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It's Alive! Increasing Protective Action Against the Coronavirus Through Anthropomorphism and Construal News outlets often depict the coronavirus as a "burglar" or a "killer"-even though viruses are not technically alive. While imbuing this virus with human-like qualities may enable the public to feel as if they are better able to understand it, does anthropomorphizing the coronavirus lead people to adopt protective behaviors against the spread of the disease? Integrating construal level theory, we argue that anthropomorphizing an agent makes it seem more understandable, which decreases its psychological distance. And through construal matching between the message and consumers' temporal focus, we demonstrate that when the coronavirus is anthropomorphized, people are more likely to adopt protective measures when they are focused on the present versus the future because consumers believe the anthropomorphized coronavirus to be more powerful. Our findings contribute to both anthropomorphism and construal level theory research. Additionally, our findings offer implications for health communication strategies and public policy.

We examine decision-making under risk as a function of the degree to which consumers anthropomorphize their luck. We propose that consumers make riskier financial decisions when they anthropomorphize (vs. objectify) their luck and that this effect occurs because humanizing luck engenders a perceived sharing of risk in the presence of "lady luck." A series of experiments shows that consumers among whom anthropomorphized versus objectified luck is salient display greater risk-taking in financial, but not social, decisions. These effects are heightened among consumers who frequently engage in risky decision-making and are driven by perceptions of risk-sharing produced by anthropomorphized luck. Collectively, these findings document how anthropomorphizing luck can influence consumers' decision-making within the financial domain. We discuss important consumer welfare implications associated with the negative consequences that result from repeated detrimental consumer behaviors, particularly given the pervasive use of anthropomorphized luck by marketers in the gambling domain.For a change, lady luck seemed to be smiling on me. Then again, maybe the fickle wench was just lulling me into a false sense of security while she reached for a rock.

Can spicy gustatory sensations increase variety-seeking in subsequent unrelated choices-and if so, how? The present research explores these questions. Based on the metaphor "variety is the spice of life," and drawing on research on metaphors and embodied cognition, the authors propose that spicy gustatory sensations may activate a desire to be interesting that leads to greater variety in subsequent unrelated choices. Specifically, the first study demonstrates that tasting spicy vs. mild potato chips results in greater variety-seeking in candy bars-but only when there is a time delay between the gustatory sensation and the variety-seeking choice task, suggesting an underlying motivational process. Further, the effect of spicy gustatory sensations on varietyseeking strengthens as the time delay increases, consistent with a motivational account. The second study provides evidence for a metaphor-based explanation of the effect by demonstrating that while there is no difference in variety-seeking among consumers who have tasted a spicy candy and those merely primed with the metaphor "variety is the spice of life," variety-seeking is lower among consumers who have tasted a mild candy. This study also rules out taste-related factors as an alternative explanation.