Vinculación emocional humano-máquina: una aproximación desde la psicología a los asistentes virtuales

Abstract

This research sought to understand the factors that influence the bond and attachment that a user generates with his virtual assistant, assistants such as Alexa, Siri, Google Assistant and Cortana, for which this relationship was investigated in the community of the University Santo Tomás, Bogotá, by means of the MPPUS tools or ¨Mobile Phone Problem Use Scale¨, the Camir-R, the measurement of satisfaction and loyalty Net promoter Score or NPS, and finally a semi-structured interview. With this we sought to answer the research question: How is the human-machine emotional bonding understood, from an understanding of psychology in the use of virtual assistants, in the university community of Santo Tomás, Bogotá campus?

The research was based on a sequential explanatory design, with exploratory scope and a mixed methodology with qualitative preponderance, which sought to give the greatest breadth to the phenomenon of study, being a reference as far as the psychological discipline refers, for it in the first quantitative part a sample of 7 participants of the university community of Tomas, and in the second and last, delved into the qualitative aspects with 2 participants. For the analysis of the results, Spearman correlation, the Chi2 statistic, and the categorization by means of Atlas T, of the emerging discourses in the interviews were used, all to account for the factors that affect the understanding of the link between users and virtual assistants. The main data indicated a correlation between the type of attachment and the scale of excessive use of the MPPUS cell phone, likewise, the characteristics of the attachment were found to have an impact on the nature of the bond that a user generates with the assistant, as well as the functions and personalization available in these programs, which was revealing, The multinational bet of the companies behind these assistants, such as Amazon, Microsoft, Apple and Google, to provide a greater variety in the possibilities of personalizing these assistants, would help to generate a much closer and more intimate bond between human-machine, thus opening a new panorama of action for psychology in this interaction.