Abstract
The first sex robots will hit the market within the next few years, but no empirical research has gathered insights into the question who possible costumers could be. Therefore, the present study aimed to investigate personal characteristics (e.g. relationship status) and personality traits (such as loneliness) that would influence the intention to buy a Sex Robot. An online survey with 263 male participants showed that 40.3% would buy such a robot now or within the next five years. We could show that while the affiliation-related personality traits, the relationship status and sexual fulfilment does not have any impact on the intention to buy a sex robot, rather, negative attitude towards robots and anthropomorphic tendency are influential.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Barss, P.: The Erotic Engine: How Pornography has Powered Mass Communication, from Gutenberg to Google. Doubleday Canada, Toronto (2011)
Worthen, M.G.: Sexual Deviance and Society: A Sociological Examination. Routledge, Abingdon (2016)
Levy, D.: Love and sex with robots: The evolution of human-robot relationships. New York (2007)
Schuetz, M., Arnold, T.: Are we ready for sex robots? In: The Eleventh ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human Robot Interation, pp. 351–358. IEEE Press (2016)
Fullerton, J.: Lonely men to get guide on building a sex robot, The Times, Newspaper article (2016). http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/lonely-men-to-get-guide-on-building-a-sex-robot-hn69zggs0
Szczuka, J.M., Krämer, N.C. (revise and resubmit): Not Only the Lonely. How males explicitly and implicitly evaluate the attractiveness of sex robots in comparison to women and personal characteristics that influence this evaluation. Special Issue: Love and Sex with Robots. Multimodal Technologies and Interaction (2017)
Richardson, K.: The asymmetrical ‘relationship’: parallels between prostitution and the development of sex robots. ACM SIGCAS Comput. Soc. 45(3), 290–293 (2016)
Sullins, J.P.: Applied Professional Ethics for the Reluctant Roboticist. Portland, OR, US. The Emerging Policy and Ethics of Human-Robot Interaction workshop at HRI (2015)
Ajzen, I., Fishbein, M.: Understanding Attitudes and Predicting Social Behavior. Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs (1980)
Ferguson, A.: The Sex Doll: A History. Mcfarland & Co Inc., USA (2010)
Reece, M., Herbenick, D., Dodge, B., Sanders, S.A., Ghassemi, A., Fortenberry, J.D.: Vibrator use among heterosexual men varies by partnership status: results from a nationally representative study in the United States. J. Sex Marital Ther. 36(5), 389–407 (2010)
Herbenick, D., Reece, M., Schick, V., Jozkowski, K.N., Middelstadt, S.E., Sanders, S.A., Dodge, B.S., Ghassemi, A., Fortenberry, J.D.: Beliefs about women‘s vibrator use: results from a nationally representative survey in the United States. J. Sex Marital Ther. 37(5), 329–345 (2011)
Bardzell, S., Bardzell, J.: Technosexuality. In: Wong, A., Wickramasinghe, M., Hoogland, R., Naples, N.A. (eds.) The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Gender and Sexuality Studies, pp. 1–3. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., Singapore (2016)
Gillespie, C.: Lars and the Real Girl, USA (2007)
Flintoff, T., Raphael, M.: Guys and dolls [Motion picture documentary]. [Directed by N. Holt]. [Narrated by M. Strong]. North One-BBC America, United Kingdom (2006)
Eyssel, F., Reich, N.: Loneliness makes the heart grow fonder (of robots): on the effects of loneliness on psychological anthropomorphism. In: Proceedings of the 8th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction, pp. 121–122. IEEE Press (2013)
Baumeister, R.F., Leary, M.R.: The need to belong: desire for interpersonal attachments as a fundamental human motivation. Psychol. Bull. 117(3), 497–529 (1995)
Kolbeck, S.: Zur psychometrischen Differenzierbarkeit von sozialen Ängsten und sozialen Defiziten. Eine empirische Studie an nichtklinischen und klinischen Stichproben. Dissertation (2008)
Leary, M.R., Dobbins, S.E.: Social anxiety, sexual behavior, and contraceptive use. J. Pers. Soc. Psychol. 45(6), 1347–1354 (1983)
Suzuki, T., Yamada, S., Kanda, T., Nomura, T.: Influence of social avoidance and distress on people’s preferences for robots as daily life communication partners. In: Conference Proceedings New Friends 2015 (2015)
Syrdal, D.S., Dautenhahn, K., Koay, K.L., Walters, M.L.: The negative attitudes towards robots scale and reactions to robot behaviour in a live human-robot interaction study. Adaptive and Emergent Behaviour and Complex Systems (2009)
Nomura, T., Suzuki, T., Kanda, T., Kato, K.: Measurement of negative attitudes toward robots. Interact. Stud. 7(3), 437–454 (2006)
Nomura, T., Shintani, T., Fujii, K., Hokabe, K.: Experimental investigation of relationships between anxiety, negative attitudes, and allowable distance of robots. In: Chamonix, F. (ed.) Proceedings of the 2nd IASTED International Conference on Human Computer Interaction. ACTA Press (2007)
Marelich, W.D., Lundquist, J.: Motivations for sexual intimacy: Development of a needs-based sexual intimacy scale. Int. J. Sex. Health 20(3), 177–186 (2008)
Neave, N., Jackson, R., Saxton, T., Hönekopp, J.: The influence of anthropomorphic tendencies on human hoarding behaviours. Pers. Individ. Differ. 72, 214–219 (2015)
Russel, D., Peplau, L.A., Cutrona, C.E.: The revised UCLA Loneliness Scale: Concurrent and discriminant validity evidence. J. Pers. Soc. Psychol. 39(3), 472–480 (1980)
Krämer, N.C., Hoffmann, L., Fuchslocher, A., Eimler, S.C., Szczuka, J.M., Brand, M.: Do i need to belong? development of a scale for measuring the need to belong and its predictive value for media usage. Paper Presented at the Annual Conference of the International Communication Association (ICA), 17–21 June 2013, London, Great Britain (2013)
Rosenthal-von der Pütten, A.: Uncannily Human. Empirical Investigation of the Uncanny Valley Phenomenon. Dissertation (2014)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2017 Springer International Publishing AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Szczuka, J.M., Krämer, N.C. (2017). Influences on the Intention to Buy a Sex Robot. In: Cheok, A., Devlin, K., Levy, D. (eds) Love and Sex with Robots. LSR 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10237. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-57738-8_7
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-57738-8_7
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-57737-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-57738-8
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)