According to a new study from the Kellogg School, you’ll likely take more precautions against a sneaky agent than a plain old virus. Research shows that people are more likely to comply with health recommendations when diseases are anthropomorphized and given human characteristics, such as names, personalities or jobs.
“If you think about a disease in human terms, you’ll be more likely to try to avoid it,” he says Maferima Touré-Tillery, associate professor of marketing. At the same time he wrote the newspaper Lily Wang of Zhejiang University and Ann L. McGill of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.
Previous research has shown that anthropomorphizing our cars and dogs makes us feel closer to them. the same, it turns out, is true of diseases. Proximity to the disease, the researchers found, evokes feelings of vulnerability. “Thinking about an illness in human terms—terms that are closer to me—makes me feel more vulnerable,” explains Touré-Tillery. “And that’s what prompts people to say, ‘Maybe I should wear a mask’ or ‘Maybe I should get this shot.’
Taking steps to avoid Mr. (or Mrs.) disease.
Researchers have conducted several studies to determine the relationship between anthropomorphism and health compliance. In one, they recruited 166 American participants to complete an online study. Participants read about a scenario in which they might be exposed to yellow fever, a viral infection transmitted through mosquito bites. For half of the participants, the condition was anthropomorphized as “Mr. Yellow fever?” for the other half, it was simply described as “yellow fever”.
Participants then rated from one to seven how likely they would be to take various precautions against yellow fever, such as getting vaccinated before traveling. They also answered basic demographic questions and disclosed whether they had personal experience with yellow fever. (If they did, the researchers excluded them from the analysis.)
Participants were more likely to take precautions against “Mr. Yellow fever’ and not just ‘yellow fever’, the researchers found.
The researchers found the same pattern in several other experiments. Participants were more willing to comply with health recommendations when faced with anthropomorphized compared to non-anthropomorphized COVID-19. They were also more likely to take precautions against a humanized non-communicable disease, breast cancer. These experiments involved both American and Chinese participants, suggesting that the tendency to change behavior in response to anthropomorphized illnesses is cross-cultural. However, Touré-Tillery recommends that health communicators find a method of anthropomorphizing an illness that produces positive results because it is humanized but at the same time does not downplay the seriousness of the health condition.
From proximity to vulnerability
The first phase of the study showed that people are taking greater precautions against man-made diseases, but did not reveal Why. So in their next set of experiments, the researchers decided to investigate the mechanism behind the pattern they were seeing.
They recruited 308 female students at a Chinese university and randomly assigned them to one of two groups. In the first group, participants read about non-anthropomorphized breast cancer. in the second, the breast cancer described itself in the first person (“I am breast cancer”). All participants then read about the importance of breast self-examination.
Participants then indicated how likely they would be to perform a breast self-examination in the next week. They also showed how close they felt with breast cancer. how concrete and abstract the illness felt to them. and how alive, alert, and in control they felt—all potential explanations for why anthropomorphism may induce increased compliance with health recommendations.
Consistent with previous experiments, participants in the anthropomorphized group reported higher intentions to perform breast self-examination than those in the control group. (Participants who had a previous diagnosis of breast cancer were excluded from the analysis.) They also felt greater psychological closeness and vulnerability to the disease. There was no difference between anthropomorphized participants and control group participants on measures of accuracy, vividness, alertness, and control, indicating that these factors did not explain their greater intentions to perform breast self-examination.
The researchers conducted further statistical analysis that showed what Touré-Tillery calls a “causal chain reaction”: anthropomorphism leads to greater feelings of psychological closeness, which in turn creates a greater sense of vulnerability, resulting in a greater willingness to comply with health recommendations.
In a second experiment, using an almost identical setup, the researchers ruled out several other possible explanations for the result. They asked participants about self-efficacy (“To what extent do you feel able to take the necessary steps to avoid breast cancer?”), disease severity (“How serious a health problem is breast cancer?”) and response efficacy (“To what extent do you think breast self-examination is an effective way to avoid breast cancer?”)—all factors that have been shown to influence health behavior.
“We wanted to see if these processes could explain the effect we observed, but we found that they did not,” says Touré-Tillery—further strengthening their explanation of an anthropomorphism-proximity-sensitivity chain reaction.
When anthropomorphizing the disease helps most
So, how can anthropomorphism be most effectively deployed to promote public health? Touré-Tillery says the benefits are strongest among people who aren’t already worried or alert about a particular disease.
For example, men are much less likely to regularly wear sunscreen or understand its benefits than women, so an anthropomorphized skin cancer character is more likely to actually change their behavior.
“Be specific in your targeting,” advises Touré-Tillery. “When we’re messaging, we want to reach people who aren’t already engaging in health behaviors. It may be because they simply do not know or because they do not feel particularly vulnerable to the disease. And anthropomorphism can help them understand their vulnerability in a very subtle way.”
He hopes future research will explore how this particular type of anthropomorphism might affect the precautions people are willing to take. For example, the experiments in this study used “Mr.”—participants would respond to “Ms. Yellow Fever” in the same way? Will it differ between male and female participants? Could the anthropomorphization of health-promoting behaviors itself have a beneficial effect?
“It would be important to identify other caveats and associated factors,” he says.
