Loneliness is a distressing personal experience and a growing social issue. Social robots could alleviate the pain of loneliness, particularly for those who lack in-person interaction. This paper investigated how the effect of loneliness on the anthropomorphism of social robots differs by robot appearance, and how it influences purchase intention. Participants viewed a video of one of the three robots (machine-like, animal-like, and human-like) moving and interacting with a human counterpart. Bootstrapped multiple regression results revealed that although the unique effect of animal-likeness on anthropomorphism compared to human-likeness was higher, lonely individuals’ tendency to anthropomorphize the animal-like robot was lower than that of the human-like robot. This moderating effect remained significant after covariates were included. Bootstrapped mediation analysis showed that anthropomorphism had both a positive direct effect on purchase intent and a positive indirect effect mediated by likability. Our results suggest that lonely individuals’ tendency of anthropomorphizing social robots should not be summarized into one unified inclination. Moreover, by extending the effect of loneliness on anthropomorphism to likability and purchase intent, this current study explored the potential of social robots to be adopted as companions of lonely individuals in their real life. Lastly, we discuss the practical implications of the current study for designing social robots.

This paper proposes a multiple stakeholder perspective model (MSPM) which predicts the future pedestrian trajectory observed from vehicle's point of view. For the vehicle-pedestrian interaction, the estimation of the pedestrian's intention is a key factor. However, even if this interaction is commonly initiated by both the human (pedestrian) and the agent (driver), current research focuses on developing a neural network trained by the data from driver's perspective only. In this paper, we suggest a multiple stakeholder perspective model (MSPM) and apply this model for pedestrian intention prediction. The model combines the driver (stakeholder 1) and pedestrian (stakeholder 2) by separating the information based on the perspective. The dataset from pedestrian's perspective have been collected from the virtual reality experiment, and a network that can reflect perspectives of both pedestrian and driver is proposed. Our model achieves the best performance in the existing pedestrian intention dataset, while reducing the trajectory prediction error by average of 4.48% in the short-term (0.5s) and middle-term (1.0s) prediction, and 11.14% in the long-term prediction (1.5s) compared to the previous state-of-the-art.