Scientists explain why people feel as if robots are alive

Confusion in basic concepts

People attribute traits of a living being even to geometric shapes — this classic experiment paved the way for the science of feelings toward robots. Researchers from the University of Milan-Bicocca and their colleagues reviewed 132 articles on human-robot interaction and found confusion in the basic concepts of the works. The review was published in the journal BMC Psychology.

From Vaucanson's flutist to the Kismet robot head

The tendency to see the living in the inanimate has a long history. In 1944, Fritz Heider and Marianne Simmel showed volunteers a cartoon featuring a triangle, a circle, and a rectangle — and viewers saw an entire drama: the big triangle was 'angry,' while the circle and the small triangle were 'happy' with each other. As early as 1738, Vaucanson's mechanical flutist, with artificial lungs and a metal tongue, seemed alive to the public. And in 2004, people attributed loneliness to the social robot head Kismet — at least, that is how its creator Cynthia Breazeal recalled it.

Three meanings of one word

The main conclusion of the review: 'emotions' in this science are an umbrella term with at least three meanings. These are the feelings a person attributes to a robot, the emotions a robot expresses through its appearance, and the response the machine evokes in the person themselves. Many works provide no definitions at all, and those that do use heterogeneous formulations. 'The term

Anthropomorphism and measurement methods

A similar story with the word 'anthropomorphism': behind it lie two phenomena — the human-like design of a robot (face, voice, gestures) and the actual psychological process in which a person believes the machine feels. According to the review, a human-like appearance yields contradictory results and does not guarantee warm feelings, whereas a personal tendency to humanize everything is a stable predictor of emotional response to a robot. The methods are also monotonous: in most studies, feelings are measured with questionnaires, while behavioral reactions and brain activity are hardly studied at all. Science depicts the emotional bond between humans and robots mainly based on people's own words, so the authors call for standardizing the terms and verifying the accumulated findings through meta-analyses.

Why put words in order

As companion robots become an everyday reality, incomparable studies slow down practice: the results of one study cannot be transferred to another. Moreover, the confusion hinders understanding why the brain persistently sees the living where there is none. The answer, apparently, is evolutionary: reading others' emotions is a default strategy, and it cannot be switched off, even if the interlocutor is a machine. Earlier, neuroscientists claimed that emotions are a theater for others, not what we feel.