Touching Robots Inappropriately Can Apparently Arouse Humans, Says Science

According to a romantic new study, the intimate touch of a robot can actually stimulate arousal in humans. California researchers had volunteers sit less than two feet away from a humanoid robot while it said provocative things, like,

Sometimes I'll ask you to touch my body and sometimes I'll ask you to point to my body.

They found that touching a robot where its butt or genitals would be resulted in a detectable response of arousal from the volunteer human. The researcher who led the study, Jamy Li, a mechanical engineer at Stanford University in California, said,

Our work shows that robots are a new form of media that is particularly powerful. It shows that people respond to robots in a primitive, social way. Social conventions regarding touching someone else's private parts apply to a robot's body parts as well. The research has implications for both robot design and the theory of artificial systems.

Of the ten volunteers, four were female and six were male. While the study isn't exhaustive or definitive in any way, it does give us some insight into the primitive, instinctual human mind -- mainly, that we can get turned on by our GPS if it talked dirty to us.

Don't watch the video below unless you're certain you can handle the sexual tension.

Citations: Touching robots can arouse humans, study finds (The Guardian)