McCain et al., 2015), the term otaku has lost much of its stigmatization in recent times.
As it happened with related concepts such as the “nerd” or the “geek” (cf. The merchandise targeted at otakus include body pillows with manga character prints and interactive holographic animations of their waifus. They have a strong attachment to Japanese manga comics and sometimes even label fictional human-like manga characters as their waifus (their ‘wives’). Prototypical members of this group are male and socially secluded. Our starting point to identify explicative individual difference dimensions is the cultural phenomenon of the otaku (e.g., Kinsella, 1998 Galbraith, 2009 Ito et al., 2012 Kam, 2013). The aim of this work is to examine individual differences as predictors of affective responses and behavioral intentions toward sex robots. The arguably most dazzling category of these social robots-and one that captures a large portion of media attention (e.g., Kleeman, 2017 National Broadcasting Company news, 2017 Awford, 2019)-is sex robots.
The vision of a proliferation of robotic technologies has been met with mixed reactions ( Gnambs and Appel, 2019) human-like robots in particular have been the cause of skepticism and negative emotions among potential users. More recently, tech companies have started to develop robots that are meant to be applied outside factory walls, in hospitals, shopping malls, and in people’s homes. For our male subsample, sex robots and GMOs stood out as shyness yielded a particularly strong relationship to contact/purchase intentions for these new technologies.įor many years now, robots have been involved in the production of cars, chemicals, and other industrial goods.
Higher anime and manga fandom was associated with higher appeal for all three future technologies. In an online-experiment, 261 participants read one out of three randomly assigned descriptions of future technologies (sex robot, nursing robot, genetically modified organism) and reported on their overall evaluation, eeriness, and contact/purchase intentions. Starting from the concept of the otaku, a term from Japanese youth culture that describes secluded persons with a high affinity for fictional manga characters, we examine individual differences behind sex robot appeal (anime and manga fandom, interest in Japanese culture, preference for indoor activities, shyness). Social robots are becoming increasingly prevalent in everyday life and sex robots are a sub-category of especially high public interest and controversy.
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