PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

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.