TY  - JOUR
A1  - Appel, Markus
A1  - Marker, Caroline
A1  - Mara, Martina
T1  - Otakuism and the appeal of sex robots
JF  - Frontiers in Psychology
N2  - Social robots are becoming increasingly prevalent in everyday life and sex robots are a sub-category of especially high public interest and controversy. 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). 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. Higher anime and manga fandom was associated with higher appeal for all three future technologies. 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.
KW  - sex robots
KW  - anime
KW  - manga
KW  - fan culture
KW  - otakuism
KW  - shyness
KW  - uncanny valley
Y1  - 2019
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-195893
SN  - 1664-1078
VL  - 10
IS  - 569
ER  -