a corresponding
decrease in prosocial behavior toward the dehumanized (Has-
lam and Loughnan 2014). We therefore hypothesize that
enhanced consumers who are dehumanized will suffer from
greater social stigma.
To avoid such incurring social consequences, prospective
consumers of an enhancement technology may be less likely
to use dehumanizing products themselves. In other words,
when a prospective consumer observes another consumer us-
ing an enhancement technology, or views a marketing com-
munication promoting the enhancement technology, the de-
gree to which they see that technology as dehumanizing will
negatively impact their interest in using it themselves. We
therefore identify dehumanization as an important and as-

yet unrecognized factor in shaping consumers’ attitudes to-
ward and interest in using an enhancement technology.
H2: Perceiving an enhancement as dehumanizing will
increase the degree to which the user of that en-
hancement will be stigmatized and decrease prospec-
tive consumers’ interest in using that enhancement
themselves.
Overcoming Dehumanization
Our central hypothesis is that enhancing one of the funda-
mental dimensions of humanness, namely, cognitive abili-
ties, to a level unattainable without enhancement will be de-
humanizing, because it results in the perception that the
enhanced consumer is robotic and lacks emotional abilities,
which is the other fundamental dimension of humanness.
This suggests that mechanistic dehumanization resulting
from cognitive enhancement might not occur when the en-
hanced consumer’s emotional abilities are emphasized, as
might occur when their motivation to use enhancement is
to help other people. This inoculation against dehumaniza-
tion might be achieved, for example, by portraying the user
of the enhancement product as warm and caring, motivated
by helping others, and so on.
A recent video ad from Thync (https://tinyurl.com/y4x
l7tvl), a company producing tDCS devices for consumers, il-
lustrates this approach by telling the story of one of its
users, a father, who uses the cognitive enhancement to bet-
ter connect with and care for his child. By portraying the
user of the enhancement technology as an unselfish person
who cares for others, the company may have succeeded in
emphasizing the user’s emotional side and other-focused
motivations, thus decreasing the likelihood that he would
be dehumanized as an unemotional robot. Note that this
product is clearly a form of cognitive enhancement insofar
as it is claimed to enhance focus, concentration, and learn-
ing, but that this particular marketing strategy emphasizes
how that cognitive enhancement can have benefits for the
user’s ability to be present and better care for other people.
Similar attempts to claim “emotional” benefits from cogni-
tive enhancement could include emphasizing that doctors
using cognitive enhancement are in effect better able to care
for their patients, or the CEO of a nonprofit using cognitive
enhancement in order to better help other people through
their work. Thus, an effective strategy for overcoming the
dehumanizing perception that cognitively enhanced users
lack emotional abilities and are likened to robots may be
to emphasize that the motivation to use cognitive enhance-
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Volume 4 Number 3 2019 221
ment can be prosocial, which should boost the perceived
emotional abilities of the enhanced consumer.
H3: Advertising that emphasizes how cognitive en-
hancement can benefit other people (beyond the en-
hanced individual) will decrease the likelihood that
the enhanced individual is dehumanized, which in
turn will increase prospective consumers’ interest in
using the enhancement themselves.
OVE R V I E W O F T H E ST U D I E S
Study 1 demonstrates the dehumanization effect for a wide
range of radical technological enhancement products. This
study shows specifically that enhancing (vs. restoring) cog-
nitive abilities leads to mechanistic dehumanization by cre-
ating the perception that the enhanced consumer lacks emo-
tional abilities and seems robotic, and documents increased
stigmatization of the enhanced consumer and reduced inter-
est in using the technology among prospective consumers.
Study 2 explores an important moderator of the effect, show-
ing that enhancement technologies cease to be dehumanizing
when the enhanced consumer’s perceived emotional abilities
are bolstered by a prosocial motivation. Finally, study 3 shows
how a marketing campaign based on this moderator can mit-
igate the dehumanization effect and thereby increase inter-
est in enhancement, using a Facebook ad campaign.
ST U DY 1
The first study shows that the dehumanization effect is
broadly applicable to several innovative products and tech-
nologies and also demonstrates the consequences of dehu-
manization for current and prospective consumers of en-
hancement products.
Method
We recruited 574 Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) users
(54% women, mean age 5 34:2) to read one of 10 vignettes,
organized in five pairs. Each vignette asked participants to
imagine an acquaintance using one of five radically new en-
hancement products either to restore abilities that had they
had lost because of a stroke, or to enhance the same abilities
from an already healthy level to a level that he could not
achieve before. The acquaintance was described as an “am-
bitious, type-A personality, who always keeps up with the
latest trends” in order to ensure that participants were
imagining the same kind of person in both the restoration
and enhancement conditions. Three products (a fictitious,
innovative pill; a new smartphone app; and a computer chip
222 Human or Robot? Castelo, Schmitt, and Sarvary
implanted in the brain) were described as either enhancing
or restoring working memory and attentional control, one
product (an augmented reality device) was described as en-
hancing or restoring “cognitive abilities,” and another (the
genetic engineering technique CRISPR) was described as en-
hancing or restoring IQ (see the appendix, available online,
for all stimuli).
After reading the vignette, participants were asked the
extent to which someone who used that particular kind
of technology for that purpose would seem to have a num-
ber of abilities, organized into cognitive abilities (conscien-
tious, analytic, rational, competent, organized; a 5 :87) and
emotional abilities (friendly, warm, fun-loving, emotionally
responsive, passionate; a 5 :92). These measures, and all
subsequent ones, were on scales of 0 (“not at all”) to 10
(“very much”).
Next, to measure the two types of dehumanization, we
asked how robotic and how animalistic the acquaintance
seemed. Participants then reported how realistic, safe, fair,
and effective the enhancement/restoration seemed, because
these are common concerns regarding the use of enhance-
ment products and could therefore be plausible alternative
explanations for our results (Fitz et al. 2014). Additionally,
we asked participants how willing they would be to have
the acquaintance from the vignette move into their neighbor-
hood, become friends with them, start working closely with
them on a job, and have them date someone in their family;
those scales were averaged to create a measure of stigma
(a 5 :94). Finally, participants reported how interested they
would be in using the technology.
Results
Mental Abilities. For generalizability purposes, we chose to
include the type of enhancement as a factor in our analyses,
specifically running a 5 (enhancement product)  2 (res-
toration vs. enhancement) ANOVA with enhancement prod-
uct and restoration versus enhancement as between-subjects
factors and the enhanced consumers’ emotional abilities as
Table 1. Key Results of Study 1
Condition Cognitive abilities Emotional abilities
(1) (2) (3)
Restoration 6.93a 6.25a
Enhancement 6.72a 5.01b
Note.—A consumer using a technological product for enhancement (vs. restoration) is seen as having fewer emotional abilities, being more
robotic, and is more stigmatized. Prospective consumers are thus less interested in using such a product themselves. Means with different
subscripts in the same column are significantly different from each other.
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the first dependent variable. This allows us to test whether
the effects of restoration versus enhancement differ by
product, or are relatively generalizable across products.
This ANOVA revealed significant effects for product,
F(4; 570) 5 5:63, h2 5 :03, p < :001, and the predicted sig-
nificant effect for the outcome of restoration versus
enhancement, F(1; 572) 5 68:96, h2 5 :10, p < :001. The
interaction was not significant, F(4; 568) 5 1:02, h2 5
:006, p 5 :395. The effect of product simply indicates that
some products resulted in lower perceived emotional abili-
ties than others, with a brain implant resulting in the low-
est perceived emotional abilities and a smartphone app re-
sulting in the highest, perhaps because smartphone apps
are already very familiar to most consumers and do not in-
tervene directly on the consumer biologically, making it less
likely that such enhancements are seen as dehumanizing.
Most importantly, as shown in table 1 (col. 3), the restora-
tion/enhancement factor had a significant effect on emotional
abilities ratings (M restore 5 6:25, M enhance 5 5:01, t(572) 5
8:42, p < :001). The main effect of restoration versus en-
hancement and the lack of an interaction confirm the central
hypothesis that, across a wide range of products, enhancing
(but not restoring) cognitive abilities impacts the enhanced
consumer’s perceived emotional abilities.
We then ran a similar ANOVA with cognitive abilities as
the dependent variable and observed no significant effects
for product, F(4; 570) 5 :69, h2 5 :005, p 5 :594, nor the
outcome of restoration versus enhancement, F(1; 572) 5
2:40, h2 5 :004, p 5 :122, and a nonsignificant significant
interaction, F(4; 568) 5 2:13, h2 5 :01, p 5 :075. Thus, us-
ing technology to enhance specific cognitive abilities does
not make the enhanced consumer seem to have higher or
lower levels of other cognitive abilities (see table 1, col. 2).
Note that the cognitive abilities that we measured in this
study are different from the cognitive abilities that were
specified as being enhanced or restored, and so the lack of
effects on the cognitive abilities measure does not suggest
that the products were not perceived as effective.
Robotic Animalistic Stigma Interest in use
(4) (5) (6) (7)
3.16a 2.63a 2.31a 6.15a
5.31b 2.97a 3.65b 4.65b

Dehumanization. Next, we ran a similar 5 (enhancement
product)  2 (outcome: restoration vs. enhancement)
ANOVA using participants’ mechanistic (“robotic”) dehu-
manization ratings as the dependent measure. The results
are highly similar to the previous ANOVAs. The degree to
which the enhanced consumer seemed robotic was affected
by the product being used, F(4; 570) 5 6:89, h2 5 :04,
p < :001, by restoration versus enhancement, F(1; 572) 5
86:85, h2 5:12, p < :001, and, marginally, by the interac-
tion of the product and the outcome, F(4; 568) 5 2:35,
h2 5 :01, p 5 :053. Specifically, the enhanced consumer
was mechanistically dehumanized more when using a tech-
nology for enhancement than for restoration (Mrestore 5
3:16, Menhance 5 5:31, t(572) 5 9:09, p < :001; see table 1,
col. 4). Dehumanization was highest when using a brain im-
plant and lowest when using a smartphone app. The inter-
action indicates that the restoration versus enhancement
had a significant effect on dehumanization for all products
except for smartphone apps (smartphone app F(1; 98) 5
1:78, p 5 :186; all other F > 14:44, p < :001).
Turning to the animalistic dehumanization ratings, sur-
prisingly the degree to which the enhanced consumer
seemed like an animal was also affected by the technology
being used, F(4; 570) 5 2:62, h2 5 :02, p 5 :034, margin-
ally affected by the outcome of restoration versus enhance-
ment, F(1; 572) 5 2:94, h2 5 :004, p 5 :087, and qualified
by a significant interaction, F(4; 568) 5 3:09, h2 5 :02,
p 5 :016. The enhanced consumer seemed most animalis-
tic when using a brain implant, least animalistic when using
a smartphone app, and marginally more animalistic when
enhancing (M 5 2:97) than when restoring cognitive abil-
ities (M 5 2:63, t(574) 5 1:69, p 5 :091). The interaction
indicates that restoration versus enhancement had an ef-
fect on animalistic ratings when the enhancement product
was a pill, F(1; 106) 5 7:81, h2 5 :07, p 5 :006, or CRISPR,
F(1; 145) 5 5:15, h2 5 :03, p 5 :025, but not for the re-
maining products, all F < 2:71, p > :103.
Together with the previous ANOVAs conducted on men-
tal abilities, our results provide evidence for hypothesis 1:
enhancing, rather than restoring, cognitive abilities results
in the denial of emotional abilities as well as likening the
enhanced consumer to a robot.
Stigma. A 5 (enhancement product)  2 (outcome: restora-
tion vs. enhancement) between-subjects ANOVA with stigma
as the dependent variable revealed a main effect of restora-
tion/enhancement, F(1; 572) 5 89:83, h2 5 :07, p < :0001,
no main effect of product, F(4; 570) 5 1:61, h2 5 :008,
p 5 :169, and a significant interaction, F(4; 568) 5 4:31,
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Volume 4 Number 3 2019 223
h2 5 :01, p 5 :001. As table 1 (col. 6) shows, stigma toward
the consumer was higher when a product was being used for
enhancement (M 5 3:65) than for restoration (M 5 2:31,
t(572) 5 9:15, p < :0001). This confirms that enhancement
products can increase stigma directed toward the enhanced
consumer. Where higher numbers reflect more stigma (less
willingness to have the enhanced consumer move into one’s
neighborhood, make friends with them, etc.), using a technol-
ogy for enhancement versus restoration increased stigma
when using a brain implant (M restore 5 1:96, Menhance 5
3:83, t(127) 5 3:77, p 5 < :001), augmented reality
(M restore 5 1:64, M enhance 5 3:87, t(98) 5 4:66, p < :001),
and CRISPR (Mrestore 5 2:15, M enhance 5 3:61, t(145) 5
3:53, p < :001), but not when using a smartphone app or a
pill (p > :05).
Interest in Use. As table 1 (col. 7) shows, interest in the
products was higher when the technologies were used for
restoration (M 5 6:15) than for enhancement (M 5 4:65,
t(572) 5 5:44, p < :0001). We used a regression analysis
to explore which factors contributed to consumers’ interest
in using the enhancement technologies themselves. Collaps-
ing across all five technologies and specifying interest in
use as the dependent variable, we included the following
factors as independent variables: enhancement versus resto-
ration, b 5 :18, p 5 :414, how animalistic the enhanced
consumer seemed (b 5 :06, p 5 :185), how robotic the en-
hanced consumer seemed (b 5 2:14, p 5 :002), and how
fair (b 5 :08, p 5 :109), effective (b 5 :26, p < :0001), real-
istic (b 5 :09, p 5 :041), familiar (b 5 :09p 5 :023), and
safe (b 5 :25, p < :0001) the enhancement seemed to par-
ticipants, as well as participants’ age (b 5 2:008, p 5 :377)
and gender (b 5 2:43, p 5 :038), indicating less interest
among females. The fact that how robotic the enhanced con-
sumer seemed remained a significant predictor of interest in
use, even controlling for these other factors, suggests that de-
humanization of the enhanced consumer is indeed an im-
portant factor for marketers of enhancement technologies
to consider in their efforts to increase interest in their prod-
ucts.
Mediation. In order to validate our proposed process of de-
humanization and its consequences, we ran a serial media-
tion model that tests hypotheses 1 and 2 together (see fig. 1).
Restoration versus enhancement predicted the degree to
which the enhanced consumer was perceived to have emo-
tional abilities, which in turn predicted the degree to which
they were seen as robotic (hypothesis 1), which in turn pre-
dicted stigma toward the consumer, which finally predicted
224 Human or Robot? Castelo, Schmitt, and Sarvary
Figure 1. Consumers using a technological product for enhancement (vs. restoration) are seen as having fewer emotional abilities, more
robotic, and is more stigmatized. Prospective consumers are thus less interested in using such a product themselves.
participants’ interest in using the technology themselves (hy-
pothesis 2). The indirect effect was b 5 :08, 95% confidence
interval [CI] [.05, .14]. The direct effect of restoration (coded
as 1) versus enhancement (coded as 0) on interest in use was
b 5 1:50, p < :001; when controlling for the three mediators,
this effect was no longer significant (b 5 :09, p 5 :718).
In order to test hypotheses 1 and 2 separately, we also
conducted separate mediation analyses for the two pro-
cesses that are presented together in figure 1. First, per-
ceived emotional abilities mediated the effect of restoration
versus enhancement on how robotic the user seemed. The
direct effect of restoration versus enhancement on per-
ceived roboticness (b 5 22:16, p < :001) was reduced
but still significant when accounting for emotional abilities
as a mediator ( b 5 21:46, p < :001), and the indirect ef-
fect was significant ( b 5 2:70, 95% CI [2.94, 2.50]). This
confirms hypothesis 1, that using enhancement products
for enhancement versus restoration leads to a decrease in
perceived emotional abilities of the enhanced consumer,
which in turn makes them seem more robotic.
Second, stigma mediated the effect of perceived robotic-
ness on interest in use. The direct effect of roboticness
on interest in use (b 5 2:44, p < :001) was reduced but
still significant when accounting for stigma as a mediator
(b 5 2:23, p < :001), and the indirect effect was signifi-
cant (b 5 2:22, 95% CI [2.27, 2.16]). This confirms hy-
pothesis 2, that perceiving an enhancement as dehumaniz-
ing will increase stigma for the enhanced consumer, in turn
decreasing prospective consumers’ interest in use.
Discussion
Study 1 contributes in several ways to our understanding of
consumers’ interest in enhancement. First, it demonstrates
that products that enhance cognitive abilities produce
mechanistic dehumanization (likening the person to a ro-
bot) because the enhanced consumer seems to be denied
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(or perceived to be possessing fewer) emotional abilities.
Second, the study demonstrates an important social conse-
quence (increased stigma) for the users of enhancement
technologies. Third, it demonstrates that these perceptions
of humanness and the stigma resulting from them are ro-
bust predictors of prospective consumers’ interest in using
the technologies themselves, even controlling for a wide
range of other relevant factors. In sum, the study provides
clear evidence for a process of dehumanization and its con-
sequences.
Although unexpected, the fact that enhancing cognitive
abilities can also sometimes produce animalistic dehuman-
ization suggests that the consequences of dehumanization
are perhaps even stronger and broader than we had antic-
ipated. One potential explanation for this unexpected find-
ing is that enhancing one’s abilities creates the perception
that the improved abilities are attributed more to the prod-
uct than to the consumer of the product, and that this re-
flects a lack of agency or control over one’s abilities, com-
bined with the fact that animals tend to be associated
with a lack of intentional agency (Gray, Gray, and Wegner
2009). Future research should explore this and other po-
tential mechanisms in more detail.
Furthermore, the marginal interactions between prod-
uct and restoration versus enhancement that we observed
suggest that there are some limits to the main effect of res-
toration versus enhancement on dehumanization. Products
that are already very familiar to consumers, or that do not
intervene directly on the enhanced consumer, such as
smartphone apps, may be able to provide enhancement
without dehumanization.
ST U DY 2
How can dehumanization from cognitive enhancement be
overcome? As discussed earlier, one way to improve atti-
tudes toward enhancement, which follows directly from

our theorizing, is to emphasize that the enhanced consumer
can be motivated by a desire to help other people and not
only themselves. In light of existing research on the psychol-
ogy of person perception, this would be expected to prevent
the negative effects of any stereotypical associations be-
tween cognitive abilities and unfeeling robots. We conducted
study 2 to test whether such an approach can inoculate en-
hanced consumers against dehumanization.
In addition, this study employs a different operational-
ization of restoration versus enhancement. Our first study
operationalized restoration as restoring functioning that
had been lost due to a stroke while enhancement was de-
scribed in the context of a healthy person. In the present
study, we instead keep the initial health of the enhanced
consumer constant and manipulate restoration versus en-
hancement in a way that is not confounded with sickness
versus health. Finally, we used one of the stimuli from study
1 as the enhancement product: a fictitious, innovative pill
that would affect working memory and attentional control.
Method
We recruited 201 MTurk users (57% women, mean age 5
36:2) to read one of four vignettes organized in a 2 (restora-
tion vs. enhancement)  2 (description of consumer: selfish
vs. prosocial) between-subjects design. In all conditions, the
enhanced consumer was described as a male suffering from
extreme stress at work, which had damaged his cognitive
abilities including working memory and attentional con-
trol. In the restoration conditions, he was described as tak-
ing a pill which restored those abilities to the level they had
been at before the stress. In the enhancement conditions,
he was described as taking a pill enhancing the abilities
to a level higher than he was able to achieve before. The de-
scription of the enhanced consumer was manipulated by de-
scribing him either as a “warm and caring personality who
works as a social worker” (prosocial motivation) or as an “am-
bitious, type-A personality, who always keeps up with the
latest trends” (selfish motivation) which is how we described
the enhanced consumer in all conditions in the previous
study. In the former, the enhancement was said to allow
the consumer to better care for his patients, while in the lat-
ter it was said to benefit only himself. After reading the vi-
gnette, participants completed the same measures as in the
previous study.
Results
A 2  2 ANOVA using restoration versus enhancement
and the description of the consumer to predict the enhanced
consumer’s perceived emotional abilities revealed effects
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Volume 4 Number 3 2019 225
for restoration versus enhancement, F(1; 199) 5 4:14,
h2 5 :02, p 5 :043; the description of the consumer,
F(1; 199) 5 32:35, h2 5 :14, p < :001; and their interac-
tion, F(3; 197) 5 4:59, h2 5 :02, p 5 :033. Breaking down
the interaction, we found that restoration versus enhance-
ment had a significant effect on perceived emotional abili-
ties in the selfish conditions (Mrestore 5 6:14, Menhance 5
5:16, t(199) 5 2:88, p 5 :005) but had no effect in
the prosocial conditions (Mrestore 5 7:02, M enhance 5 7:05,
t(199) 5 2 :07, p 5 :937.) See figure 2 for a visual depiction
of these results.
A second ANOVA using the same independent variables to
predict how robotic the consumer seemed revealed effects for
restoration versus enhancement, F(1; 199) 5 3:55, h2 5 :02,
p 5 :061; the description of the consumer, F(1; 199) 5
14:72, h2 5 :07, p < :001; but no interaction, F(3; 197) 5
:98, h2 5 :004, p 5 :322. Enhancement made the consumer
seem marginally more robotic (M 5 4:62) compared to res-
toration (M 5 3:90, t(199) 5 1:82, p 5 :070), and the pro-
social consumer seemed less robotic (M 5 3:56) than the
neutrally described consumer (M 5 4:94, t(199) 5 3:61,
p < :001). Despite the lack of a significant interaction, follow-
up analyses showed that restoration versus enhancement
had an effect on how robotic the consumer seemed only
when the consumers’ motivations were selfish (M restore 5
4:39, Menhance 5 5:62, t(199) 5 2:12, p 5 :030) but not
when his motivations were prosocial (Mrestore 5 3:30,
M enhance 5 3:78, t(199) 5 :92, p 5 :363). These results
are therefore directionally consistent with our theory and
mirror the results obtained for the measure of perceived
emotional abilities reported above.
Two additional ANOVAs revealed that the consumers’
cognitive abilities were not affected by restoration versus
enhancement, F(1; 199) 5 :14, h2 5 :0002, p 5 :704; nor
by the description of the consumer, F(1; 199) 5 2:74,
Figure 2. Consumers using a technological product for enhancement
(vs. restoration) are seen as having fewer emotional abilities but only
when the enhancement is for selfish (vs. prosocial) purposes.
226 Human or Robot? Castelo, Schmitt, and Sarvary
h2 5 :01, p 5 :100; or by their interaction, F(3; 197) 5
2:43, h2 5 :01, p 5 :120. The degree to which the consumer
seemed like an animal was also not affected by restoration
versus enhancement, F(1; 199) 5 :003, h2 5 :0001, p 5
:960; that it was affected the description of the consumer,
F(1; 199) 5 4:65, h2 5 :02, p 5 :032; but not by their in-
teraction, F(3; 197) 5 1:38, h2 5 :007, p 5 :241. The con-
sumer seemed more like an animal when he was described
as selfish (M 5 3:46) than when he was described as pro-
social (M 5 2:75, t(199) 5 2:16, p 5 :032).
Moderated Mediation. We next tested whether the medi-
ation process hypothesized in hypotheses 1 and 2 and dem-
onstrated in study 1 would be replicated in the neutral
condition but not in the caring condition, in which the re-
lationship between restoration versus enhancement and
perceived emotional abilities would no longer be observed.
As expected, the process was replicated in the selfish condi-
tion: restoration versus enhancement predicted the degree
to which the enhanced consumer was perceived to have emo-
tional abilities (b 5 :98, p 5 :004), which in turn predicted
the degree to which they seen as robotic (b 5 2:52, p 5
:001), which in turn predicted stigma toward the consumer
(b 5 :38, p < :001), which finally predicted participants’
interest in using the technology themselves (b 5 2:53,
p < :001). The indirect effect was b 5 :06, 95% CI [.01,
.21].
In contrast, in the prosocial condition, this process was
not observed. Restoration versus enhancement did not pre-
dict perceived emotional abilities (b 5 2:02, p 5 :937), and
the indirect effect was not significant (b 5 2:004, 95% CI
[2.124, .119]).
This study therefore confirmed that the effect of cognitive
enhancement on mechanistic dehumanization can be pre-
vented by emphasizing that the enhancement can be used
to benefit people other than the enhanced consumer, since
it prevents the enhanced consumer from being seen as lack-
ing emotional abilities. That is, increasing the perceived emo-
tional abilities of the user of an enhancement product can
inoculate the enhanced consumer against mechanistic de-
humanization. Study 3 will test the validity of this approach
further in a marketing field study.
ST UDY 3
In the final study, we sought to apply the findings from
study 2 in two steps. We first conducted study 3A in which
we confirmed that the degree to which a consumer is dehu-
manized can be effectively manipulated using the features
of a display ad. Next, in study 3B, we designed a real adver-
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tising campaign on Facebook in which we manipulated the-
oretically relevant constructs using Facebook ads for a cog-
nitive enhancement product and measured the impact of
our manipulations on click-through rates (CTR). We used
tDCS as the enhancement product, which is a wearable
technology that stimulates the user’s brain using electricity
in order to improve brain function.
Study 3A
We recruited 201 MTurk users (57% women, mean age 5
33:8) who saw one of two advertisements for a wearable
technology product that was said to “enhance their cognitive
abilities (such as working memory and attentional control)
by stimulating the brain with safe, low-level electrical pulses,”
a description of tDCS adapted from the website of com-
pany producing these devices for consumers (Thync). Both
ads featured an image of a male consumer of the product.
One ad emphasized the consumer’s selfish motivations for
enhancement with a tagline that read “Lead, compete, domi-
nate. For your career.” The second ad stressed the user’s pro-
social motivations with a tagline that read “Support, under-
stand, empathize. For your family.” Please see the appendix
for the ads used.
After viewing the ad, participants rated the extent to which
someone who uses this kind of technology would seem to
have the five emotional abilities measured in the previous
two studies. Participants also reported how robotic the user
would seem and how interested they would be in using this
kind of technology themselves. All measures used scales of
0 (not at all) to 10 (very much).
Results indicated that the selfish ad was more dehuman-
izing than the prosocial ad. Participants who saw the selfish
ad reported that someone who uses this kind of technology
would seem to have fewer emotional abilities (M 5 3:53)
compared to participants who saw the prosocial ad (M 5
3:80, t(199) 5 1:68, p 5 :093), and would seem more
robotic (M 5 3:95 versus M 5 3:21, t(199) 5 1:77, p 5
:078). The degree to which participants thought that the
user of this kind of technology seemed to lack emotional
abilities in turn predicted participants’ interest in using
the enhancement themselves, b 5 21:16, p < :001. Study 3A
therefore confirms that theory-based manipulations of a
display ad can successfully affect the degree to which the
consumer in the ad is dehumanized, which in turn can affect
interest in using the technology.
Study 3B
We randomly exposed 22,371 Facebook users (44.6% fe-
male, mean age not reported) to one of the two ads that

we used in study 3A. The ads were displayed on the Face-
book newsfeed as sponsored posts under a headline that
read “Try a new wearable technology that directly enhances
your brain” and above the caption that read “Enhance your
brain. Improve your life.” We did not restrict the participants
in the study based on any demographic factors, and the ads
were displayed continuously for 5 days in total. If users
clicked on the ad, they were taken to a page explaining that
the ad was part of an academic study. We measured click-
through rates as the dependent variable (the number of
people who clicked on the ad divided by the number of peo-
ple who were exposed to the ad). CTR for the prosocial ad
(1.04%) was significantly higher than the selfish ad (0.61%;
x2 (1) 5 6:67, p 5 :009). This range of CTRs is comparable
to the rates seen in other recent research using Facebook
advertising field studies (Matz et al. 2017). Together with
study 3A, this result confirms that advertisements empha-
sizing the prosocial, other-focused motivations of an en-
hanced consumer may be used to reduce the extent to which
a consumer is dehumanized, and in turn can increase inter-
est in using the technology among consumers viewing the
advertisement.
GENERAL DISCUSSION
We provided evidence that consumers who enhance their
cognitive abilities using new innovation products and tech-
nologies can be dehumanized, and this dehumanization pre-
dicts consumers’ interest in using enhancement products.
The process of dehumanization thus likely explains, in part,
why consumers’ interest in enhancement products tends to
be low (Riis et al. 2008; Scheske and Schnall 2012) and sug-
gests how marketers can increase interest in these increas-
ingly powerful products, namely, by emphasizing the pro-
social or selfless motivations of their users, or the ways
in which the use of the product can benefit other people.
Theoretical Contributions
Our research contributes, first and foremost, to research
on radical innovation. “Big innovations” affecting people’s
bodies and minds are an increasingly important topic for
consumer researchers, and yet the majority of existing con-
sumer research on this topic has focused on innovations that
are external to the consumer’s body and mind. We there-
fore introduce the study of radical consumer enhancement
technologies that are closely linked to humanness to the
consumer-behavior literature.
In addition, our research contributes to the literature on
enhancement technologies. Whereas past research has largely
explored consumer attitudes and moral judgments toward
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Volume 4 Number 3 2019 227
enhancement (Scheske and Schnall 2012; Williams and
Steffel 2014), we document the importance of a previously
unrecognized theoretical construct—dehumanization—in
shaping interest in use, above and beyond the degree to
which the enhanced abilities are seen as fundamental to
the self (Riis et al. 2008). In addition to confirming prior
findings that consumers are more interested in cognitive
than emotional enhancement, and in restoration versus en-
hancement, we provide in-depth explanations of the pro-
cess underlying these preferences. For example, dehumani-
zation and its consequences (i.e., increased stigma) helps to
understand why consumers are more wary of “embellishing”
than “enabling” abilities (Williams and Steffel 2014). Fur-
thermore, although prior research has identified the impor-
tance of factors such as fairness and safety in shaping con-
sumers’ attitudes (Scheske and Schnall 2012), our research
demonstrates that dehumanization plays an important role
in shaping attitudes—and specifically interest in using en-
hancement—even controlling for these other factors.
Our research also provides an extension to existing the-
ories of dehumanization and demonstrates the relevance of
this social-psychological construct in a consumer context
(Haslam 2006; Haslam and Loughnan 2014). That is, while
prior theory has mainly examined dehumanization in the
context of racial, gender, and ethnic groups, we examine de-
humanization in the commercial context of marketing en-
hancement products. Our findings suggest that perceptions
of humanness and the process of dehumanization consist
of more than simply the presence or absence of specific
abilities. Rather, there are also stereotypical associations
between different kinds of abilities that are relevant to de-
humanization. Furthermore, the level of those abilities rel-
ative to the normal range of human abilities seems to mat-
ter a great deal for the process of dehumanization.
Specifically, our research seems to indicate that in the
context of enhancement, consumers have strong associa-
tions between highly advanced cognitive abilities and un-
emotional robots, which suggests that such stereotypical
thinking can influence how consumers think about the in-
terplay between cognitive and emotional abilities. Interest-
ingly, across all studies cognitive and emotional abilities
were seen as positively correlated (ranging from .42 to
.56). Thus, while the two sets of abilities are not necessarily
seen in terms of a trade-off, our data clearly indicate that
enhancing cognitive abilities using technologies can trigger
associations with robots, which in turn decreases the per-
ceived emotional abilities of the enhanced consumer.
It is this association between advanced cognitive abili-
ties and robots that serves as the key theoretical explana-
228 Human or Robot? Castelo, Schmitt, and Sarvary
tion for our documented dehumanization effect. People
perceive humanness as consisting of two dimensions—here
referred to as emotion and cognition—and dehumanization
occurs when we deny a person abilities on one of the two di-
mensions (Haslam and Loughnan 2014). We find that en-
hancing one dimension of these basic human abilities leads
others to perceive that the enhanced individual lacks the
other set of basic human abilities, which is dehumanizing.
Practical Implications
While the debate surrounding the moral propriety of en-
hancement has been largely confined to bioethics (Presi-
dent’s Council on Bioethics 2003), our work offers insights
to marketers by studying how consumers themselves view
enhancement technologies. Our results suggest that con-
sumers are wary of enhancement technologies; they perceive
and subsequently stigmatize users of these technologies as
less human and more robotic, which ultimately decreases
their own interest in using the technology. Because these
technologies can be marketed directly to consumers and
may be much less regulated than the pharmaceutical en-
hancements studied in prior research (Riis et al. 2008; Wil-
liams and Steffel 2014), marketers, now and in the future,
may have great flexibility in how they portray these en-
hancement technologies. Based on the results of our article,
we recommend that simply positioning a new product as a
new and innovative cognitive enhancement technology may
risk creating a perception that the users of the product are
seen as unemotional and robotic, whereas infusing the prod-
uct positioning with symbolism highlighting that the user is
an emotional human being can help inoculate potential users
against dehumanization.
Beyond these marketing implications, our results also
speak to the broader ethical debate surrounding the use
of enhancement technologies. Many prominent social com-
mentators believe that the technologies we study here have
the potential to transcend the biological limits of Homo sa-
piens and possess “transhuman” abilities. There is sharp dis-
agreement regarding the desirability of this outcome. Whereas
some tend to celebrate the removal of biological limits and
envision a future in which humans can live unimaginably
stimulating, long-lasting, healthy, and productive lives thanks
to enhancement technologies (Bostrom 2013), others strongly
oppose the use of “unnatural” means to tamper with human
nature and believe that those who do so are degrading human
dignity (Fukayama 2002). Our results suggest that consumers
are more closely aligned with the latter view on this critical
issue.
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Future Research
Exploring technological dehumanization in more detail is an
important task for future research. First, while we demon-
strated that restoration versus enhancement is a key factor
that contributes to judgments of humanness and ultimately
to consumers’ interest in using the technology, other dimen-
sions should be explored in future research. For example,
there may exist individual difference variables that moderate
our effects. Our effects may be particularly strong amongst
consumers with strong essentialist beliefs (Chiu, Hong, and
Dweck 1997; Haslam et al. 2004), insofar as those consumers
might be more likely to perceive technological enhancement
as a violation of “human nature.” Similarly, the level of tech-
nological product expertise (of both the user and the judge)
may be an additional moderator to consider (Alba and Hutch-
inson 1987). Future research may also explore additional fac-
tors besides emotional user symbolism that could mitigate
dehumanization. For example, participants may be asked to
consider using the enhancement themselves rather than an-
other person, since some research has shown that people
are less likely to dehumanize themselves than to dehuman-
ize others (Haslam et al. 2005), since they also tend to hold
double standards regarding the acceptability of enhance-
ment for self versus others (Williams and Steffel 2014).
Ample opportunities exist to explore the consumer psy-
chology of enhancement technologies in a broader social con-
text. For example, one could investigate whether consumers
consider distributive justice when forming their attitudes to-
ward enhancement. That is, would a rich person using an ex-
pensive enhancement technology be judged more harshly
than someone of lesser financial means? Further, what sort
of public policies might consumers support for regulating
the use of enhancement technologies, and how might they
balance the improved outcomes that such products can offer
against concerns regarding distributive justice and economic
inequality? More research on how consumers perceive en-
hancements technologies and those who use them has the po-
tential to provide critical knowledge about this revolution-
ary trend.
Conclusion
Rapid “big innovation” progress in the basic sciences and in
the fields of nanotechnology, biotechnology, information
technology, and cognitive science indicates that the trend
toward enhancing human abilities and abilities using tech-
nology will only become more important in the coming
years (Roco and Bainbridge 2003; Kurzweil 2005; Bostrom
2013). Indeed, human enhancement technologies are be-

coming increasingly popular as “lifestyle” products (Racine
and Forlini 2008; Dubljević, Saigle, and Racine 2014). As
technology continues to blur the lines between human and
robot, consumer research can play an important role in en-
suring that consumers, firms, and policy makers can navi-
gate these unfamiliar waters armed with behavioral data
to make sure that enhanced humans are still seen as humans
and not as robots.
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