As human contact becomes rarer across various service sectors, is it starting to resemble a rare luxury that only the rich can afford? In a seminar held by Dr. Claudia Civai, Senior Lecturer in Psychology (Behavioural Economics) at City St George's, University of London, in October, this question was discussed at length as Dr. Civai presented her research on the growing value of human contact in an increasingly digital world.
The work is published on the PsyArXiv preprint server. In the talk, Dr. Civai discussed how she has been exploring how digitalization, while beneficial, might be turning human interaction into a scarce luxury good.
This research suggests that as human contact becomes rarer across various service sectors, people are willing to pay more for it, particularly those with higher incomes. Valuable contact The study in question involved four pre-registered online experiments with 3,521 participants from the UK and Italy. It examined how people valued services across four domains: education, finance, mental health, and fitness.
Participants were presented with two options for each service—one that involved human contact, such as face-to-face counseling, and another that was fully digital, like an app-based fitness program. "We wondered whether, by focusing on the benefits of digitalization, something might be overlooked," Dr. Civai explained during the seminar, highlighting the motivation behind the research.
"Human contact might be becoming scarcer, and in eff.
