Lonely Minds and Robotic Bonds: Effects of Human Loneliness on the Anthropomorphization of Robots

Abstract Loneliness is a human experience that affects our social perception, including how we perceive robots as social beings. According to the Three-Factor Theory of Anthropomorphism, sociality motivation causes lonely humans to ascribe more social characteristics to robots. We tested this in a sequence of three studies (total $$N = 558$$ <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <mml:mrow> <mml:mi>N</mml:mi> <mml:mo>=</mml:mo> <mml:mn>558</mml:mn> </mml:mrow> </mml:math> ) within an art-science collaboration based on the installation Contact (2021), in which an industrial robot interacts with humans via organic movement patterns to make physical contact through a pane of glass. In the online study using a video and without real-world interaction, we found no significant effects. However, our two field studies with real-world human-robot interactions showed that humans who felt lonelier ascribed significantly more social characteristics to the robot and were more likely to also exhibit social behavior. The study shows how emotional states such as loneliness influence the perception of a robot. It enhances the literature by (i) providing high statistical power, (ii) incorporating real-world face-to-face human-robot interactions (in addition to online), (iii) utilizing behavioral variables (in addition to perceptual measures), and (iv) employing social movement cues (instead of humanoid appearance). We encourage researchers to engage in art-science collaborations to gain new perspectives that benefit multiple disciplines.