Image: Stanford University
Robots and their very clever mix of hardware and software can leave us thinking they’re more than just machines. So much so that it gets a little weird in certain cases. Touching a robot’s “intimate parts” for example.
Researchers at Stanford University will present a paper at the Annual Conference of the International Communication Association in Fukuoka, Japan. The paper, “Touching a Mechanical Body: Tactile Contact With Intimate Parts of a Human-Shaped Robot is Physiologically Arousing,” explores the situation when a human is asked by a robot to touch its butt. In this particular scenario, a NAO robot asks multiple human subjects to touch its butt. When told to, the human subjects get uncomfortable. Robots don’t really have butts, so what’s going on?
Researchers sat participating undergraduates at a table where a NAO robot sat in a relaxed position. The robot told participants that the exercise was focused on terms of body parts. They were told by the robot to touch certain body parts using their dominant hand while their other hand was hooked up to a skin conductance sensor to measure their physical arousal.
Each body part was given a score in relation to how often people touch other people in those regions. Hands, arms, and forehead were classified as high accessibility areas while breasts, genitals, and buttocks were classified as low accessibility areas.
In the study, human participants took no delay when told to touch areas of high accessibility. But when told by the robot to touch an area like the buttocks, there was a delay revealing some discomfort.
The paper describes:
Touching less accessible regions of the robot (e.g., buttocks and genitals) was more physiologically arousing than touching more accessible regions (e.g., hands and feet). No differences in physiological arousal were found when just pointing to those same anatomical regions.
Further evidence of participants’ sensitivity to touching low-accessible regions of a robot emerged in an analysis of response time, which was longer for participants who touched low accessible but not high-accessible areas.
The research suggests that our brains relate the robots to real humans because they are close enough. Some robots, like NAO, are designed to look and operate like humans, and with this, we give these robots a sense of humanity.
Robots can elicit powerful social responses from people. These responses arise from an inherent tendency for people to treat media that are ‘close enough’ to being human like real people. These responses are not simply an act of playing along—they occur on a deeper physiological level. People are not inherently built to differentiate between technology and humans. Consequently, primitive responses in human physiology to cues like movement, language and social intent can be elicited by robots just as they would by real people.
As robots continue to imbue an increasing sense of human-ness, the question of our interactions will become increasingly relevant. I don’t find myself uncomfortable when touching the backside of a phone, but I can see how it would be weird with a NAO. Just wait until we start bumping into robots on a daily occasion.
Source: IEEE Spectrum
The post Things Get Awkward When A Robot Asks You To Touch Its Butt appeared first on SimpleBotics - Covering The Evolving World Of Robotics And Drones.