by David Levy
Following his work on the Australian People and Pets Survey, Headey collaborated with Markus Grabke on a similar study for Germany, comparing the data for a group of 10,000 respondents to a socioeconomic survey that had been repeated after a gap of five years. Within the survey group, those who had owned a pet for five years or more benefited the most, suggesting that it is the bond with the animal, rather than its mere proximity, that creates the feeling of well-being that positively affects the owner’s health. This implication, that the therapeutic effects of a dog vary according to how well the patient has bonded with it, confirms the results of an earlier study at the University of Nebraska, which found that interacting with a dog with whom the patient has already formed a companion bond resulted in an 8-percent decrease in blood pressure, relative to interacting with a dog with whom the patient has not bonded. Subsequently Headey speculated:
At a fundamental level, the benefits of pets appear linked to the human desire to be close to nature and other living creatures. The famous zoologist Edward O. Wilson has called the beliefs that humans need and benefit from closeness and companionship with other species “the biophilia hypothesis,” which he postulates is based on an inherent, biologically based “predisposition to attend to, and affiliate with, like and lifelike processes.”3, 4 About 50 percent of adults and 70 percent of adolescents who own pets report that they confide in them. It is most unlikely that all this communication and companionship is wasted.5
Comparing Relationships
Gail Melson has found considerable evidence that children aged three or even younger establish relationships with pets that provide emotional comfort in times of stress. She asserts that “the ties that children forge with their pets are often among the most significant bonds of childhood, as deeply affecting as those with parents, siblings and friends.”6 This form of comfort extends to school-age children, as indicated by the significant though widely varying percentages of children, aged from five to fourteen, the subjects of various studies, who said that they would turn to their pets when feeling sad, afraid, upset, or stressed. Children’s feelings about their pets are typified by remarks such as, “My dog is very special to me. We have had it for seven years now. When I was little I used to go to her and pet her when I was depressed and crying. She seemed to understand. You could tell by the look in her eyes.” Because of remarks such as these, Michael Robin and Robin ten Bensel were led to conclude, “As children get older the pet acquires many of the characteristics of the ideal mother: unconditional, devoted, attentive, loyal and nonverbal.”7 And the roles that pets play in a child’s emotional development have been further investigated by Sandra Triebenbacher at East Carolina University, who found that almost all of the children she surveyed (89 percent or more) said that their pets were important members of the family, that they loved their pets very much, and that their pets also loved them very much.
The important benefits of pets described in this chapter have thus far been discussed without any mention of what the human-animal relationship is like for the pets. Humans and animals might well have completely different perceptions of their relationship, and it is known that animals generally prefer companions from within their own species to human companions. One might therefore expect that pets do not give their all to their human owners, in which case it is inevitable that robots will have the potential to be even better companions than animals are, because robots will be designed and programmed to enjoy their interactions with humans to the fullest and to behave accordingly.
One important indicator demonstrated by the human love for animals is that humans are able to form bonds of love with nonhumans. Anyone who maintains that it is unnatural for us to love robots, on the basis that humans can love only other humans, therefore faces the instant refutation of their argument. Our love for pet animals also provides support for our understanding of why it is that many people form strong emotional attachments to robot pets, the subject of chapter 3. The virtual pets of today, and earlier generations of robots, share with real pets one strong negative property that creates great similarities between human-pet relationships and human–virtual-pet relationships: It is not possible to carry on a sensible conversation with either. True, some robots can talk, using speech-synthesis technology, but their conversational abilities correspond at best to those of a two-to three-year-old toddler. In fact, the current level of speech recognition and understanding by robots, as well as this lack of conversational ability, makes them in some ways inferior as communicators to those animals whose owners “know” that their pet understands them and “talks” to them. This might be stretching the bounds of credibility too far for the liking of some readers, but one could argue in support of an extension to Alan Turing’s thinking*—namely, if a pet owner believes that their animal understands them and “talks” to them, then we should accept that, for this particular pet owner, their animal does indeed communicate with them. And as Sherry Turkle notes, a similar tendency has been observed in some elderly people, who believe that a robot designed to be of therapeutic benefit to them is in a relationship with them, this because the robot makes eye contact or acts in some other way that is relationship-driven when seen in humans.
The fact that our love for our pets is understood by psychologists to be a form of attachment, the same phenomenon psychologists now accept as being the basis of romantic love, the same phenomenon that can have as its object computers or other artifacts, suggests that attachment permeates throughout the human-animal-artifact continuum. How has this attachment process with animals evolved? Archer believes that pets have evolved in ways that manipulate the human species through a number of features that make our interactions with them potentially rewarding for us, so that pets appear to treat their owners with love and affection. Cats and dogs behave in ways that are appealing to their human owners. Dogs show obvious signs of affection and attachment to their owners and are very attentive to them, while cats, although more independent, appear to like being stroked and petted.
Why Do People Love Their Pets?
Many people believe that strong feelings directed toward a pet are an indication of an inadequacy in the person’s relationships with humans. This judgment is often applied to a woman who lives by herself, has no children, and dotes on her dogs or cats. It can also be found in the comments of some psychiatrists about patients who show strong attachments to their pets. But there is a certain amount of convincing evidence that this view is wrong, evidence that people who have more secure attachments in their close relationships with other adults are the ones who are most strongly attached to their dogs. This is the opposite of what we would expect if strong attachment to a pet resulted from difficulties in forming relationships with adult humans.
Since reciprocity is one of the most significant factors in prompting feelings of romantic love,* it seems likely that the reciprocity demonstrated by pets—the purring of a cat and the nuzzling and tail wagging of a dog—similarly contributes to the strength of affection felt by an owner for a pet, and that reciprocity will likewise be a contributing factor in the growth of affection felt by an owner for a robot, when that robot demonstrates its virtual affection for its owner. A common example of reciprocity in dogs is seen when one of them is tethered to a lamppost while the owner goes into a shop. Next time you see this happen, watch that dog while the owner is in the shop. The dog will most likely remain fairly calm, perhaps trying to peer through the glass into the shop to see the owner. But when the owner returns to collect the pet, the dog will usually go into paroxysms of excitement, the owner’s absence, albeit for a short time, having made the dog’s heart grow fonder. In their study of human emotions: A General Theory of Love, Thomas Lewis, Fari Amini, and Richard Lannon explain this reaction as being part of the attachment process between dog and owner:
They spend time near each other and miss each other; they will read some of each other’s emotional cues; each will find the presence of the other soothing and comforting; each will tune an
d regulate the psychology of the other….8
Sherry Turkle at MIT was one of the first authoritative researchers to draw a parallel between man’s relationship with animals and his relationship with computers:
Before the computer, the animals, mortal though not sentient, seemed our nearest neighbors in the known universe. Computers, with their interactivity, their psychology, with whatever fragments of intelligence they have, now bid for this place.9
The human propensity for loving our pets thus informs our understanding of the emotional attraction to computers, to robot pets, and to humanoid robots. For those people who value their relationships with their pets more highly than their relationships with other humans, it would not be surprising if a virtual pet or a robot were to be regarded in the same vein, supplanting humans as the most natural objects of human affection. Where such people lead, others will surely follow, as the joys and benefits of relationships with robots become well publicized.
3 Emotional Relationships with Electronic Objects
A relationship with a computer can influence people’s conception of themselves, their jobs, their relationships with other people, and with their ways of thinking about social processes. It can be the basis for new aesthetic values, new rituals, new philosophy, new cultural forms.
—Sherry Turkle1
Sherry Turkle, an MIT professor of social studies and technology and director of the institute’s Initiative on Technology and Self, was the first to publish extensively on the effects of computers on society—what computers are doing to us—a subject in which her thoughtful and groundbreaking 1984 book The Second Self has become a classic.* The above quotation is taken from chapter 5, in which Turkle describes how some of the early owners of home computers, some expert programmers, and some artificial-intelligence researchers took to them in a novel way, forming some sort of relationship with their computer. These were the earliest forms of the relationships that many owners nowadays develop for their virtual pets.
A virtual pet is a computer representation of a model of pet behavior, incorporating software that allows owners to interact with their virtual pets. The computer might be a PC or game console that displays images of the virtual pet on its screen; it might be a microprocessor-based† product such as a mobile phone or a Tamagotchi, with a much smaller display than a PC screen; or it could be a microprocessor-based toy that looks like an animal or a robot. No matter what its embodiment and appearance, the principle is the same: The virtual brain of the virtual pet is simulated by software in some sort of computing device. In summary, the core of a virtual pet is a computer of some sort plus some software. Relationships between humans and virtual pets are therefore an extended form of human-computer relationship, extended by the embodiment of the microprocessor in a petlike design, whether it be the design of a creature on a screen, as with the Tamagotchi, or the design of a doll or some form of petlike body that itself creates a measure of emotional appeal.
Attachment and Relationships with Objects
In chapter 1 we touched upon the subject of attachment, discussing how the process of attachment in childhood extends into adulthood, sometimes manifesting itself as romantic love. Here we examine the process of attachment in more detail, as it pertains to computers and to virtual pets such as the Tamagotchi.
The process of attachment is closely related to another psychological phenomenon—transitional objects.* The young child becomes attached to an object such as a crib blanket (often spoken of as the child’s “security blanket”), an article of clothing, or a soft toy. These are items that help the child to make the emotional transition from being wholly dependent on its mother and other caregivers toward being independent.
The significance of transitional objects was first recognized by the British pediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, whose 1951 essay “Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena” had an enormous impact on child psychology.† Winnicott argued that such attachments represent a developmental stage whereby infants make use of an object over which they have control, to deal with and move on from their early attachment to their mother, who is less under the infant’s control than is the transitional object.
Subsequently other psychologists investigated and came to accept the notion that transitional phenomena extended past infancy, through adolescence, and into adult life. As Robert Young explains:
Having abandoned the blanket, doll or teddy, one can still attach similar significance to other objects with a less addictive intensity. The sensuous, comforting quality and the sense of something that is favorite and to which one turns when in danger of depressive anxiety applies to all sorts of special things. Everyone’s list will be different, but these days Walkmans have this quality for many adolescents, as do portable computer games for pre-teens and computers for adult devotees, whether they be merely enthusiastic word processors or totally committed “hackers.” The same can be said of mountain bikes, fancy roller skates, expensive trainers, certain fashions in clothes—Champion sweatshirts and sweat-pants and Timberland shoes in the case of my children.2
And on the consequences of the comfort given by transitional phenomena, Young asserts that
they can become more real and intimate than human relations per se. One of the consequences of the fetishism of commodities is that the products of human hands appear as independent beings endowed with life and entering into relations both with one another and the human race. This arises not only from the commodity form but also from the formation of character in the image of the commodity.3
He further posits that the relationship between persons and things thus becomes transformed “so that my best friend is my Walkman or my personal computer.” Sherry Turkle’s explanation of the effect of early encounters with transitional objects is that they create a “highly charged intermediate space between the self and certain objects in later life.”4 She observes that not only do children project their fantasies and desires onto their transitional inert playthings, they also engage with their relational artifacts, their crying, talking electronic playthings.
Robert Pirsig’s 1974 bestseller, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, expounded on the subject of intense relationships with technical objects and how such relationships can evoke philosophical musings. The latter-day version of Pirsig’s motorcycling hero is the computer hacker,* many of whom boast on the Internet about their skills. Those who love the technology and the process of programming, mostly young men who are more than willing to stay up all night “hacking,” share a fascination with the computer and an addiction to it. Out of this fascination, this addiction, springs a kind of love for the computer. Sherry Turkle has suggested that hackers’ assertiveness of their skills is probably a symptom of a basic human need to credit their own place in society, their own favorite activities, with meaning. In The Second Self, in a chapter entitled “Hackers: Loving the Machine for Itself,” Turkle describes hacking as
a flight from relationship with people to relationship with the machine—a defensive maneuver more common to men than to women. The computer that is the partner in this relationship offers a particularly seductive refuge to someone who is having trouble dealing with people. It is active, reactive, it talks back. Many hackers first sought out a refuge during early adolescence, when other people, their feelings, their demands, seemed particularly frightening. They found a refuge in the computer and never moved beyond.
The hackers that Turkle describes here are at those at an extreme end of the social spectrum. Some programmers became hackers because of their love for the process of solving difficult problems, and the computer evolved to be the perfect tool for them because of the immediacy of the feedback it gave. Many of those who considered themselves to be hackers during the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s also had very active social lives that often integrated with their computing lives, providing a decent break from hacking. The extreme cases represented by the hackers interviewed by Turkle were simply the normal extremes of the personali
ty spectrum, overlaid on the spectrum of those who love solving problems, of which mathematicians and chess grandmasters are other examples. Turkle’s hackers, because of their extreme position on the social spectrum, were the first to exemplify the type of person who will be likely to embrace the ideas of love and sex with robots.
Turkle quotes one hacker who explained to her why, after he had “tried out” having girlfriends, he preferred to relate to computers:
With social interactions you have to have confidence that the rest of the world will be nice to you. You can’t control how the rest of the world is going to react to you. But with computers you are in complete control, the rest of the world cannot affect you.
And Turkle explains the role of the computer in providing relationships for those humans who have nowhere else (or no one else) to turn to, as being based on the computer’s interactive capabilities:
One can turn to the world of machines for relationship…. And the computer, reactive and interactive, offers companionship without the threat of human intimacy…. The interactivity of the computer may make him feel less alone, even as he spends more and more of his time programming alone.5
Norman Holland goes one step further, explaining why computer programming has been likened to sex:
When programming, the computer addicts are working with an ideal partner who understands them fully. They feel toward their machines as toward a true friend. This friend will not withdraw if a mistake is made. This friend will try to be an ever-faithful helpmate. And this friend is male.6
But why do computers assume this role? The answer seems to lie in the process of attachment. Relationships that are attachment-based have been found to possess four characteristic features:
(a) An attachment figure, subconsciously associated with the infant’s mother, takes on the role of “proximity maintenance,” providing the comfort of always being there when its presence is needed, whether it be needed to bestow praise or to help dissipate feelings of fear.