Does Being Hugged by a Robot Encourage Prosocial Behavior?

摘要

This paper presents the effects of being hugged by a robot for prosocial behaviors. In human-human interaction, touches including hugs are essential ways for communication with others. Touches also show interesting effects, including the "Midas touch," which encourages prosocial behaviors from the people who have been touched. We developed a huge, teddy-bear-like robot that can give reciprocal hugs to people and experimentally investigated its effects toward their behaviors. In the experiment, a robot firstly asked participants to give a hug, and then asked them to make charitable donations with and without a reciprocated hug. The experiment results with 30 participants are approaching, but not reaching to significant level (p=0.099); the results would weakly suggest that participants who were hugged by a robot donate more money than participants who only hugged the robot, without a reciprocated hug of it.