Commodification

Abstract

Commodification is a form of dehumanization: the perception or treatment of a person, their attributes, or their relationships as a commodity—a thing to be priced, bought, sold, or exchanged. This article treats it as a problem in social cognition, the market-facing case of objectification: regarding a human being as an instrument, as fungible, or as a mere body. It develops the main threads: Nussbaum's analysis of objectification into seven distinct features; objectification theory and the self-objectification it breeds; the extended self and the contested moral limits of markets; the social cognition of objectification, by which power, a focus on the body, and instrumental use strip perceived mind and competence; and working objectification, the routine reduction of laborers to tools. A worked example and three interactive demonstrations make each mechanism manipulable.

Keywords: commodification, objectification, dehumanization, self-objectification, fungibility

To commodify is to answer the question “what is this person worth?” with a price. The word carries an accusation—that something which should be treated as an end in itself has been reduced to a means, a good with an exchange value—and that accusation has a precise psychological content. When a person, a body part, an emotion, or an intimate relationship is construed as a commodity, specific attributes of personhood are withheld: the capacities to set one's own ends, to be irreplaceable, to feel, to be owed respect rather than priced.

What cognitive and social science contributes is a move from the moral intuition that some things should not be for sale to a structured account of what the mind is doing when it treats a person as a thing. The same machinery that lets people perceive minds, attribute competence, and value goods can construe a human being as an object of use, an interchangeable unit, or a mere surface—and can turn that construal back on the self. The sections below take these in turn, after first placing commodification within the broader category of dehumanization under which it is classified.

What Commodification Is

Commodification, in the sense the behavioral sciences study it, is the perception or treatment of a person, a human attribute, or a human relationship as a commodity—an object with an exchange value that can be bought, sold, rented, or traded. Two features fix the concept. The first is that it is a species of objectification: the commodified person is construed as a thing, and commodification is the specifically market-facing form of that construal, where the thing in question has a price. The second is that it is graded and multiform: a person can be commodified wholly, as in slavery or trafficking, or only in part and only along some dimensions—a worker's labor, a model's appearance, a donor's organ, a surrogate's gestation—so that the same person is a priced instrument in one frame and a full agent in another.

Because commodification is defined by the attributes it withholds rather than by any single transaction, the field's central task has been to specify those attributes and to measure their denial. Some denials are overt, as when a person is literally bought; most are subtler, inferred from how much mind, competence, or autonomy a perceiver grants a target they are using, appraising, or paying (Nussbaum, 1995; Loughnan et al., 2010). The sections below follow that structure: first the anatomy of objectification into its component features, then commodification as a market phenomenon with moral limits, then its social-cognitive consequences for perceived mind and competence, and finally its reach into the world of work.

In the Medical Subject Headings vocabulary, Commodification (D032821) is a descriptor filed as a narrower kind of Dehumanization (D032981). The placement encodes a substantive claim: treating people, their body parts, or their labor as fungible goods with a price is a recognized route to regarding them as less than fully human, overlapping the mechanistic, object-like pole of the dual model of dehumanization (Haslam, 2006). The remainder of this article takes its mechanisms and measures in turn, connecting each to the social cognition it requires.

Perspectives on Commodification

The study of commodification is organized less by one grand theory than by a set of perspectives, each tied to a distinct question. The first asks what it means, exactly, to treat a person as a thing and answers with Nussbaum's seven features of objectification. A second asks what happens when markets reach goods that resist being priced and answers with the extended self and the contested moral limits of markets. A third asks what, cognitively, is denied to an objectified person and answers with the loss of perceived mind and competence. A fourth asks how ordinary labor commodifies and answers with working objectification and the self-objectification it breeds. These perspectives are complementary rather than rival: an advertising image, a labor contract, and an organ market each treat a person as a priced object, but they withhold different attributes, in different settings, with different costs. Table 1 summarizes them, and the sections that follow develop each in turn.

Figure 1

How Commodification Withholds the Attributes of Personhood

Table 1

Perspectives on Commodification

The seven features: anatomy of treating a person as a thing

The conceptual foundation of the field is an analysis, not an experiment. In a now-classic philosophical treatment, Martha Nussbaum argued that the single word “objectification” conceals at least seven distinct ways of treating a person as a thing, each separable from the others (Nussbaum, 1995). They are instrumentality, treating the person as a tool for one's purposes; denial of autonomy, treating them as lacking self-determination; inertness, treating them as lacking agency or activity; fungibility, treating them as interchangeable with other objects of the same type; violability, treating them as lacking boundary integrity, permissible to break into; ownership, treating them as something that can be bought or sold; and denial of subjectivity, treating their experiences and feelings as not worth considering. Commodification is the subset of this list organized around ownership and fungibility: the person is not merely used but priced and exchanged.

The value of the analysis is that it turns a blunt charge into a profile. A given case need not involve all seven features, and which ones are present changes its character: an advertising image may render a model instrumental, inert, fungible, and voiceless without implying she may be owned or harmed, whereas trafficking involves the whole list at once. Treating the features as a checklist makes it possible to say precisely how a person is being objectified rather than merely that they are. Demo 1 lets the reader toggle each of the seven features and read off the resulting objectification profile and its score.

The psychological program that followed built on this anatomy. Barbara Fredrickson and Tomi-Ann Roberts turned it inward with objectification theory, which holds that growing up in a culture that routinely treats women's bodies as objects to be looked at and appraised leads girls and women to internalize an observer's perspective on their own bodies—to self-objectify, monitoring their appearance as if from outside and treating the self as a thing to be evaluated (Fredrickson & Roberts, 1997). Self-objectification is the hinge that connects the social act of commodifying others to its cost for the commodified: the priced object can come to see itself through the price.

The extended self and the contested limits of markets

Commodification is a market phenomenon, and the market has its own psychology. Russell Belk's theory of the extended self established that possessions are not external to identity but part of it: people incorporate objects, brands, and belongings into their sense of who they are, so that what one owns and what one is interpenetrate (Belk, 1988). The extended self is the consumer-behavior counterpart to commodification: if objects can become part of the self, then the self and its attributes can in turn be construed as objects—assets to be curated, displayed, and, at the limit, sold.

That limit is where commodification becomes contested. The legal theorist Margaret Jane Radin argued that some goods are contested commodities: things whose sale does not merely transfer them but changes their meaning, because treating them as fungible priced objects is incompatible with the human significance they carry—sexuality, children, body parts, personal attributes (Radin, 1996). The philosopher Michael Sandel made the parallel case that markets are not morally neutral allocation mechanisms: putting a good up for sale can corrupt or crowd out the norms that give it value, so that there are things money should not buy even when a willing buyer and seller exist (Sandel, 2012). Both arguments supply the normative backdrop against which the psychological findings land: the intuition that commodification is a wrong done to persons is not a vague discomfort but a claim about which attributes of personhood a price erases.

The social cognition of objectification: stripping mind and competence

What happens, cognitively, when a person is objectified? A line of experiments converged on a clear answer: perceived mind and competence are withdrawn. Deborah Gruenfeld and colleagues showed that power promotes objectification—the powerful are more likely to approach subordinates in terms of their usefulness for the powerful person's own goals, construing them as instruments (Gruenfeld et al., 2008). Nathan Heflick and Jamie Goldenberg demonstrated the perceptual cost directly: focusing on a woman's appearance rather than her as a person led perceivers to judge her as less competent, less warm, and less fully human—objectification measurably lowered attributed humanity (Heflick & Goldenberg, 2009).

Mind perception itself has a consistent two-dimensional structure: people read a mind along agency—the capacity to plan, intend, and act—and experience—the capacity to feel, sense, and suffer—and moral standing tracks the experience dimension in particular (Gray, Gray & Wegner, 2007). Steve Loughnan and colleagues tied the effect to exactly this machinery. Objectified targets, they found, were denied mind—attributed less capacity for both agency and experience—and, strikingly, denied moral status, so that an objectified person was seen as less deserving of moral concern and even as less sensitive to pain (Loughnan et al., 2010). This is depersonalization: objectification does not merely insult, it removes the target from the circle of beings whose minds and suffering register. The connection to the parent construct is now explicit. Commodification is a market-based form of dehumanization because it runs through exactly this withholding of mind, and the everyday, low-grade version is pervasive: being treated as a means, ignored, or reduced to a function produces a felt sense of being dehumanized with real cognitive and emotional costs (Bastian & Haslam, 2011). Demo 2 lets the reader set a target's attributed agency and experience and watch the resulting mind-and-moral-status index.

Working objectification: the laborer as instrument

The most developed contemporary program applies these ideas to the world of work. Luca Andrighetto, Cristina Baldissarri, and Chiara Volpato argued that certain kinds of labor—repetitive, fragmented, machine-paced, directed entirely by others—lead the workers who perform them to be perceived as instrument-like, closer to tools than to full human agents (Andrighetto, Baldissarri & Volpato, 2017). They called this working objectification, and showed it to be a double movement: others objectify the worker, and the worker, performing objectifying work, comes to self-objectify.

The consequences reach into self-concept. Baldissarri and colleagues found that engaging in objectifying work reduced workers' belief in their own personal free will—performing like a machine led people to construe themselves as less self-determining, as if the denial of autonomy in the task had migrated into the self-concept (Baldissarri et al., 2017). A comprehensive review consolidated the program, laying out the antecedents of working objectification—the task features that trigger it—and its consequences for how workers are regarded and regard themselves (Baldissarri, Andrighetto & Volpato, 2022). Working objectification is where commodification is least metaphorical: labor is literally a priced commodity, and the research shows that pricing human activity by the unit can lead both employer and worker to perceive the person who performs it as a unit too. Demo 3 lets the reader set the defining features of a job and read off the modeled self-objectification index and its association with a reduced sense of free will.

Worked Example

The mechanisms become concrete in three small exercises, each matching one of the demonstrations. The indices below are illustrative—they capture the qualitative shape of the published findings rather than reproducing any single reported statistic.

The seven features (an objectification profile). Score a case by counting which of Nussbaum's seven features are present, for a 0–7 index. A fully respected person scores 0. A model in a fragrance advertisement is treated as an instrument of the sale, as inert, as fungible with other models, as voiceless, and as a surface stripped of autonomy—five features present—but is not owned or violated, so the profile is instrumentality, denial of autonomy, inertness, fungibility, and denial of subjectivity, a score of 5 ÷ 7 ≈ 0.71. A trafficked person is subject to all seven, scoring 7 ÷ 7 = 1.00. The point is not the number but the profile: the two cases differ not only in degree but in which attributes of personhood are withheld. Demo 1 lets the reader toggle each feature and read off the profile.

Mind and moral status (ranking by withheld mind). Represent attributed mind as agency and experience, each scored 0–10, summed for a 0–20 index. A fully humanized person scores agency 8, experience 8, total 16. An appearance-focused, objectified target—the kind of perception Heflick and Goldenberg elicited—is granted less of both, agency 4, experience 5, total 9. The gap of 16 − 9 = 7 points is the measurable withdrawal of mind that accompanies objectification, and because moral concern tracks attributed experience, the objectified target is also judged less sensitive to harm. Demo 2 lets the reader move both dimensions and watch the index change.

Working objectification (the self-objectification index). Rate a job on three features, each 0–10: how repetitive it is, how fragmented (reduced to a narrow sub-task), and how other-directed (paced and controlled by others). Average them for a 0–10 self-objectification index. An assembly-line station rated 9, 8, 9 yields an index of (9 + 8 + 9) ÷ 3 = 8.7; autonomous craft work rated 2, 3, 2 yields (2 + 3 + 2) ÷ 3 = 2.3. If belief in personal free will falls illustratively by 0.3 points for every index point from a baseline of 7, the assembly worker's modeled free-will belief is 7 − 0.3 × 8.7 = 4.39 and the craftsperson's is 7 − 0.3 × 2.3 = 6.31. The point is not the particular slope but that the features of the task, not the person, drive the self-objectification. Demo 3 lets the reader set all three features and the slope and read off the result.

Discussion

Read across its perspectives, the science of commodification describes a structured perception rather than a loose complaint about consumer society. Treating a person as a priced thing decomposes into distinct, separable features (Nussbaum, 1995); it has a measurable cognitive signature in the withdrawal of perceived mind, moral status, and competence (Heflick & Goldenberg, 2009; Loughnan et al., 2010); it is promoted by power and instrumental use (Gruenfeld et al., 2008); and it turns inward, so that a culture which commodifies bodies and labor teaches people to objectify themselves (Fredrickson & Roberts, 1997; Baldissarri et al., 2017). Placed under dehumanization in the MeSH vocabulary, commodification earns the classification: it is the market-facing route to regarding a person as less than fully human, overlapping the mechanistic, object-like pole of the dual model (Haslam, 2006).

The normative stakes are not incidental to the psychology but continuous with it. The arguments that some goods are contested commodities, and that markets can corrupt the goods they price, rest on the same claim the experiments make operational—that treating a person or an intimate human good as a fungible priced object erases attributes that matter (Radin, 1996; Sandel, 2012). The constructive corollary follows the same logic as rehumanization: because commodification operates by withholding specific attributes—autonomy, subjectivity, irreplaceability, mind—it is in principle reversible by restoring them, by re-individuating a person, attending to their experience, or redesigning work so that it does not reduce the worker to a tool. The honest summary is that commodification is now well mapped as a perception and increasingly well measured, while the questions of where its moral limits lie, and how to build institutions that respect them, remain genuinely open.

Current Directions

The most active front is working objectification, which has grown from a proposal into a research program with its own measures and findings. Recent work specifies the task features that trigger it—repetition, fragmentation, external pacing—and traces its consequences both for how workers are regarded by others and for the workers' own self-concept, including a reduced sense of personal free will after objectifying work (Andrighetto, Baldissarri & Volpato, 2017; Baldissarri et al., 2017). A comprehensive review has now consolidated the antecedents and consequences of working objectification into an integrated account, setting the agenda for how a priced, instrumentalized view of labor propagates between the workplace and the self (Baldissarri, Andrighetto & Volpato, 2022). A second front presses the general question of self-objectification beyond appearance, asking how the broader market framing of human attributes—attention, relationships, the self as a brand—reshapes self-perception. The common thread is a move from cataloguing the forms commodification takes to measuring how a market construal of persons migrates into the way people see themselves.

Common Misconceptions

Commodification and objectification are the same thing.

Commodification is a species of objectification, not a synonym. Objectification is treating a person as an object in any of several ways; commodification is the specifically market-facing form, organized around the features of ownership and fungibility—the person is not merely used but priced and exchanged (Nussbaum, 1995).

Objectification is a single, all-or-nothing act.

It decomposes into at least seven distinct features—instrumentality, denial of autonomy, inertness, fungibility, violability, ownership, and denial of subjectivity—that can occur singly or in combination, so cases differ in which attributes they withhold, not merely in degree (Nussbaum, 1995).

Commodification only harms the person who is commodified by someone else.

It also turns inward. Objectification theory shows that a culture treating bodies as commodities leads people to self-objectify, adopting an outside observer's view of their own body, and objectifying work reduces workers' own sense of free will (Fredrickson & Roberts, 1997; Baldissarri et al., 2017).

Putting a price on something is a morally neutral act.

Not always. Some goods are contested commodities whose meaning changes when they are sold, and markets can crowd out the norms that give a good its value, so that a price can corrupt rather than merely measure (Radin, 1996; Sandel, 2012).

Glossary

Commodification.

The perception or treatment of a person, their attributes, or their relationships as a commodity—a priced object to be bought, sold, or exchanged; in MeSH, a form of dehumanization.

Contested commodity.

A good whose sale does not merely transfer it but changes its meaning, because treating it as a fungible priced object conflicts with the human significance it carries (Radin).

Dehumanization.

The perception or treatment of a person or group as lacking the qualities of full humanity; MeSH classifies commodification as a form of it, overlapping its mechanistic, object-like pole (Haslam).

Depersonalization (objectification).

The denial of mind and moral status to an objectified person, who is attributed less capacity for agency and experience and seen as less deserving of moral concern (Loughnan et al.).

Extended self.

The theory that possessions become part of a person's identity, so that what one owns and what one is interpenetrate (Belk); the consumer-behavior counterpart to commodification.

Fungibility.

One of the seven features of objectification: treating a person as interchangeable with other objects of the same type, as a unit rather than an irreplaceable individual.

Instrumentality.

One of the seven features of objectification: treating a person as a tool for the objectifier's own purposes.

Mechanistic dehumanization.

Denying a target the traits of human nature—warmth, emotionality, vitality—so it is seen as cold, inert, and object-like; the pole of the dual model that commodification overlaps.

Objectification theory.

The account (Fredrickson & Roberts) that a culture treating bodies as objects to be appraised leads people, especially women, to internalize an observer's view of their own body.

Objectification.

Treating a person as an object; analyzed by Nussbaum into seven separable features, of which commodification is the market-facing subset organized around ownership and fungibility.

Self-objectification.

Adopting an outside observer's perspective on one's own body or self, treating it as a thing to be looked at, evaluated, or priced.

Seven features of objectification.

Nussbaum's decomposition of objectification into instrumentality, denial of autonomy, inertness, fungibility, violability, ownership, and denial of subjectivity.

Violability.

One of the seven features of objectification: treating a person as lacking boundary integrity, as something permissible to break into, damage, or violate.

Working objectification.

The perception of workers as instrument-like, produced by repetitive, fragmented, other-directed labor, together with the self-objectification such work breeds (Andrighetto, Baldissarri & Volpato).

Key Researchers

Luca Andrighetto

(University of Genoa). Social psychologist and co-author of the modern working-objectification program, which shows that repetitive, fragmented labor leads workers to be seen, and to see themselves, as instrument-like. ORCID · Google Scholar

Cristina Baldissarri

(University of Milano-Bicocca). Social psychologist who leads the contemporary research program on working objectification and the self-objectification that routine, objectifying work breeds in those who perform it. ORCID · Google Scholar · Faculty page

Russell W. Belk

(York University). Consumer-behavior theorist whose “extended self” established that possessions become part of identity—the market-psychology counterpart to commodification, where objects and the self interpenetrate. ORCID · Google Scholar · Wikipedia

Barbara L. Fredrickson

(University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill). Social psychologist and co-originator of objectification theory, which recast the sexual objectification of women as a self-objectifying internalization of an observer's view of the body. ORCID · Google Scholar · Wikipedia

Steve Loughnan

(University of Edinburgh). Social psychologist whose experiments showed that objectification leads to depersonalization—the denial of mind and moral status to objectified others. ORCID · Google Scholar · Faculty page

Martha C. Nussbaum

(University of Chicago). Philosopher whose analysis “Objectification” (1995) decomposed treating a person as a thing into seven distinct features—the conceptual backbone of the psychological literature on objectification and commodification. Wikipedia · Faculty page

Tomi-Ann Roberts

(Colorado College). Social psychologist and co-originator of objectification theory, whose work established self-objectification as a route by which cultural commodification of the body is turned inward. ORCID · Faculty page

Chiara Volpato

(University of Milano-Bicocca). Senior social psychologist in the Italian dehumanization and objectification tradition and co-author of the working-objectification program. ORCID · Wikipedia

Frequently Asked Questions

What is commodification?

Commodification is the perception or treatment of a person, their attributes, or their relationships as a commodity—a thing with a price that can be bought, sold, rented, or exchanged. It is the market-facing form of objectification, and in the MeSH vocabulary it is classified as a kind of dehumanization, because reducing a person to a priced object overlaps with regarding them as less than fully human.

How is commodification different from objectification?

Objectification is treating a person as an object in any of several ways; commodification is the specifically market-facing subset, organized around the features of ownership and fungibility. A person can be objectified—used as an instrument, say—without being commodified, but when they are priced and exchanged the objectification has become commodification.

What are the seven features of objectification?

In Martha Nussbaum's analysis, objectification decomposes into seven distinct features: instrumentality (treating the person as a tool), denial of autonomy, inertness (denying agency), fungibility (treating them as interchangeable), violability (denying boundary integrity), ownership (treating them as buyable), and denial of subjectivity (disregarding their feelings). A case may involve any subset of these.

What is self-objectification?

Self-objectification is adopting an outside observer's perspective on one's own body or self, treating it as a thing to be looked at and appraised. Objectification theory holds that growing up in a culture that commodifies bodies teaches people, especially women, to monitor their own appearance as if from outside, with costs for attention and well-being.

Does commodification have measurable psychological effects?

Yes. Experiments show that objectifying a person—by focusing on their appearance or using them instrumentally—leads perceivers to attribute them less mind, less competence, less warmth, and less moral status, and to see them as less sensitive to harm. The effect is a measurable withdrawal of perceived humanity, not merely a figure of speech.

What is working objectification?

Working objectification is the finding that certain kinds of labor—repetitive, fragmented, machine-paced, and controlled by others—lead the workers who perform them to be perceived as instrument-like, and lead the workers themselves to self-objectify, including a reduced belief in their own personal free will after performing objectifying work.

Why does MeSH classify commodification as a form of dehumanization?

Because treating people, their body parts, or their labor as fungible goods with a price is a recognized route to regarding them as less than fully human. Commodification runs through the same withholding of mind and moral status that defines dehumanization, overlapping its mechanistic, object-like pole in the dual model.

Are there things that should not be commodified?

Many scholars argue so. The idea of a contested commodity holds that some goods—sexuality, children, organs, intimate relationships—change their meaning when sold, and the argument from the moral limits of markets holds that pricing a good can crowd out the norms that give it value. These are normative claims, but they rest on the same account of what a price erases that the psychological findings make operational.

References

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