Operative displacement and the psychology of smart product use

As smart products gain autonomy, they increasingly perform tasks that consumers used to carry out themselves. This challenges foundational assumptions in consumer psychology that link psychological value to consumers’ active participation in product use. This article introduces the concept of operative displacement, a consumption arrangement in which smart products perform the core tasks of product use while consumers move from operative agency (directly executing tasks) to meta-agency (configuring, supervising, evaluating, and selectively intervening). We outline three dimensions of operative displacement: process-outcome decoupling, effort conversion into supervisory load, and attentional recession and relational intensification, along with their psychological consequences and implications for future research.