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You may think you’re not aroused by robots, but you’re probably wrong.
A new study out of Stanford University, conducted by PhD student Jamy Li, showed 90% of the participants in his experiment exhibited some sort of arousal when touching robo-junk.
To learn this, Li connected 10 participants to electric sensors and had a small robot ask each of them to touch 13 of its body parts. Sorry, “body parts”. When instructed to touch the robot in areas you wouldn’t usually touch, like the eyes or the buttocks, they were more emotionally aroused than when touching more “accessible” parts like the hands or neck.
The sensors that participants were hooked up to measured skin conductance, a way of measuring arousal, as well as reaction time.
When touching “intimate” areas people were more hesitant than with elsewhere, the reaction times revealed. This teaches us a lot about human-humanoid relationships, according to Li.
“Our work shows that robots are a new form of media that is particularly powerful. It shows that people respond to robots in a primitive, social way,” said Li. “Social conventions regarding touching someone else’s private parts apply to a robot’s body parts as well. This research has implications for both robot design and theory of artificial systems.”
So, essentially, people are just as timid when touching robo-butt as when touching real butt, which might be the reason for the apparent arousal. Maybe there’s some hope for us after all, and all the C-3POs and Wall-Es of the world are safe once again.
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