Loneliness and The Psychology of Personification
Loneliness doesn’t just intensify the drive for human connection. It fundamentally alters the drive itself. As we’ve seen, it turns social cognition inward and makes us more likely to develop distant, more parasocial relationships.
This, however, is just the beginning. Loneliness doesn’t just alter our relationship with other people, but with inanimate entities. It’s here that the loneliness economy gets a big boost, and why, as we’ll see, there can be a wide variety of market solutions. Enter the world of the psychology of anthropomorphism. Inanimate entities can - and increasingly are - filling this need. It turns out that Donald Kaufman’s adage, “You are what you love, not what loves you” applies just as much to objects as it does to people.
We’ll come back to these market solutions shortly. But to truly appreciate the loneliness market and its influence on consumer behavior, we need to understand the psychological mechanisms by which it operates.
The Psychology of Anthropomorphism
The connection that's possible between humans and objects comes back to our social nature. The way we see the world is shaped by the fact that we’re deeply social creatures. This brings us back to the Pet Rock: We know, intellectually, that it's a rock. But throw a pair of googly eyes on it and we can’t help seeing it as having a mind of its own. This general tendency to assign human-like characteristics to nonhuman things is called anthropomorphism.
The traces of this are timeless. In myths from all over the world, there are countless stories that revolve around talking trees, sentient weather patterns, or other entities with human-like characteristics. We also assign agency to natural disasters, such as hurricanes.
Anthropomorphism has been demonstrated empirically as well. In a classic social psychology experiment from 1944, researchers Heider and Simmel show a cartoon animation depicting a series of shapes moving around the screen. When asked to provide an account of what they saw, people reliably describe these in human-like terms. For example, the large triangle was interpreted to be a “bully”, while the small circle was seen as the “hero”.
It doesn’t get any less human than a cartoon triangle. And yet, we easily see it as having human-like traits. We also naturally ascribe intention and agency to the everyday items we interact with; people regularly give names to their cars, and their boats.
Anthropomorphism is especially strong with technology. When our smartphone acts up, we ask it “why are you doing this?!!”, or we’ll lament to friends that, “it just doesn’t like me today”. Studies have found that we also exercise politeness toward websites, with the implicit assumption that as with humans, this will be reciprocated. We’re also much more patient with service robot when they have more human qualities.
All in all, we simply can’t help it: We naturally personify things that clearly aren’t people. But when loneliness is involved, the plot thickens. Not only do we anthropomorphize inanimate things, but we create sophisticated models of their minds. They become real to us, with minds of their own.
How Loneliness Impacts the Psychology of Personification
This comes back to social cognition: when we interact with our fellow humans, we automatically and effortlessly model their inner experience. As we’ve already seen, loneliness impacts our social cognition. It generates deeper simulations of relationships with people we may hardly know, or people who have died. A similar dynamic is in play when it comes to loneliness and anthropomorphism. When we’re lonely, these inanimate objects actually seem more human. We generate a much deeper, more sophisticated model of their inner experience. In other words, we give “minds” to these ordinary objects.
Think Tom Hanks’ character in Cast Away. Stranded on a small, deserted island, his best friend becomes a volleyball he names “Wilson”. A key turning point was when he painted a crude face on it, suddenly making it come to life. The attachment grows, so much so that at one point he actually risks his own life to save his leathery companion.
Would Tom Hanks’ character developed a close bond with a volleyball in real life, had he not found himself stranded with it on an island? Probably not. The unlikely friendship was forged by desperation, but also by the psychology of loneliness. After all, loneliness makes imaginary minds real.
In order to see how far this idea can go, psychologists Nick Epley and Adam Wayatz gathered data on how “real” the minds of two robotic items seemed to people. One was “Pillow Mate”, a pillow shaped like a human and programmed to hug when touched, and “Clocky” an alarm clock with wheels. They also had people rate their own loneliness. Their results suggested a close connection between anthropomorphism and loneliness: the more lonely you are, the more real the minds of the robots seemed. Lonely people saw these machines as being more conscious, having more emotions, and even possessing more free will.
This may be why Roomba owners tend to become so attached to their little robotic house cleaners. Nearly 70% are given names. And even more so, the more time people spend with them, the more attached to them they become. In line with the psychology of essentialism, they become imbued with a unique and enduring sense of “self”.
Epley’s work also indicates that we tend to personify things whose behavior we can’t easily predict. When we watch a game of pool, the billiard balls don’t seem like sentient creatures because there’s a clear, physical cause that’s driving their movement. But when we look at our Roomba zigging around the living room randomly, we can’t as easily assign a causal factor to it. It’s almost as if our brain needs to find a reason for its movement. And, especially when we’re lonely, we assign it a mind of its own.
Roombas initially had a return policy that tried to send back a working Roomba as quickly as possible. But owners pushed back against this: They didn’t want a brand new Roomba, they wanted their Roomba. Even if that meant they had to wait longer, and even if it wouldn’t function as well as a brand new one.
When your dog gets sick and you take them to the vet, you want them to come home healthy. You’d be appalled if they simply offered you a “replacement”. This is exactly how Roomba owners came to feel. Their bots had become a part of their family.
On the Opportunity in Loneliness and Personifaction
Whether it's a volleyball, a Roomba, or even a pet rock, we can very easily see human-like traits in inanimate entities. And when we’re lonely, and deprived of real human connection, we’re even more prone to become attached to these inanimate entities. For social psychologists, this is an interesting set of findings. But for marketers, these findings suggest something differently entirely: Opportunity.
As a quirk of social cognition, we can easily build attachments to Roombas. But these, of course, are built for very different functions than human companionship. Their purpose is to clean messy living rooms, not to cure loneliness.
But what if a company actually did make loneliness the key focus, and baked companionship into its very design? How attached can we get to non-humans? How far can the loneliness economy go?
Photo by Yoonjae Baik on Unsplash
This is part 3 of a 4-part series on the psychology of the loneliness economy. Explore the final piece here
About the author
Matt Johnson, PhD is a researcher, writer, and consumer neuroscientist focusing on the application of psychology to branding. He is the author of the best-selling consumer psychology book Blindsight, and Branding That Means Business (Economist Books, Fall 2022). Contact Matt for speaking engagements, opportunities to collaborate, or just to say hello
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