Abstract: Physical and emotional intimacy between humans and robots may become commonplace over the next decades, as technology improves at a rapid rate. This development provides new questions pertaining to how people perceive robots designed for different kinds of intimacy, both as companions and potentially as competitors. We performed a randomized experiment where participants read of either a robot that could only perform sexual acts, or only engage in non-sexual platonic love relationships. The results of the current study show that females have less positive views of robots, and especially of sex robots, compared to men. Contrary to the expectation rooted in evolutionary psychology, females expected to feel more jealousy if their partner got a sex robot, rather than a platonic love robot. The results further suggests that people project their own feelings about robots onto their partner, erroneously expecting their partner to react as they would to the thought of ones’ partner having a robot.
Discussion
The results of the analysis confirms previous findings that males are more positive toward the advent of robots than females (Scheutz and Arnold, 2016). Females who had read about the sex robot reported particularly elevated levels of jealousy, less favorable attitudes, more dislike and more predicted partner’s dislike. This pattern was not found in the male sample, whose feelings were largely unaffected by the type of robot they were made to envision.
One possible explanation for the gender difference could be a combination of differences in how males and females frame the concept of human-robot sexual relations, as well as different attitudes toward masturbation and the use of artificial stimulants for masturbatory purposes. Past research has indicated that males masturbate more, have more permissible attitudes toward masturbation, use more pornography, and have more permissive views of pornography consumption (Baumeister et al., 2001; Petersen and Hyde, 2010; Regnerus et al., 2016; Maas et al., 2018). If the males in the present study framed the prospect of having sex with robots as allegorically to masturbation with pornography, while the females considered the act more allegorical to cheating, one would expect the present results to emerge. While we did not include measures of how the participants view sex with robots, past research has suggested that males tend to think of sex with robots as a form of masturbation, not sex (Scheutz and Arnold, 2016). The overall gender difference in attitudes may also be partly due to men expressing their positive views more readily, while women may explicitly or implicitly not want positive attitudes toward robots. Future research should explore the moral and relational framing of human-robot sex in depth, including potential gender differences therein.
A different explanation for the observed results is that sex dolls and sex robots to this day primarily have been marketed toward men (Danaher and McArthur, 2017). This can explain why this idea evokes stronger negative feelings among females. In addition, the men and women might react differently to the lack of strong social cues in the sex-robot. According to the Persuasive robot’s acceptance model (Shazwani binti Ghazali, 2019), social cues and a lack of social cues predict attitudes toward robots. Women may view the sex robot in a more negative way both because they do not observe social cues and do not have an immediate sexual response. The observed gender differences may also be partly due to men and women finding it difficult to visualize forming a romantic bond with a non-human entity. Interestingly, studies have revealed that people seem to assume a more mutual relationship even with completely non-social service robots like vacuum cleaners (Forlizzi and DiSalvo, 2006; Sung et al., 2007). Such findings suggest that people get deeply engaged with robots even without humanoid qualities. However, the current study suggest that this effect may only be present in true interaction, not when anticipating future interaction, as our results indicate relatively small effects.
Findings from evolutionary psychology has generally indicated that females experience more jealousy at the thought of their partner having a romantic bond with another person, while males experience more jealousy at the thought of their female partner having a sexual relationship with another man (Buss et al., 1992, 1996, 1999). This finding has been explained by the different evolutionary imperatives faced by males and females. In a pre-industrial state, males had to compete for reproductive resources, and could know for certain whether the offspring they provide valuable resources to were actually related to them. Males have therefore developed their feelings of jealousy as an adaptive strategy to motivate behaviors that reduce paternity uncertainty and loss of access to reproductive resources. Their jealousy is thus especially attuned to the threat of sexual encounters. Females, on the other hand, faced certainty in their rightful motherhood, but face the risk of their partner abandoning her and their common offspring, which severely compromises the odds of survival. Their jealousy is thus geared less toward purely sexual escapades without any other forms of attachment, and more concerned with emotional bonds that may distract paternal investment in partner and offspring. This adaptation account has been proposed as a the explanation for the observed gender differences across cultures (Buss and Haselton, 2005). One problem facing this account is that it can be difficult for participants to envision their partner in a purely emotional or purely sexual relationship with someone, without envisioning that the relationship can change and evolve over time. A purely romantic attraction can evolve into a sexual one, and vice versa. In this study, however, we offer a more “clean” manipulation of this variable, in that the robots we described were either purely sexual or purely non-sexual. The sex robot was explicitly described as unable to engage in anything more than a sexual relationship, while the platonic love robot was explicitly described as disembodied and unable to satisfy physical sexual urges. Our findings therefore shed new light on how males and females feel about different kinds of infidelity in a setting where sex cannot lead to love and love cannot lead to sex.
Our results further show that males and females varied in how they expected to feel if their partner acquired and used a sex robot or platonic love robot. However, the results demonstrate that both males and females fail to predict how their partner would feel if they themselves got a robot. Males, who report feeling at ease with the thought of their partner having a robot, erroneously expect that their partners will extend the same relaxed attitude toward them. Females on the other hand, who are negative to the prospect of their male partners having a sex robot, and neutral to them having a platonic love robot, erroneously expect their partners to react negatively to them having a sex robot and positively to them having a platonic love robot. These results are in line with a projection account, which suggests that people tend to expect their partners to feel as they would have, especially in emotionally charged situations (Newman et al., 1997; Kawada et al., 2004; Maner et al., 2005).
Limitations
There are two notable limitations to the present study. The first is the recruitment procedure and sample. Participants were recruited primarily via social media (Facebook) and accessible e-mail lists to workplaces. Therefore, our sample is likely to be influenced by a self-selection bias, whereby those who thought human-robotic interaction more interesting presumably were more likely to participate in the study. The sample of participants consisted of a majority of students, and was somewhat restricted in age variation, which limits the generalizability of the findings. In addition, the results cannot be directly generalized to homosexual populations as the sample was almost exclusively heterosexual. The second limitation is the use of novel non-validated measurements. There are few validated measurements of reactions to robots, and to the best of our knowledge, none that capture sentiments regarding sex and love robots. The Negative Attitudes toward Robots Scale (NARS) (Nomura et al., 2006b) is too general for the purposes of our study. In order to gain thorough understanding of how people feel about different types of robots designed for physical and emotional intimacy, improved measurement scales need to be designed and validated.
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