My wish list for research in 2024: Why does estrogen make my brown eyes blue? Sex linkage of hair and eye colors

 

Eye colors (R.A. Sturm, University of Queensland)

Estrogen seems to favor the expression of non-black hair and non-brown eyes during fetal development. The “new” hair and eye colors are not only more frequent among women but also associated, in the case of blue eyes, with feminization of male face shape, female shoulder width, and female waist-to-hip ratio ... and with shyness in young boys.

 

Europeans have a surprising variety of hair and eye colors. Their hair is not only black but also brown, flaxen, golden, or red. Their eyes are not only brown but also blue, gray, hazel, or green (Frost, 2006; Frost, 2022). This differentiation from the original black hair and brown eyes seems to have begun among women and gone farther among them.

 

Hair color - Women more often have the new hair colors, particularly red and blond. Conversely, their hair is less often black—three to five times less often. This sex difference is natural (Hysi et al., 2018; Shekar et al., 2008). Among Czechs, 19% of women and 11% of men have the highest gradation of hair redness (Frost et al., 2017).

 

Eye color - Women more often have the new eye colors, particularly green and hazel (Frost et al., 2017). Conversely, their eyes are less often brown. The first new eye color seems to have been blue, which then differentiated to create gray, green, and hazel. Thus, “blue” in its narrow sense has lost ground among women to the derived variants of green and hazel.

Population frequencies of eye colors, for men and women (Frost et al., 2017)

The new hair and eye colors are unusual in two ways. First, they are brighter than the original black and brown. They thus reflect more light and have a higher chance of standing out against the visual landscape. Second, they are “purer”—they occupy thinner slices of the visible spectrum than the original black and brown. In nature, pure colors are typically found in situations where an animal or a plant has to catch attention, such as to get pollinated, to warn predators, or to attract a mate.

 

This need for attention may explain how a single hair or eye color evolved into a diverse palette of hues. A color gets noticed not only for its brightness and purity but also for its novelty. The last quality is frequency-dependent. If a noticeable color becomes too frequent in a population, it thereby becomes less noticeable and, hence, less novel. The desire for novelty is now reoriented toward less frequent colors, including those that have recently appeared through mutation. Thus, over successive generations, the population will accumulate more and more color variants. This is likely how hair and eye color became polymorphic (see Note #1).

 

Again, the evidence seems to point to women being the main target of this selection for brighter, purer, and more novel colors. One piece of evidence is the higher frequency of the new hair and eye colors in the female population. Another is the role of estrogen in this sex-linkage. The female hormone seems to favor the expression of non-black hair and non-brown eyes during fetal development.

Red is the hair color that differs the most in frequency between women and men. Red hair should therefore be most clearly associated with increased exposure to estrogen during fetal development. This hypothesis is supported by the higher incidence of estrogen-dependent diseases in redhaired women. According to a health survey of over seven thousand people, male redheads are as healthy as other men, doing better on average in three categories and worse in three. Female redheads, however, do worse on average than other women in ten categories and better in only three. They are especially prone to four types of cancer: colorectal, cervical, uterine, and ovarian—three of which are estrogen-dependent (Frost et al., 2017). Being both female and red-haired therefore generates the highest level of risk for estrogen-dependent diseases, probably because of the combined effect of these two risk factors.

 

In sum, the new hair and eye colors were favored by a selection pressure that acted primarily on European women, with European men acquiring them as a side-effect (since the new alleles are only partly sex-linked). The selection was specifically for eye-catching qualities—brightness, spectral purity, and relative novelty.

 

This looks like sexual selection, but why would women have a greater need to get noticed on the mate market? Usually, it is the other way around, both for humans and for mammals in general. Females are less available for mating because of the limitations of pregnancy, lactation, and early infant care. Conversely, males are more available, and thus often have more than one mate at any one time. That was, in fact, the situation of most humans in prehistory. But that situation changed as they expanded their range out of the tropics and into more seasonal environments. At higher latitudes, proportionately fewer men were available for mating at any one time. There were two reasons:

 

·         Polygyny was more costly for men. With men specializing in hunting and women in gathering, women became dependent on men during winter—since there was little food to be gathered. Men thus had to bear a greater share of food provisioning, with the result that polygyny became impossible for all but the ablest hunters.

·         Death rates were higher for men than for women. Because men had to hunt for more food and over longer distances, they suffered a higher death rate at younger ages. They were thus fewer in number overall.

 

Male scarcity was most acute in an environment that no longer exists: the steppe-tundra of the last ice age, essentially the vast plains stretching from the Baltic to western Siberia. That environment supported large herds of reindeer and other herbivores, which could in turn support a large human population. But at a cost: women depended almost entirely on their hunting husbands for food, and those hunters had to cover long distances without alternative food sources, thus risking death from starvation or exposure. The result was an imbalance in the operational sex ratio: too many women for too few men, and strong selection for women with eye-catching features (Frost, 2006; Frost, 2022; Frost, 2023).

 

Proposed study

 

The aim here is to determine whether the ratio of estrogens to androgens in fetal tissues influences the development of hair and eye color. One way would be to measure the “digit ratio”—the length of the index finger divided by the length of the ring finger. This measure of fetal exposure to the sex hormones is relatively inexpensive, though disputed by some researchers. The lower your digit ratio, the more you have been masculinized by androgens during fetal development; the higher your digit ratio, the more you have been feminized by estrogens during fetal development. The left-hand digit ratio is associated with prenatal and postnatal exposure to the sex hormones. The right-hand ratio is associated much more with prenatal exposure (see Note #2).

 

An unpublished study, using a sample of 644 British participants, found that the left-hand digit ratio was significantly higher on average among individuals with blond hair than among those with brown, red, or other hair colors. For eye color, there was a similar but weaker relationship: the left-hand digit ratio was higher on average among individuals with blue eyes than among those with other eye colors.

 

That study was not published because of two objections from the referees: hair dyeing could not be excluded as a possible factor; and identification of hair and eye color was too subjective. Yet it is difficult to see how hair dyeing or misidentification can explain the digit ratio differences. Such methodological problems would introduce more noise into the data and make any differences less significant.

 

I wish to see that study replicated with a more rigorous experimental design, specifically a larger sample and narrower age range. Age interacts with the effects of the sex hormones, i.e., prenatal effects on hair color are the opposite of pubertal effects. Whereas women are lighter-haired than men from 17 onward, they are actually darker-haired up to the age of 14 (Steggerda, 1941). The right-hand digit ratio should thus be better at predicting the darkening of hair color before puberty, and the left-hand digit ratio better at predicting the lightening of hair color after puberty.

 

In addition, I wish to see whether the relationship between fetal estrogenization and eye color explains three other relationships between non-brown eyes and certain behavioral/physical traits:

 

·         Blue-eyed boys tend to be shy. This is the “little boy blue” effect. A study of preschoolers found more social wariness in blue-eyed boys than in brown-eyed boys. The difference was greatest at the extremes of wariness. Among the very inhibited boys, 13 out of 14 were blue-eyed. Among the very uninhibited, only 4 out of 10 were. There was no such relationship among the girls, whose eyes were blue in 5 out of 9 among the very inhibited and in 6 out of 11 among the very uninhibited (Coplan et al., 1988).

·         Blue-eyed women tend to have narrower shoulders and lower waist-to-hip ratios. A Latvian study found small but significant correlations between female eye color and certain sexually dimorphic features. Shoulders were narrower and waist-to-hip ratios lower in blue-eyed women than in brown-eyed women (Kažoka and Vetra, 2011).

·         Blue-eyed men tend to have more feminine faces. This was an unintended finding of two Czech studies whose participants were asked to rate male and female facial photos. Initially, the brown-eyed male faces were rated as more dominant than the blue-eyed male faces. When, as a control, the brown-eyed faces were photoshopped to make them blue-eyed, they were still rated as more dominant. On careful examination, the originally brown-eyed faces were found to be more masculine with broader and more massive chins, broader mouths, larger noses, larger eyebrows, and closer-set eyes. The originally blue-eyed faces had smaller and sharper chins, narrower mouths, smaller noses, and greater distance between the eyes. Blue eyes were associated with a more feminine face shape only in male participants. This is perhaps because a male fetus normally does not have enough estrogen to feminize the face. If enough estrogen is present to feminize the face, there is probably enough to influence the development of eye color (Kleisner et al., 2010; Kleisner et al., 2013).

      

      Were brown eyes associated with a different face shape because some of the brown-eyed men were partly Jewish or Roma and had a more Mediterranean appearance? In that case, face shape would have been more variable in the brown-eyed men. It was not. This explanation also fails to explain the effect of gender: why were blue eyes associated with facial feminization in men but not in women?

 

 

Averaged faces: blue-eyed men (left), brown-eyed men (right), Czech population (Kleisner et al., 2010). 

The above studies suggest that the association between the "new" colors and physical/behavioral feminization is largely confined to men. (There is only a weak association between them and shoulder breadth or waist-to-hip ratio). This is probably because the feminization effects are triggered when the estrogen level has risen above a certain threshold. That threshold would already be surpassed by almost all female fetuses.

Notes

 

1. Preference for rare hair colors was demonstrated by Thelen (1983), who showed pictures of attractive women to male participants and then asked them to choose the one they most wanted to marry. There were three series of pictures: the first had equal numbers of brunettes and blondes; the second had one brunette for every five blondes; and the third had one brunette for every eleven blondes. The scarcer the brunettes were in a series, the more attractive they seemed, i.e., each brunette had a better chance of being chosen.

 

Thelen’s findings were not replicated by Janif et al. (2015), whose male participants made their choices online, i.e., in private and on their home computers. There was thus no control over the female images they may have previously viewed on the same computer screen or might still be viewing on an alternate screen or split screen. This source of unwanted female imagery introduces noise into the data, thus increasing the minimum number of online raters to produce replicable ratings of female facial attractiveness. Devcic et al. (2010) report that their mean ratings of facial attractiveness did not become stable until they had recruited 857 online raters. Popenko et al. (2012) state that they needed a minimum of 992 online raters to achieve stable ratings. By comparison, Janif et al. (2015) used 658 male raters, while making their data even noisier by recruiting an ethnically diverse pool of raters, i.e., over a third were of non-European descent. Those raters would have tended to perceive female faces with black hair as ethnic insiders and female faces with non-black hair as ethnic outsiders.

 

2. Using a meta-study, Sorokowski and Kowal, 2023) concluded that the digit ratio indicates only an individual’s prenatal exposure to testosterone (and only in amniotic fluid, not in core blood). The authors, however, did not look at the ratio of estrogens to androgens. Their exclusion of data on estrogen levels is puzzling, since fetal exposure to estrogens is no less important than fetal exposure to androgens.

 

References

 

Coplan, R., B. Coleman, and K. Rubin. (1998). Shyness and little boy blue: Iris pigmentation, gender, and social wariness in preschoolers. Developmental Psychobiology 32(1): 37-44. https://doi.org/10.1002/(SICI)1098-2302(199801)32:1<37::AID-DEV4>3.0.CO;2-U

 

Devcic, Z., Karimi, K., Popenko, N., and Wong, B.J.F. (2010). A web-based method for rating facial attractiveness. Laryngoscope 120(5), 902-906. https://doi.org/10.1002/lary.20857

 

Frost, P. (2006). European hair and eye color - A case of frequency-dependent sexual selection? Evolution and Human Behavior 27(2): 85-103. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2005.07.002

 

Frost, P. (2022). European Hair, Eye, and Skin Color: Solving the Puzzle. Washington: Academica Press, 169 pp., ISBN 9781680538724 https://www.academicapress.com/node/549

 

Frost, P. (2023). A people of many colors. Peter Frost’s Newsletter. January 24. https://peterfrost.substack.com/p/a-people-of-many-colors

 

Frost, P., K. Kleisner, and J. Flegr. (2017). Health status by gender, hair color, and eye color: Red-haired women are the most divergent. PLoS One 12(12): e0190238. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0190238   

 

Hysi, P.G., A.M. Valdes, F. Liu, N.A. Furlotte, D.M. Evans, V. Bataille, et al. (2018). Genome-wide association meta-analysis of individuals of European ancestry identifies new loci explaining a substantial fraction of hair color variation and heritability. Nature Genetics 50(5): 652-656. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41588-018-0100-5

 

Janif, Z.J., R.C. Brooks, and B.J. Dixson. (2015). Are preferences for women's hair color frequency-dependent? Adaptive Human Behavior and Physiology 1(1): 54-71. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40750-014-0008-y

 

Kažoka, D. and J. Vetra. (2011). Variations in some anthropometrical parameters of the women with the different iris color in Latvia. Papers on Anthropology XX: 160-170. https://doi.org/10.12697/poa.2011.20.17

 

Kleisner, K., T. Kocnar, A. Rubešová, and J. Flegr. (2010). Eye color predicts but does not directly influence perceived dominance in men. Personality and Individual Differences 49(1): 59-64. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2010.03.011

 

Kleisner, K., L. Priplatova, P. Frost, and J. Flegr. (2013). Trustworthy-looking face meets brown eyes. PLoS One 8(1): e53285. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0053285

Popenko, N.A., Devcic, Z., Karimi, K., and Wong, B.J.F. (2012). The virtual focus group. A modern methodology for facial attractiveness rating. Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery 130(3), 455e-461e. https://doi.org/10.1097/PRS.0b013e31825dcb48

 

Shekar, S.N., D.L. Duffy, T. Frudakis, G.W. Montgomery, M.R. James, R.A. Sturm, and N.G. Martin. (2008). Spectrophotometric methods for quantifying pigmentation in human hair-Influence of MC1R genotype and environment. Photochemistry and Photobiology 84(3): 719-726. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1751-1097.2007.00237.x   

 

Sorokowski, P., and M. Kowal. (2023). Relationship between the 2D:4D and prenatal testosterone, adult level testosterone, and testosterone change: Meta-analysis of 54 studies. American Journal of Biological Anthropology. 183(1): 20-38. https://doi.org/10.1002/ajpa.24852

 

Steggerda, M. (1941). Change in hair color with age. Journal of Heredity 32(11): 402-403. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordjournals.jhered.a104977

 

Thelen, T.H. (1983). Minority type human mate preference. Social Biology 30(2): 162-180. https://doi.org/10.1080/19485565.1983.9988531

 

The monster in the mirror

Cyborg She, a love story about a female android and a shy young man (credit: Gaga Communications, for use in critical commentary)

 

Can humans and robots get along together? Actually, they already do in a wide range of applications from surgery to assembly lines. The question is more vexing when the robots are androids—human-like creatures that can recognize faces, understand questions, and behave as social, emotional, and affective beings. It is this aspect that troubles us the most, partly because it creates a power to manipulate and partly because it transgresses the boundary between human and nonhuman.

A manipulative female android appears in the recent British film Ex Machina. Ava exploits Caleb's sexual desire and sense of compassion, convincing him to help her escape from the research facility. She succeeds but leaves him behind, trapped in the building. This kind of negative portrayal runs through many sci-fi movies of the past four decades. In some, particularly the Terminator series (1984, 1991, 2003, 2009, 2015), androids are evil and seek to destroy mankind. In The Stepford Wives (1975), they are simply tools of wicked people: in a small town, the men conspire to murder their wives and replace them with lookalike android homemakers. In Westworld (1973), a Wild West theme park becomes a killing field when a gunslinger robot begins to take his role too seriously.

In other movies, the portrayal is more nuanced but still negative. Blade Runner (1982) assigns the human Rick Deckard the role of a bad good-guy who seeks out and kills android "replicants." Deckard hunts them down mercilessly, the only exception being Rachael, whom he rapes. Conversely, the replicants emerge as good bad-guys who show human mercy, particularly in the final scene when the last surviving one saves Deckard from death. This theme is further developed in AI (2001), where a couple adopt an android boy, named David, after their son falls victim to a rare virus and is placed in suspended animation. When their biological son is unexpectedly cured, and refuses to accept his new sibling, they decide to abandon David in a forest, much as some people get rid of unwanted pets. He meets another android, Gigolo Joe, who explains why David's love for his adoptive mother can never be reciprocated:

She loves what you do for her, as my customers love what it is I do for them. But she does not love you, David. She cannot love you. You are neither flesh nor blood. You are not a dog or a cat or a canary. You were designed and built specific, like the rest of us, and you are alone now only because they are tired of you, or they replaced you with a younger model or were displeased by something you said or broke.

In short, androids can love humans, but this love has a corrupting effect, making humans more callous and self-centered than ever. 

Some American and British movies have featured androids in unambiguously positive roles, like some of the droids in Star Wars (1977), Lisa in Weird Science (1985), Bishop in Aliens (1986), and Data in the TV series Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987-1994). Usually, however, androids are either villains or tragic heroes. One might conclude, therefore, that this dominant view is the logical one that emerges when thoughtful people weigh all the pros and cons.

And yet, we have the example of another cinematographic tradition where androids are viewed quite differently.

The Japanese exception?

Japan has diverged from Western countries in the way it depicts androids on screen. This is especially so in three productions that have appeared since the turn of the century:

Chobits (2002)

This TV series begins in the near future with Hideki, a young man who lives on a remote farm. He has never had a girlfriend and decides to go to a prep school in Tokyo, where he can meet other people his age. On arriving in the big city, he is surprised to see so many androids, called “persocoms.” The life-sized ones are expensive, but many of his college friends have mini-persocoms—small fairy-like creatures, a bit larger than Tinkerbell, who can take email messages, help with schoolwork, provide GPS directions, or simply sing and dance to keep your spirits up.

One night, walking home, he sees a girl's body in the trash piled alongside the curb. He takes a closer look, realizes it's a persocom, and takes it home, where he manages to turn it on. But the persocom—a strangely beautiful girl with large eyes and floor-length hair—can speak only one word and knows nothing about the world. Hideki tries to teach her how to live in society, but he too is socially inept, so other people have to step in to provide help and advice.

From time to time, we see the girl with a children's book that Hideki bought to teach her how to read. It is about a place called Empty Town where people remain secluded in their homes and refuse to venture outside. At the end of each episode, we see this town and a female figure wandering through its deserted streets.

Chobits seems to have been made principally for a mature male audience, while containing elements that normally appear in magazines for teen and pre-teen girls. This is not surprising, given that it was created overwhelmingly by female storyboarders and animators.

Cyborg She (2008)

Most of this movie is set in the present. There are obvious similarities with The Terminator (1984): an android arrives from the future in an electrical discharge; it has superhuman strength and, initially, no emotions; and near the end it must crawl around on its arms because it has lost the lower half of its body. But the similarities end there. The android is female and has come to befriend a shy young man, Kiro, who is spending his 20th birthday alone. She is, in fact, a creation of an older Kiro who wishes to change the course of his life. In this role, she saves him from a gunman who would otherwise leave him a cripple and, later, from a devastating earthquake. She also breaks his vicious circle of shyness/withdrawal, thus transforming him from a boy into a man.

The changes to Kiro are paralleled by changes to her. She develops feelings of jealousy and becomes conscious of her appearance; after being mutilated by a collapsing wall, she begs Kiro to leave, so that he will no longer see what she has become. In these final moments of her life, she tells Kiro that she can "feel his heart." The rest of the building then collapses on her, and when he later retrieves her remains from the rubble, he clings to them, overwhelmed by grief.

Q10 (2010)

This TV series features a timid boy called Heita who attends a private high school. He feels a chasm between himself and the world of love, preferring to be alone in places like the school's science lab. One day, however, he enters the lab and finds the inanimate body of an android girl. When he touches her teeth, she comes to life and asks him to give her a name. He chooses “Kyuuto” because her serial number is Q10 … and because she’s cute.

She follows Heita everywhere, and the principal tries to head off a potential scandal by enrolling her at the school and making the boy her caretaker. Heita tells his science teacher that he doesn't want the job and asks her to turn the android off, but she simply smiles and says there is no going back. The rest of the series recounts the weird love that develops between Heita and Kyuuto.

A common theme

You may have noticed a common theme: male shyness. It's nothing new in Japanese society. Indeed, it seems to prevail in all societies where the father invests much time and energy in providing for his wife and children. In exchange, he wants to be sure that the children are his own. So monogamy is the rule, and something is needed to keep the same man and woman together.

In such a context, male shyness deters men from sexual adventurism, i.e., wandering from one woman to another. Of course, the shyness must not be so strong that it leaves a man with no mate at all. This is not a problem in traditional societies, where intermediaries can step in and help the process along. It becomes a major problem, however, in modern societies where each man is expected to be a sexual entrepreneur.

Male shyness is becoming pathological in today’s Japan. The pathology even has a name: hikikomori—acute withdrawal from all social relationships outside the family. Numbers are hard to come by, but such people may exceed over a million in Japan alone, with 70-80% of them being men (Furlong, 2008). These figures are really the tip of the iceberg, since many men can lead seemingly normal lives while having no intimate relationships.

A form of therapy?

When the Japanese talk about future uses of androids, they invariably talk about elder care or home maintenance. It is really only in movies and manga comics that the subject of loving relationships is explored, and this is where we see the greatest difference between Japanese and Westerners. The latter seem pessimistic, seeing such love as manipulative or corrupting. In contrast, the Japanese see it as beneficial, even therapeutic.

Who is right? Some insight may be gleaned from research on love dolls, which occupy an early stage of the trajectory that leads to affective androids. In a study of 61 love doll owners, Valverde (2012) found them to be no different from the general population in terms of psychosexual functioning and life satisfaction. In contrast, the rate of depression was much higher among individuals who did not own a love doll but were planning to buy one. It seems likely, then, that the dolls are enabling these men to achieve a healthier psychological state. We will probably see a similar therapeutic effect with affective androids. 

But will this psychological improvement help such men move on to real human relationships? After all, many of them will simply be too unattractive, too socially marginal, or too lacking in personality to make the transition. Others may prefer androids to real women. This point comes up in Chobits when a woman tells Hideki that she feels jealous of his android and its perfect beauty.

One thing is sure. No android, no matter how lifelike, can procreate. When Hideki is walking with a friend by a lake, he is warned that an android can never be as good as a real human. We then see a woman in a boat, with two young children. This fact also explains the convoluted ending of Cyborg She. There can be no happy ending until Kiro's life path is fully rectified, and this can happen only when he becomes a husband and father. Through a series of unusual events, the android's memory is transferred to a similar-looking woman who then travels back in time to meet Kiro after the earthquake. 

Although we will soon have androids that can recognize individual humans and respond to them affectively, there are no procreative models on the drawing board. This limitation will have to be recognized before we begin to use them for therapeutic purposes.

Two different paths

Why does Japan have a more positive attitude toward androids in particular and robots in general? Most observers put it down to the animist roots of the country’s religion, Shinto, which teaches that everything has a spirit, be it the sun, the moon, mountains, trees, or even man-made objects (Mims, 2010). In contrast, Christianity teaches that only humans have souls, so there is no moral difference between swatting a fly and killing an android. When Deckard rapes Rachael, he is merely masturbating. She loves him, but her love can only have a corrupting effect because humans of Christian heritage feel no need to reciprocate. 

This cultural explanation isn’t perfect. For one thing, the divergence between Japan and the West is less obvious the farther back in time you go (Anon, 2013). Before the 1970s, robots were generally likeable characters on the American big screen or small screen, from the Tin Man of The Wizard of Oz (1939) to the robot of Lost in Space (1965-1968). There was even a romance genre: in the seventh episode of The Twilight Zone (1959), a female android saves a man from the loneliness of solitary confinement.

The change of attitude among cineastes seems to have happened during the 1970s. Perhaps not coincidentally, the same decade saw a parallel change of attitude in the business community. Previously, with the West moving toward an increasingly high-wage economy, automation and robotization were considered inevitable, since there would be nobody available to do low-paying jobs. This attitude changed during the 1970s with the growing possibilities for outsourcing of high-wage manufacturing jobs to low-wage countries and, conversely, insourcing of low-wage workers into industries that could not outsource abroad (construction, services, etc.). This easier access to cheap labor made the business community less interested in robots, so much so that robotics research has largely retreated to military applications. There is very little research into use of robots as caregivers or helpmates. 

This new economic reality has spawned a strange form of Japan-bashing in the press, as in this Washington Post story:

There are critics who describe the robot cure for an aging society as little more than high-tech quackery. They say that robots are a politically expedient palliative that allows politicians and corporate leaders to avoid wrenchingly difficult social issues, such as Japan's deep-seated aversion to immigration, its chronic shortage of affordable day care and Japanese women's increasing rejection of motherhood.

"Robots can be useful, but they cannot come close to overcoming the problem of population decline," said Hidenori Sakanaka, former head of the Tokyo Immigration Bureau and now director of the Japan Immigration Policy Institute, a research group in Tokyo. "The government would do much better spending its money to recruit, educate and nurture immigrants," he said. (Harden, 2008)

Of course, this kind of argument could be stood on its head. Aren’t we using immigration as a means to evade the challenges of caring for an aging population and robotizing low-paying jobs out of existence? 

Conclusion

It is no longer fashionable to believe that economics can influence culture and ideology. Yet there seems to be some linkage between the growing indifference toward robots in our business community and the growing hostility toward them in our popular culture. In Japan, major corporations like Honda strive to rally popular opinion in favor of robotics. In the West, big business plays no such role and, if anything, has to justify its relative indifference. There is thus no organized faction that can push back against anti-robotic views when and if they arise.

So we will fail in robotics because we’re not trying very hard to succeed. This is one of those basic rules of life: if you don’t try, not much is going to happen.

But will the Japanese succeed? I cannot say for sure. I can only say there is a lot of pent-up demand for personal robots, especially androids with affective capabilities. Modern society is creating loneliness on a massive scale with its war on “irrational” and “repressive” forms of sociality—like the family and the ethny. I remember doing fieldwork among elderly people on Île aux Coudres and expecting no end of trouble with my stupid questions about attitudes toward skin colour in a traditional mono-ethnic environment. I needn’t have worried. The interviewees showed an unusual degree of interest in my questions and would talk for hours on end. Then I discovered these people typically went for days—sometimes weeks—with no human contact at all. And then others would tell me that so-and-so next door had committed suicide, not because of terminal illness but because of terminal loneliness.

Mark my words. When cyber-Tinkerbells start appearing in stores, people will come in droves to snatch them up like there’s no tomorrow. And many will also be snatching up the life-sized equivalents—even if they cost as much as a Lamborghini.

References 

Anon. (2013). Debunked: Japan's "Special Relationship with Robots", Home Japan

http://www.homejapan.com/robot_myth 

Chobits (2002). Japanese TV series, directed by Morio Asaka, 26 episodes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ingYFsjgaZ4 

Cyborg She (2008). Japanese drama, directed and written by Kwak Jae-yong

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lO7OEAzZ4aU 

Furlong, A. (2008). The Japanese hikikomori phenomenon: acute social withdrawal among young people, The Sociological Review, 56, 309-325

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-954X.2008.00790.x/full 

Harden, B. (2008). Demographic crisis, robotic cure? Washington Post, January 7

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/01/06/AR2008010602023.html 

Mims, C. (2010). Why Japanese Love Robots (And Americans Fear Them), MIT Technology Review, October 12

http://www.technologyreview.com/view/421187/why-japanese-love-robots-and-americans-fear-them/ 

Q10 (2010). Japanese TV series, directed by Kariyama Shunsuke and Sakuma Noriyoshi, 9 episodes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tE_NEjPjdSI  

Valverde, S.H. (2012). The modern sex doll-owner: a descriptive analysis, master's thesis, Department of Psychology, California State Polytechnic University.

http://digitalcommons.calpoly.edu/theses/849/