Human contact in the digital age: a scarce luxury good?

The benefits of digitalisation have been widely embraced, but little is known about one of its downsides, the gradual erosion of human interaction from our lives. What are the psycho-social implications of this? Do people value human contact, and do they value it more when perceived as scarce, effectively turning it into a luxury good? We tested these questions in four pre-registered online studies (N=3521), using hypothetical scenarios encompassing four different domains (education, finance, mental health, and fitness) and a willingness to pay task, where we asked participants how much they were willing to pay for a service, offered either with human contact (e.g., a financial advisor), or fully digital (e.g., an app for financial advice). We found that services offering human contact are valued more than their digital equivalent, and people on higher income are willing to pay more for them, but not for digital; crucially, nudging people to perceive human contact as scarce increased its value, in that people were willing to pay more for it. These findings were replicated within a UK and Italian sample and support our intuition that the move towards digitalisation could introduce a new form of inequality, that of access to human contact.