Speaker: Dr Claudia Civai, City St George's, University of London
Abstract
While the advantages of digitalisation are widely acknowledged, there is less understanding of its drawbacks, particularly the gradual reduction of human interaction in our lives.
What are the psycho-social implications of this? Do people value human contact, and does human contact become more valuable when perceived as rare, potentially turning it into a luxury?
To explore these questions, we conducted four pre-registered online studies (N=3,521) across different domains (education, finance, mental health, and fitness) using hypothetical scenarios and a willingness-to-pay task, where we asked participants how much they were willing to pay for a service, offered either with human contact (e.g., a financial advisor), or fully digital (e.g., an app for financial advice).
Their results revealed that services offering human contact are valued more than their digital equivalent, and people with higher income were willing to pay more for them, but not for digital options.
Crucially, when participants were nudged to view human contact as scarce, its perceived value increased, in that they were willing to pay more for it.
These findings were replicated within a UK and an Italian sample and support our intuition that the move towards digitalisation could introduce a new form of inequality, that of access to human contact. Plans for future research will be discussed.
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