Men tend to have more positive attitudes towards futuristic sex robots and wrongly assume their female partners share their views. Women, on the other hand, are less fond of such robots. But like their male counterparts, women also wrongly assume that their partners share their views.
That’s the finding from a new study that has been published in Frontiers in Psychology. The results suggest that “people project their own feelings about robots onto their partner.”
The research was inspired in part thanks to science fiction series like Westworld. “These works of art are great at demonstrating the ethical dilemmas posed by the advent of AI and human-robot interaction,” explained study author Mads Nordmo Arnestad, an associate professor in social psychology and organizational behavior at BI Norwegian Business School.
“But another way to put it is to say that one of the oldest and deepest questions in the history of philosophy is ‘what makes a human a human?’ That is what, if anything, separates us from the realm of material objects and animals? And as geniuses have pondered this question for millennia, less-than-geniuses like my co-authors and I have to come up with creative ways to get at the question.”
“One such way would be to ask; what qualities does a sex-toy need to have in order to make using the toy an act of infidelity? There’s plenty of research suggesting that some people feel threatened by and even jealous of their partners sex-toy, but I don’t think anyone would say that using a vibrator counts as infidelity,” Arnestad said.
“But what if you could share a cigarette with that vibrator afterwards, and talk about your innermost feelings? And what if the artificially intelligent vibrator was attached to a full android body? At what point would people start intuiting that this is an act of infidelity? What specific qualities does it need to have? I think that these are actually really fun question to ponder.”
In the study, 163 female and 114 male participants read a short story about a highly realistic robot designed purely for either sex or platonic love before completing a questionnaire regarding how they would react if their partner owned and used such a robot, and how they think their partner would react if they used with such a robot themselves.
The researchers found several significant differences in how men and women reacted to the hypothetical robot.
Men were more likely than women to agree with statements such as “I hope this type of robot is developed in the future” and “I look forward to the development and launch of this type of robot.” On the other hand, women were more likely than men to agree with statements such as “This kind of robot would evoke strong feelings of jealousy in me” and “I would like my partner to get rid of this robot.”
Arnestad told PsyPost he was not particularly surprised to find that “men are more interested in sex robots, and think that they should be seen as permissible within the framework of a committed relationship, while women are less interested and think that they should be seen as unacceptable within a relationship.”
More surprising, however, was that “both men and women erroneously expect their heterosexual partners to share their intuition about sex robots. Men expect women to be cool with them getting one, while women expect men to dislike them having one. Both are wrong, according to our data.”
The study — like all research — includes some limitations.
“The major ones are that these questions remain very hypothetical, so it’s difficult for people to accurately assess how they’d feel if it were to become a reality. In addition, we should have used a bigger and more diverse sample and ideally some other measures than just self-made survey items,” Arnestad explained.
“It’s always more fun to ask strange questions than obvious ones, especially when you’re a student. Julie and Marte, two of the authors of the paper are still at undergraduate level, which I think is impressive. They contributed substantially to all parts of the paper,” he added.
The study “Friends, Lovers or Nothing: Men and Women Differ in Their Perceptions of Sex Robots and Platonic Love Robots“, was authored by Morten Nordmo, Julie Øverbø Næss, Marte Folkestad Husøy, and Mads Nordmo Arnestad.
(Image by vulcanostraga from Pixabay)
