Social Robots As Companions for Lonely Hearts: The Role of Anthropomorphism and Robot Appearance

Developing upon my interest in loneliness, I came to seek the possibility of technology providing real-life help to lonely individuals. Social robots that are capable of socially meaningful interaction with humans could be a potential source of connectedness. Therefore, I wrote my master’s thesis about how lonely individuals anthropomorphize embodied robots, which is, attributing human-like qualities to non-human agents, with various appearances. Moreover, I examined how the anthropomorphic tendency has downstream consequences on acceptance behavior to investigate the possibility of robotic agents being accepted and used as companions for lonely individuals in real life. Participants viewed a video of one of the three robots (machine-like, animal-like, and human-like) moving and interacting with a human counterpart. Although the main effect of loneliness on anthropomorphism was not significant, the interaction effect between loneliness and robot appearances on predicting anthropomorphism toward social robots was significant. That is, when individuals were lonelier, the tendency to anthropomorphize human-like increased more than that of animal-like robots. Moreover, the increase in anthropomorphic tendency predicted the purchase intent of social robots. This study suggested the potential of social robots to be used to replenish the sense of connectedness for lonely individuals in real life.