A seven-item unipolar scale measuring the degree to which a person is perceived as mechanistic or dehumanised — stripped of the qualities associated with full human agency, uniqueness, and vitality. Items use single-word descriptors capturing emotional coldness, rigidity, fungibility, superficiality, passivity, and inertness, reflecting the mechanistic dehumanisation pathway theorised by Haslam (2006) in which people are likened to automata or objects. Developed in social psychology and applied in consumer research examining how machine-like health messaging portrays human body functions.
Haslam, Nick (2006). Dehumanization: An integrative review. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 10(3), 252–264. [Applied by: Weihrauch, Andrea and Szu-Chi Huang (2021). Portraying humans as machines to promote health: Unintended risks, mechanisms, and solutions. Journal of Marketing, 85(3), 184–203.]
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