[From Businessweek; for more information see the coverage in Medical Xpress and the study in the journal Psychological Sciences]
The Lonely Can’t Tell Other People From Dolls
By Drake Bennett
September 11, 2014
In the movie Cast Away, Tom Hanks, playing a man stranded alone on the proverbial desert island, turns a volleyball into his closest friend. A new study suggests that, even under less extreme circumstances, loneliness primes us to lower the bar on who, or what, we’ll befriend.
The study, in Psychological Science, attempted to determine “how differences in our need to connect with other people could affect our perceptions of social cues,” says Katherine Powers, a psychologist and postdoctoral fellow at Harvard, and the lead author of the paper. Previous work has found that, like actual hunger, the hunger for social connection heightens our awareness of the things that might aid in alleviating that need. People who feel lonely are better than those who aren’t at remembering social information about others, and at discerning what other people are thinking and feeling.
Powers and her co-authors set out to see whether feelings of social isolation might work at a most basic social level—the awareness of whether a person is interacting with another real person or an artificial one. Subjects in the study were shown “animacy morphs,” images of faces created by combining real faces with the faces of dolls and statues. Different morphs contained different mixes of real and artificial faces, creating a continuum of humanness. In one version of the study, the subjects’ need for social connection was determined through a questionnaire. In a second version, that need was actively manipulated by giving the subjects a questionnaire and then telling them that, based on its results, the subjects were either: a. likely facing a solitary, isolated future, or b. destined for a life full of stable, long-lasting friendships. The test subjects were then shown a series of morphs and asked which were alive and which not. In both versions of the study, subjects who felt lonely saw a greater percentage of the faces as alive—and, presumably, as potential friend material—than those who were less lonely.
It’s an intuitive enough finding; the desirability of friendship and the idea that we’d therefore lower our standards if necessary to try to attain it makes sense. What is striking, though, is that loneliness can affect our perception at such a basic level, and that it could have counterproductive effects: A heightened awareness for social information is helpful in trying to find and make friends, an inability to tell fake people from real ones is not. But maybe the behavior is adaptive in another way. Recent research has shown that loneliness can have dramatic health impacts, and even shorten our lives. In situations where there aren’t any good friend options—a desert island, say—it might make sense to fool ourselves into believing that inanimate objects are animate, to stave off not only the psychological but the physical effects of solitude.
In that sense, the animacy study’s findings are hopeful, in a creepy way—the lonelier a person is, the easier it is to assuage that loneliness, perhaps with a simple computer avatar or a not particularly sophisticated robot. Human beings are already predisposed to anthropomorphize things—research has shown that people ascribe human qualities to even the most basic robots. If you’re a computer engineer trying to design a believable artificial intelligence, there are two routes to go: hone the software to try to mimic the complexities and power of the human mind, or make the people judging it painfully lonely.