People were asked to touch a robot's butt — for science.
Stanford researchers performed an experiment where a humanoid robot asked participants to either point or touch a specific part of its body. Yes, that was the crux of the study.
The study found that participants became more emotionally aroused when asked to touch areas like the butt or where you'd expect genitals if robots were given genitalia — nicely referred to in the study as "less accessible" areas. It also found that people took fractions of a second longer to touch those, ahem, "less accessible" areas.
The researchers measured emotional arousal by measuring the participants' skin conductivity while the experiment was going on. The study underwent 26 trials with 10 participants, four women and six men, being asked to touch or point to 13 different body parts.
All of the participants exhibited increased emotional arousal when touching the butt and genital area, with touching the genital area resulting in the most emotional arousal, as compared to areas like the feet, hands, and ears.
The study seems a bit strange, but it actually says something oddly profound about how people will react to a future where robots become an increasingly more common sight in everyday environments like shopping centers and the workplace.
"Social conventions regarding touching someone else's private parts apply to a robot's body parts as well," lead researcher Jamy Li wrote in the study.
He expanded on that point further in an interview with The Guardian: "These responses are not simply an act of playing along — they occur on a deeper physiological level. People are not inherently built to differentiate between technology and humans."
That last point is key. If people can garner emotional arousal by touching a robot the same way they would be touching a human, the it shows robots can interact with people in a very human way. That could mean a great deal for a future where robots help us with tasks like caring for the elderly.
