Loneliness enhances the willingness to engage in interactions with robots

The COVID-19 pandemic has introduced challenges on a vast array of dimensions into our lives. One
of the psychological challenges concerns the experience of loneliness during lockdown and
quarantine. The present research focused on the effect of individuals’ inclusionary status and
loneliness on their perceptions of and behavioural intentions towards social robots. Prior research
has shown that situational loneliness makes humans keen to anthropomorphize nonhuman agents.
Humanizing robots makes us view them as seemingly adequate surrogates for human social
interaction partners. In an online experiment with N = 143 participants, we therefore investigated
whether exclusion (vs. inclusion vs. control condition) would enhance participants’ willingness to
self-disclose towards a social robot and whether it would increase the attribution of warmth and
mind towards a robot. Contrary to our predictions, experimentally induced exclusion had no effect
on the dependent variables. However, correlational analyses provided important insights: The more
COVID-19-induced loneliness participants reported, the more they were willing to self-disclose and
the more they looked forward to a conversation with the robot. The results imply that those
participants who were most strongly psychologically affected by the pandemic, would also be most
willing to engage in a social interaction with a robot. Thus, making social robots available to people
who are at risk of suffering from loneliness could be a way to ease the detrimental psychological
consequences associated with the ongoing pandemic.