Researchers from the University of Duisburg-Essen in Germany have found that humans are susceptible to emotional manipulation by robots. The findings indicated that humans have such a strong tendency to anthropomorphize - attribution of human traits, emotions, or intentions to non-human entities like robots -- that we can fall prey to emotional manipulation by such entities.

In 2007, a team of researchers carried out a study called "Begging computer does not want to die" in which volunteers were asked to switch off a robot cat but were not sure what to do when the cat begged them to not turn them off, Tech Xplore reported on Friday. In this new effort, the researchers replicated this experiment using more volunteers and a different robot, the report said. For the study, published in the journal PLOS ONE, the research team involved 89 volunteers who were asked to interact with a robot under the guise of helping it become more intelligent.