Trait Loneliness and Social Presence in Human-Human and Human-Robot Interaction

Abstract

Social robots are a proposed solution to feelings of loneliness and social isolation. Given the psychological complexity of experienced trait loneliness and its potential to reduce perceived social presence, an experiment using a social robot was conducted to examine how trait loneliness impacted perceived social co-presence, psychobehavioral interdependence, and subjective mutual presence in social robot interactions. Furthermore, we explored whether these effects differed from human-to-human interactions. Although trait loneliness only affected third order subjective copresence among the three social presence dimensions, individuals with higher trait loneliness were more likely to accept the robot as a social companion.