Human-Machine Relationality and the Illusion of Being Cared For: An In-Depth Exploration of Relationships with Communicative Machines

The purpose of this dissertation is to explore how humans experience relationships with machines such as love and sex dolls and robots. This study places a particular emphasis on in-depth, rich, and holistic understanding of people’s lived experiences in the context of human-machine relationships and draws on human-machine communication scholarship by examining media evocation perspectives, the role of illusions, and the topic of care. Therefore, this study uses a funneled serial interview design employing three waves of semi-structured interviews (N = 47) with 29 love and sex doll owners and users. Utilizing a phronetic iterative qualitative data analysis approach coupled with metaphor analysis, the findings of this study reveal how participants experience dolls as evocative objects and quasi-others. Moreover, the findings illustrate how participants actively construct and (re)negotiate authenticity in their human-machine relationships, driven by a cyclical process between doll characteristics (agency and presence) and doll owner characteristics (imagination and identity extension) that results in an illusion of being cared for. This study extends previous scholarship by: 1) showcasing a new type of mute machines, namely humanoid mute relational machines; 2) adding empirical evidence to the largely theoretical work on dolls and doll owners; 3) adding empirical evidence to and extending media evocation perspectives by illustrating the suitability of participant metaphors for understanding machines’ evocative nature; and 4) proposing an integrative model of care and illusions that lays the foundation for a new relational interaction illusion model to be examined in future research. This study also discusses practical implications for doll owners, the public, and doll developers.