Otakuism and the Appeal of Sex Robots.

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 , 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 (, , , ). In an online-experiment, 261 participants read one out of three randomly assigned descriptions of future technologies (, , ) and reported on their overall evaluation, eeriness, and contact/purchase intentions. Higher 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.