Are companies like people?

Companies may not be flesh and blood, but customers view even the largest publicly traded companies, very much like the way they view other people.

That's according to this

episode's guest, social psychologist Susan Fisk. For example, does Netflix have my best interest at heart

when it raises its fees or limits streaming? Is the service Amazon Prime competent enough to meet my needs?

These are the kinds of questions that run through our minds when we're deciding whether

or not to do business with companies.

In this episode, we talk with Dr. Fisk about how these thought patterns relate to the way

that humans evolved to trust one another.

I'm Audrey Hamilton, and is a professor of psychology and public affairs at Princeton University. She has authored hundreds of publications on social behaviors and cognition and has received

numerous scientific awards, including election to the National Academy of Science. She is a co-author

of the book, The Human Brand, which combines psychological science with marketing research to

explain how we interact, not just with other people, but also with companies. Thank you for joining us, Dr. Fisk.

Thank you. On a fundamental level, your work focuses on how humans interact with one another

and how we're influenced by other people, but your latest book, The Human Brand, looks at how we

relate to companies. Can you explain what you and your co-author, Chris Malone, found?

What we found is that people

surprisingly relate to companies as if they were people. So our psychological research in the

past has, and ongoing, has found that people make two fundamental time-honored judgments

about other people quite quickly and automatically.

The first one is friend or foe. Is this person on my side or not? Do they share my interests or not?

And can they be trusted? And are they friendly? So that's an instantaneous decision that people make on the basis of a person's face and posture and so on.

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