What is the connection between human loneliness and the use of chatbots?

Lauren Kunze, CEO of Pandorabots, a Californian company supporting chat-bot applications, gave a presentation in 2019 about chatting with machines: “Strange things 60 billion bot logs say about human nature”. Two of her observa-tions are important from a psychological point of view. The analysis of billions of chatbot conversations revealed that a staggering 20 to 30% include some form of sexual-oriented verbal abuse or inappropriate language. This number is so high that a whole chapter in this book is dedicated to the question of why humans abuse computers and the consequences for very advanced AI systems. The second observation is made towards the end of her presentation with reference to a discussion about chatbot applications for the social good. Lauren Kunze said that people talk with chatbots because they are lonely. With all the social media and networking that is available at this point in time, the analysis of a large number of chatbot conversations revealed that loneliness is the problem of our time. How can a conversational, psychological AI system help users who experience loneliness?

Psychologically, loneliness corresponds to a discrepancy between an individual’s preferred and actual social relations (Peplau & Perlman, 1982; in Cacioppo et al., 2015). This discrepancy then leads to the negative experience of feeling alone and/or the distress of feeling socially isolated even when among family or friends (Weiss, 1974). In other words, you can feel alone with hundreds of Facebook friends if you expect to have thousands of them. You can feel alone even if sur-rounded by family and friends if you expect something more or different.

Humans do not simply require the presence of others but the presence of significant others. People to trust and rely on. But most importantly, loneliness is a matter of perspective. It has been suggested that loneliness can be experienced at three different levels:

1. The intimate space (the family or people in a living environment),
2. The social space (including friends and acquaintances), and
3. The public space (typically, people are anonymous in this space).

Individuals can experience loneliness at different levels in these spaces. How is loneliness addressed from a psychological point of view?

Psychologists have tried a number of strategies to help individuals who feel lonely. Intuitively, these strategies make a lot of sense. Firstly, help individuals to get more friends. Yet, having a lot of friends is not a problem for most people in the age of social media. So clearly, simply assisting individuals to get a lot of contacts, acquaintances and friends is not really addressing the core of the issue.

Another approach is skills training to assist people to develop new relationships and friendships if and when required. Clearly, social skills training can be very helpful in the context of autism and a number of mental health issues. However, we have seen already that individuals can feel lonely in the presence of others, so the skill of obtaining new friends in itself is not addressing the problem.

From the viewpoint of CBT, maladaptive and unhelpful cognitions that result in the experience of loneliness must be addressed. What are the conditions of loneliness and how might this be manifested?

Nobody becomes or feels lonely voluntarily. The experience of loneliness typically includes the feeling of being on the fringe of a social network. A feeling of being isolated. Frequently, there is the experience of a process: Step-by-step the individual perceives isolation and loneliness as if moving from the centre of social relations to the edge. This experience often results in maladaptive thoughts and behaviours.

The perception of living on the edge of social networks frequently results in efforts to make new contacts and in having high expectations for these new friend-ships. These new relationships have great importance due to the perceived isola-tion. Hence, any event that makes the development of these friendships more difficult, in particular early in the process, can be viewed as negative. It can result in unhelpful thinking styles such as catastrophising and personalisation.

Perhaps as a result of not achieving human companionship, a common anti-dote is for people to seek a loving relationship with a pet. The adage ‘A man’s best friend is his dog’ is a telling statement about the consistent loyalty and affec-tion that many people receive through owning a pet. Pets are often used for therapeutic purposes to counteract the loneliness of living along in old age when one’s spouse may have passed on, and children are less accessible as they grow up and develop their own lives. Similarly, owning or having regular access to a horse has been deemed valuable for equine assisted psychotherapy to help an individual build confidence, trust, impulse control. A feeling that someone or an animal cares is a powerful antidote to loneliness, which can be supported through the caring professions, and to current and future applications of AI.

References

Diederich J, The Psychology of Artificial Superintelligence. Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021, ISBN 978-3-030-71841-1, DOI https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71842-8

Kunze L, Chatting with Machines: Strange Things 60 Billion Bots Logs Say About Human Nature. https://youtu.be/KSJ0DMQbN-s

Cacioppo S, Grippo, AJ, London,S, Goossens L, Cacioppo, JT, Loneliness: Clinical Import and Interventions. Perspect Psychol Sci., 10(2) (2015) 238–249.

Weiss R, Loneliness. The Experience of Emotional and Social Isolation. Boston: MIT Press 1974.