Breaking Emotional Barriers: How AI Mitigates Interpersonal Distance and Fosters Social Capability Growth

In today’s “liquid modernity”, rapid technological change and hyper-mediated relationships often leave youth’s emotional needs unmet, fostering fatigue, social pressure, and loneliness. Yet, as interaction is intrinsic to human sociality, intelligent agents are emerging as viable alternatives to traditional social partners. Using grounded theory, this study identifies a prevalent “sense of interpersonal distance” among youth. It examines its moderating role in a 2 (social type: interpersonal vs. human–AI) × 2 (scenario type: competence vs. emotional) experiment. Findings reveal that interpersonal distance significantly shapes evaluations of social types and that AI can function as a social actor in both competence- and emotion-oriented contexts. Such human–AI connections may offer new forms of technologically mediated intimacy, shifting sociality from co-presence to co-existence.