Research peek -- Playing with dinosaurs for science
Added 2022-07-11 07:12:20 +0000 UTCHello, maintenance crew! Sylvan here with another glimpse at the research that goes into these videos. This week, I want to talk about something I read that didn't make it into the video. I loved this finding so much, I wanted to share it here!
Let me introduce you to Pleo the dinosaur: 
Aren't they adorable? And they have a pretty cool job! Pleo is a robot designed for use in empathy studies. In a pair of studies at the University of Duisburg Essen, researchers studied subjects' reactions when they saw people petting, playing with, or "hurting" Pleo. They had some pretty cool findings: though everyone knew this was a robot, a lot of folks felt distressed when they saw Pleo being abused.
Why do we respond this way to things we know are inanimate? I don't have time to answer that now, but I'll leave links to a couple articles that can help. And you'll hear more on the subject in an upcoming video :)
Here's an article about the Pleo studies (including videos of people playing with the robot):
https://www.mindfood.com/article/new-study-reveals-why-it-is-we-feel-empathy-for-inanimate-objects/
And
3 reasons we empathize with inanimates:
https://qz.com/935832/why-do-people-name-their-plants-cars-ships-and-guitars-anthropomorphism-may-actually-signal-social-intelligence/
See you in a couple weeks!
-- Sylvan, researcher
