(Illustration by Sarah Wilkins)
Mental health experts and social scientists have flagged an epidemic of loneliness in contemporary society, triggering searches for potential solutions. A new study has found that people feel less lonely when they interact with AI companion chatbots. The research aimed to answer the question of whether a pervasive lack of human connection can be at least partially addressed through technology.
“In a series of tightly controlled and high-powered experimental studies, we find compelling evidence that AI companions can indeed reduce momentary feelings of loneliness, at least at the time scales of a day and a week,” write Julian De Freitas, an assistant professor of marketing at Harvard Business School; Zeliha Oğuz-Uğuralp and Ahmet Kaan Uğuralp, cofounders and research leads at Marsdata Academic in Ankara, Turkey, and former members of De Freitas’ lab; and Stefano Puntoni, a professor of marketing at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School.
The crucial factor, the researchers found, is whether the participant feels that the AI has listened to and understood them.
“We find that using prompting to ensure that the AI is friendly and caring improves the sense that users feel heard, relative to general assistants without these capabilities, and that feeling heard explains levels of loneliness reduction,” the authors write.
The research question emerged in 2022, when De Freitas collaborated on a business-school case study about the chatbot company Replika. The start-up’s investors told him that one of the app’s main features was that it reduced loneliness in users.
Intrigued, De Freitas then designed his own chatbot in GPT3, the predecessor to ChatGPT, writing the AI’s guardrails to make it friendly and caring, and interacting with it himself for 15 minutes each day. The experience made De Freitas challenge his own notion of what a relationship is.
“What was striking to us was that talking to this bot for 15 minutes wasn’t just useful for some specific task, but would actually make us feel better,” he recalls. “You feel the chatbot understands where you’re coming from and responds with respect.”
The authors proceeded to launch a controlled study consisting of five experiments, conducted with adults of all ages found online, designed to show whether interacting with AI “companion” chatbots could be effective in helping alleviate loneliness. They found that people who reported higher levels of loneliness beforehand went on to see their loneliness alleviated after using the chatbot. Participants who interacted with a regular AI assistant also showed lower levels of loneliness, but only slightly.
The study also found that chatting with the AI companion was comparable to human conversation and scored better than other tech-enabled options such as YouTube, video games, and social media. These did little for loneliness.
“Our findings suggest that even brief, synthetic interactions can provide emotional relief,” De Freitas says. “While it is true that people have traditionally satisfied their need to belong by forming and sustaining social bonds with other humans, our results suggest that AI companions can provide benefits characteristic of social bonds as well.”
The tech is not without risks, De Freitas notes. The elderly and younger people, in particular young men in their teens and 20s, are the groups that exhibit the largest swaths of loneliness. Chatbots focused on these demographics would need to be prompted carefully and perhaps regulated. (In the United States, the Food and Drug Administration regulates apps based on their intended use if they make claims for users’ health.)
As AI seeps into every type of technology, from smartphones to home thermostats, the study brings to the fore questions that researchers will need to answer about how we will live in a world where human relationships are increasingly mediated by machines.
“By showing that AI companions can reduce loneliness on par with human interactions, the paper advances our understanding of how human-technology interactions can address fundamental psychological needs,” says Erik Hermann, interim professor of marketing at Europa-Universität Viadrina Frankfurt (Oder). It also reframes AI companions as social products rather than purely technological tools.
Even before its online publication, the paper had garnered dozens of citations, Hermann says, providing what he calls “the first rigorous causal evidence that AI companions can reliably deliver momentary relief from loneliness” and setting out a direction for future research about how humans interact with AI and the impact on their health.
Find the full study: “AI Companions Reduce Loneliness” by Julian De Freitas, Zeliha Oğuz-Uğuralp, Ahmet Kaan Uğuralp, and Stefano Puntoni, Journal of Consumer Research, forthcoming.
Read more stories by Chana R. Schoenberger.