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Products for Loneliness: How Companion Robots and Humanoids are Driving Consumer Behavior

Matt Johnson

If Benjamin Button taught us anything, it's that infants and old people are more similar than they are different. Towards the end of our lives, we return to the same state as we started: slow, irritable, and with a tendency towards soft foods. 

In the context of the loneliness economy, we can add another similarity to the list: Both become easily attached to toy animals. Consider Paro, the cute, furry robotic seal that can reach to touch and learn to respond to its name. You could easily imagine an infant child fawning for one and it becoming a “best friend” - like a Teddy Bear, but supercharged. 

One of the largest target markets for loneliness innovations are older adults, who sadly, have some of the highest rates of isolation. Human visitors to elderly care facilities can be few and far between so the synthetic has been picking up the extra slack. As we’ll see, however, the older demographic is just the tip of the iceberg. Increasingly, people of all ages are developing relationships with robots. 

The rise in loneliness provides a new form of consumer behavior which businesses have begun to capitalize on. These innovations are aided by the fact that loneliness doesn’t just increase the drive for human connection, but fundamentally alters the way we connect. 

Crucially for the loneliness economy, loneliness also makes inanimate objects seem human-like and sentient. Lonely people are more likely to see robotic helpers such as Roombas as having more of a mind of their own. These innovations, however, weren’t built as a cure for loneliness. They were built for very different functions, and merely, as a testament to the power of loneliness, become objects of deep affection and companionship. 

More and more, however, innovations are designed for loneliness from their very inception. While many, like Paro, are about providing companionship, others take a sharp turn for the romantic, providing “synthetic love”. How is the loneliness economy being served by these innovations? Can human connection come in the form of a romantic humanoid? Let’s meet some of these companions first. 

The Loneliness Robots That Shape Consumer Behavior

As far as robotic companions go, Paro the fluffy seal is hard to beat. Created by Takanori Shibata in 2005, the lifelike seal has been a hit. The research on Paro suggests that it provides similar benefits to comfort pets: reduced anxiety, depression, and a feeling of nonjudgmental companionship. A Paro goes for about $6,000, but despite the price tag, they’re growing in popularity. They are used in over 30 countries, including 3,000 for elderly customers in Japan alone.  

However, Paro is facing some stiff competition in a growing industry. The products are shaping consumer behavior and the “social robots” market is booming. In 2017, it was estimated at $275 million and is expected to grow to $1.4B by 2025. Others include the “Joy for All” robotic dog, which comes with built-in sensors that respond to motion and touch and can learn human voices. There’s also SONY’s Aibo which can learn tricks, memorize phrases, and adapt its personality to its human owners. The fullest expression of robot companions is one that mimics the human form: Synthetic humanoids. The mental modeling process need not strain to assign a human-looking robot a human-like mind. 

One of the most popular humanoid robots is “Pepper”. They stand about 4 feet tall and have some impressive human-like capabilities. They can dance, make jokes, engage in small talk, and walk around a cluttered room on their own. Perhaps most strikingly, Pepper uses advanced facial recognition technology to identify basic human emotions and adjusts appropriately. For example, if it thinks you’re sad, it might ask “what’s wrong?”, or offer to tell a joke to cheer you up.

Due to its relatively high social intelligence, Pepper has primarily been employed in a hospitality context. It was first rolled out in Belgian hospitals as receptionists in 2016 and has been used in retail stores throughout Japan to welcome customers. 


Romantic Relationships with Synthetic Humanoids in Pop Culture and Business

As people lean more and more on robots, it's almost inevitable that these will take a romantic turn. Pepper, and others like them who are built for hospitality, have largely avoided this kind of attention. But for other kinds of models, this is a very different story. More and more, people find themselves falling for synthetic humanoids. 

This is a topic that popular culture has long been fascinated with. The Stepford Wives in 1975 was the first major film to explore this theme, taking the idea of the subservient suburban housewife to a robotic extreme. Blade Runner and Ex-Machina, both dive into robotic love stories with a heavy emphasis on the love-based Turing Test. Spike Jonez’ Her takes explores the idea of falling in love with a disembodied operating system. 

Whether or not robots can be programmed to “love” is open to debate. But for a growing number of people, programming isn’t needed at all. 

Enter RealDolls, the best-selling model lifelike synthetic mannequins from Abyss Creations in San Marcos, California. The company allows customers to construct their ideal partner from scratch. For about $7,000, you can customize features such as eye color, hair, height, body type, and more. RealDolls are primarily seen as “sex dolls” (and yes, they are anatomically accurate). 

Here, there is no programming at all and no direct interactivity. More and more, however, especially as loneliness increases, people turn to humanoids for romance. To many, the idea of being in a relationship with a doll is intuitively odd. But it would be dismissive to label these people as being fundamentally and inexplicably strange. Instead, there’s a science to it. It’s where social cognition, robotics, and parasocial relationships meet. 

Loneliness and the Social Cognition of Synthetic Love

Understanding this phenomenon means addressing this key question: when someone feels that they are “in love” with their doll, what is that love? Again, it comes back to social cognition: creating an internal model of another person’s mind. In real relationships, and even in parasocial relationships, this model is informed by the person’s overt personality; we use what they say and do as input to help construct this model. So even if we’re the ones building the model, the other person is contributing to it. 

But in the case of dolls, however, there is no such input. It’s a lifeless doll, after all. The model is built on input which is also generated in the person’s imagination. People in relationships with dolls describe this best. Consider the following description from “DaveCat”, in an interview on the podcast Love & Radio. He describes the dynamics of his relationship with his doll named “Shi-Chan”: 

In an organic relationship, there are two people in love. And one of them - maybe both of them, has a perception of the person they’re attracted to. They’re attracted to that perception and not necessarily to the person who they actually are. It’s an image that the person has built up in their mind. And then if they do something unexpected, you’re thrown for a complete loop. But you don’t get that with a synthetic. Everything is upfront. There’s no deceit. There’s no nasty surprises. Whatever you make, as their personality - that's what you get. 

Loneliness tends to be a key component of these relationships. As DaveCat describes, Shi-Chan makes the “difference between being alone, and being lonely.”

When people go a long time without food, the body resorts to drastic measures to gain sustenance. In a process known as “autophagy”, the body’s cells start eating bits and pieces of itself. When it doesn’t get what it needs from the outside world, it turns inward. 

An analogous process seems to happen with the need for social connection. It’s as if, starved of the need for human connection, the mind turns inward. It resorts to internal means to satisfy this need. It creates a rich, detailed, model of the mind which becomes the object for human connection. The doll has become a kind of surrogate for the person’s own imagination. 

DaveCat distills this in the following way: “There’s the perfect phrase that I still use to this day: ‘dolls reflect the love that you give them’. They’re in love with you because you’ve given them minds.”


On Parasocial Relationships, Loneliness and Consumer Behavior

You can think of any parasocial relationship like a movie that the person is generating in their own head. The person is both the director and the movie’s main character. DaveCat, for example, wove a complex backstory for Shi-Chan: the daughter of a Japanese Father and English Mother who grew up in Manchester, UK. Each day is a new scene unfolding in his epic drama. The doll then, is the projector screen that this movie appears on; it brings the movie to life.

With loneliness increasing, the industry will only become more plentiful, and consumer solutions will become more diversified. The loneliness market has diverse consumer behavior. As we’ve seen, these solutions span simple companionship, hospitality, and as with DaveCat and others, romance. But far from being an inexplicable personality quirk, these bonds are a result of natural social cognitive processes turned inwards, and of market innovations filling an unmet need for human connection. 

For many, technology is more than capable of filling this need. And as the synthetic becomes more sophisticated, more human-like, and more tailored to our needs, the inanimate could play a larger role than ever.

Photo by Atharva Tulsi on Unsplash

This is 4th and final part of a four-part series on the psychology of the loneliness economy:

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