Market researchers find that we humans are so gullible we'll buy an anthropomorphized product because we think it's smiling at us

Hi! I am Thunderbird.

You will now see a picture of a Thunderbird.

Take a wild guess which car study participants described more favorably. Researchers from the University of Toronto found...

that people prefer the first car.

Why? Because it's presented in the first person and "smiling" while the second car is described in third person and "frowning." The research confirms what marketers have long perceived: that not only do we easily anthropomorphize objects, but we evaluate them based on their human-like features.

The research also showed that we'll have good evaluations of a product if we feel their human features are to our liking. To this end, the study presented participants with two identical pairs of bottles, dubbed "good twins" and "evil twins." The good twins were described with phrases such as “we are the beverage twins who will do any parents proud,” “we are both equally good." While the "evil twin" bottles were characterized by phrases such as “we are the evil twins,” “begin our reign of terror. . . conquer your city,” “you will be sorry if you don’t choose one of us."

Ahem. Right. Well, I'd take whatever car I could afford, but there's no way I'd drink from the evil twins.

The study, conducted by Pankaj Aggarwal and Ann L. McGill, is forthcoming in the Journal of Consumer Research, December 2007.