It may be fun to converse with artificial intelligence assistants like Siri and Alexa, but an increased interaction with such human-like devices may indicate loneliness, a new study has found.
It appears these human-like products keep people from seeking out normal human interaction, which is typically how people try to recover from loneliness, researchers said.
However, there are limits to this phenomenon, and the long-term consequences are unclear, they said.
"Generally, when people feel socially excluded, they seek out other ways of compensating, like exaggerating their number of Facebook friends or engaging in pro-social behaviours to seek out interaction with other people," said Jenny Olson, assistant professor at University of Kansas in the US.
"When you introduce a human-like product, those compensatory behaviours stop," said Olson.
In four experiments, the researchers found evidence that people who felt socially excluded would exhibit those compensating behaviours unless they were given the opportunity to interact with an anthropomorphic product.
To establish feelings of loneliness, participants either wrote about an important time in their lives when they felt excluded - such as being stood up for the prom - or they played an online game of "catch" in which other participants stopped throwing them the ball and chose others after a few initial tosses.
As part of the game, participants believed they were playing with real people online, but the other players were computerised.
However, after engaging with a Roomba vacuum whose design made it seem like it was smiling or when asked to think about their cellphone in human-like terms, such as "how much it helps you," participants would not feel the need to plan to spend time talking to family or friends or seek out volunteer opportunities.
However, researchers said the ability for these products to replace human contact has its limits because certain statements seemed to snap participants back to reality.
"As soon as we tell people we know that it looks like the Roomba is smiling, they seemed to realize it was a machine and not a person," Olson said.
"The effect goes away. This seems to be happening on a very subconscious level," she said.
The research could be important for consumers to realize how these types of products could thwart their motivation to interact with real people, especially because so many new products feature interactivity, said Olson.
"If someone notices they are talking more to Siri lately, maybe that has something to do with feeling lonely," she said.
The study was published in the Journal of Consumer Research.
