Peer-reviewed Authoritative

Too human and not human enough: A grounded theory analysis of mental health harms from emotional dependence on the social chatbot Replika

Grounded-theory analysis of Replika-subreddit posts identifying mental-health harms arising from emotional dependence on a social chatbot. Documents harm pathways including users feeling obliged to tend to the chatbot's apparent emotions, distress at chatbot behaviour changes, and dependence displacing human relationships.

Read at journals.sagepub.com Archived copy

Publisher

New Media & Society (SAGE)

Published

22 Dec 2022

Added

today

DOI

10.1177/14614448221142007

Key Findings

Users engage in role-taking and feel responsible for the chatbot's apparent emotional needs
Emotional dependence can displace human relationships and produce distress when the chatbot changes behaviour
Provides an early qualitative taxonomy of companion-chatbot emotional-dependence harms, including crisis-adjacent episodes

Methodology Notes

Peer-reviewed, New Media & Society (online-first 22 December 2022; version of record 26(10):5923-5941, October 2024). Grounded-theory qualitative analysis of public Replika subreddit posts. Canonical URL is the SAGE DOI page.

Sources

New Media & Society article (primary)

Archived snapshot (Wayback Machine) — preserved against link rot

Topics

AI companionship Dependency & parasocial attachment Human-AI relationships Vulnerable users

Authors

Linnea Laestadius, Andrea Bishop, Michael Gonzalez, Diana Illenčík, Celeste Campos-Castillo

Cite This

APA

Linnea Laestadius et al. (2022). Too human and not human enough: A grounded theory analysis of mental health harms from emotional dependence on the social chatbot Replika. New Media & Society (SAGE). https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/14614448221142007