You probably wouldn’t think of your Roomba as having genitals, but humanoid robots seem, well, human. They have hands, they have legs, they have faces, and they have … other stuff. To examine people’s attitudes toward anthropomorphic robots, researchers at Stanford University put skin conductance sensors on (the human) test subjects and recorded their reactions when asked to touch different parts of robots. And it turns out that asking people to touch a robot’s butt kind of freaks them out!
Subjects sat alone in a room with a humanoid robot that can finely control its body motions—the NAO from Aldebaran Robotics (a pretty cute robot). The robot asked them to point at or touch its different body parts one by one, following each point or touch with the medical name for the body part. Meanwhile, sensors recorded the subjects’ physiological arousal and response time. (“Physiological arousal” relates generally to alertness and stimulation without sexual connotations.)
The subjects had low arousal and quick response times when they were asked to touch areas like the neck or an ear—areas that are common for humans to touch on other humans. The researchers, Jamy Li, Wendy Ju, and Byron Reeves, ranked body parts in terms of accessibility, and those areas, along with places like hands and arms, are referred to as high accessibility. But when the NAO asked them to touch its genital area, physiological arousal increased and response times went down. The same was true of touching breasts or butts, all low accessibility areas.
“People respond to robots in a primitive, social way,” Li said in a statement. “Social conventions regarding touching someone else’s private parts apply to a robot’s body parts as well.”
It probably makes intuitive sense to most people. If you just imagine being asked to touch a robot’s genitals, you may feel an immediate sense of awkwardness or self-consciousness. Angelica Lim, a software engineer at Aldebaran, told IEEE Spectrum that this reaction is totally understandable but that it was highlighted by the study’s design. “People grab NAO’s bum when they carry it like a baby, but when the robot is sitting up, shoulders back, staring at you, and talking, we put the robot’s IQ at a higher level, project maturity, and recreate the social constructs that we have between adult humans,” she said.
The researchers will present their paper, “Touching a Mechanical Body: Tactile Contact With Intimate Parts of a Human-Shaped Robot is Physiologically Arousing” in June at the International Communication Association Conference.
As humanoid robots become increasingly convincing, their human-ness will continue to impact how actual people relate to them. And the social contracts between humans may carry over more and more to human-robot interactions. In the meantime, some humans—like the ones who built the Scarlett Johansson robot—are starting to figure out the sexual parameters of these relationships for us. Just in case you’re into that sort of thing.
