This study shows that people experiencing financial dissatisfaction may choose and consume food for its energy value. Because money and food are closely related, exchangeable resources, financially dissatisfied people may be motivated to replenish their need for financial resources by consuming caloric resources or food energy. Five experiments provide support for this hypothesis across various measures of caloric desire and actual eating behavior. The findings have notable implications for marketing and public policy. Whereas marketing researchers have increasingly investigated the interplay of taste and health considerations in food consumption, this research demonstrates the importance of investigating food energy considerations.

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Companies have repeatedly launched Artificial Intelligence (AI) products such as intelligent chatbots and robots with female names, voices, and bodies. Previous research posits that people intuitively favor female over male bots, mainly because female bots are judged as warmer and more likely to experience emotions. We present five online studies, including four preregistered, with a total sample of over 3,000 participants that go beyond this longstanding perception of femininity. Because warmth and experience (but not competence) are seen as fundamental qualities to be a full human but are lacking in machines, we argue that people prefer female bots because they are perceived as more human than male bots. Using implicit, subtle, and blatant scales of humanness, our results consistently show that women (Studies 1A and 1B), female bots (Studies 2 and 3), and female chatbots (Study 4) are perceived as more human than their male counterparts when compared with non‐human entities (animals and machines). Study 4 investigates explicitly the acceptance of gendered algorithms operated by AI chatbots in a health context. We found that the female chatbot is preferred over the male chatbot because it is perceived as more human and more likely to consider our unique needs. These results highlight the ethical quandary faced by AI designers and policymakers: Women are said to be transformed into objects in AI, but injecting women's humanity into AI objects makes these objects seem more human and acceptable.

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Anne-Sophie Chaxel acknowledges research support from Investissements d'Avenir ANR-11-IDEX-0003 / Labex ECODEC No. ANR-11-LABX-0047. The authors would like to thank Prof. J. Edward Russo for helping write the materials used in Study 1 and 2, and for commenting on early drafts of this manuscript.

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