Loneliness is a distressing personal experience and a growing social issue. Social robots could alleviate the pain of loneliness, particularly for those who lack in-person interaction. This paper investigated how the effect of loneliness on anthropomorphizing social robots differs by robot appearances, and how it leads to the purchase intention of social robots. Participants viewed a video of one of the three robots(machine-like, animal-like, and human-like) moving and interacting with a human counterpart. The results revealed that when individuals were lonelier, the tendency to anthropomorphize human-like robots increased more than that of animal-like robots. The moderating effect remained significant after covariates were included. The increase in anthropomorphic tendency predicted the heightened purchase intent. The findings imply that human-like robots induce lonely individuals' desire to replenish the sense of connectedness from robots more than animal-like robots, and that anthropomorphic tendency reveals the potential of social robots as real-life companions of lonely individuals.

翻译：孤独是一种令人痛苦的个人体验，也是一个日益严重的社会问题。社交机器人可以缓解孤独带来的痛苦，特别是对于那些缺乏面对面互动的人。本研究探讨了孤独对社交机器人拟人化的影响如何因机器人外观而异，以及这种影响如何导致对社交机器人的购买意愿。参与者观看了一段视频，其中展示了三种机器人（机械型、动物型和人型）之一与人类互动及移动的场景。结果表明，当个体感到更孤独时，他们对人型机器人的拟人化倾向比动物型机器人增加得更显著。在纳入协变量后，这一调节效应仍然显著。拟人化倾向的增加预示了更高的购买意愿。研究结果暗示，相比动物型机器人，人型机器人更能激发孤独个体从机器人中补充连接感的渴望，并且拟人化倾向揭示了社交机器人作为孤独个体现实生活伴侣的潜力。