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DATE: August 27, 2026 at 07:00AM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: Your psychological needs predict whether you will accept an AI companion or therapist
As artificial intelligence systems assume more socially important roles, people’s willingness to embrace these technologies depends heavily on their own psychological needs and cultural backgrounds. A recent study of over 35,000 individuals across 35 nations indicates that feelings of competence and autonomy shape whether people will allow an artificial agent to act as their doctor, teacher, or companion. Distinct patterns emerged across different regions of the world, highlighting the role of culture in technology adoption. The findings were published in Telematics and Informatics.
Researchers typically study technology acceptance by looking at factors like how useful or easy to use a new tool appears to be. “What interested us was the fact that AI is increasingly moving beyond being a tool that helps us with a task,” said study authors Magnus Liebherr of the University of Duisburg-Essen and Carnegie Mellon University Doha, Ala Yankouskaya of Bournemouth University, and Raian Ali of Hamad Bin Khalifa University. “We are beginning to consider AI for roles that have traditionally involved human responsibility and social interaction.”
“This made us wonder whether the factors that explain ordinary technology acceptance are sufficient to understand these much more consequential forms of AI use,” the researchers explained. Letting a computer program diagnose an illness or teach a child requires a transfer of trust that goes beyond simply adopting a new smartphone application. To understand what predicts this level of trust, scientists often look at fundamental human motivations.
Past research has established that a person’s cultural background systematically alters how readily they adopt new technologies. For example, a 2022 meta-analysis found that national cultural differences consistently influence technology acceptance models around the world. Building on this, researchers began testing how internal psychological needs encourage the use of specific technologies. A 2024 study showed that fulfilling basic psychological needs, like feeling independent and socially connected, predicts people’s willingness to use conversational artificial intelligence tools in educational settings.
Similarly, research covered by PsyPost in 2023 demonstrated that higher fulfillment of basic psychological needs through technology was associated with more positive attitudes toward artificial intelligence across several European countries. These earlier regional findings paved the way for a much broader global investigation. The new study aimed to see how these internal motivations predict the willingness to delegate sensitive social roles to artificial intelligence across multiple domains and diverse cultural landscapes.
The team drew on data from the 2023 Global Digital Wellbeing Survey, initiated by the Global Digital Wellbeing Program (SYNC) and the King Abdulaziz Center for World Culture (Ithra), supported by Aramco. The researchers analyzed responses from 35,018 internet users aged 18 and older, spread across 35 countries. Participants answered questions about their basic psychological needs, specifically focusing on autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Autonomy involves feeling in control of one’s decisions, competence means feeling capable and effective, and relatedness refers to feeling connected to others.
To measure the readiness to delegate tasks to artificial intelligence, the survey presented four hypothetical scenarios. Participants rated their willingness to let an artificial intelligence system teach their child, diagnose a medical condition, provide advice for a minor mental health challenge, or act as a day-to-day companion. The researchers grouped the 35 nations into nine cultural clusters to see how cultural values might change the relationship between psychological needs and technology acceptance. The team applied statistical models that adjusted for regional demographics to ensure accurate comparisons.
The researchers found that competence was the most consistent predictor of a willingness to delegate tasks to artificial intelligence. People who felt highly capable in their own lives were more open to accepting an artificial agent as a doctor or teacher, which are considered high-stakes, expert-driven scenarios. Autonomy was positively associated with accepting artificial intelligence in more emotionally and socially oriented roles, such as a mental health advisor or daily companion. Relatedness, however, showed the weakest effect globally.
“One finding that we found particularly interesting was the role of relatedness,” the researchers said. “Globally, higher satisfaction of the relatedness need was not a reliable predictor of people’s willingness to delegate these roles to AI. However, relatedness became more important in some cultural contexts, particularly for socially embedded roles.”
Cultural context heavily influenced these decisions. Participants from Arab-Islamic, Confucian-Asian, Sub-Saharan African, and South Asian regions demonstrated a higher readiness to delegate roles to artificial intelligence compared to participants from Anglo-Individualist nations like the United States and the United Kingdom. In contrast, participants from Nordic and Germanic European regions showed the lowest readiness to accept artificial agents in these social roles.
“For example, 62.5% of participants in the Sub-Saharan African cluster indicated that they would use an AI-generated companion to support them in day-to-day tasks, compared with 32.9% in the Nordic cluster,” the researchers told PsyPost. “For an AI teacher, the corresponding figures were 38.1% in the Arab-Islamic cluster and only 17.5% in the Nordic cluster.”
In South Asian and certain European contexts, a strong sense of autonomy played a much larger role in predicting the acceptance of artificial intelligence for expert tasks. The findings are in line with research covered by PsyPost in 2025, which found that East Asian participants held more positive attitudes toward artificial companionship than Western participants. However, the new 35-nation study examined how psychological needs predict the willingness to delegate social roles, rather than focusing specifically on the expected conversational enjoyment of chatbots.
“We were also struck by the magnitude and consistency of the cultural differences across the different AI roles,” the researchers said. “They also remind us that assumptions about how people will respond to AI based primarily on findings from Western populations may not generalize well globally.”
The study relied on brief, single-sentence questions to measure complex psychological needs, which allowed the team to study a massive international sample but limited the depth of the psychological profiles. “We could not formally establish measurement equivalence across all cultures,” the researchers cautioned. “The cultural differences should therefore be interpreted as promising patterns rather than definitive evidence of cultural mechanisms.”
Additionally, the survey presented hypothetical scenarios. “Saying that someone would let an AI diagnose them is not necessarily the same as actually doing so when faced with a real medical decision,” the team noted. People might hesitate to entrust an algorithm with their child’s education or their own medical care when a real human alternative is available.
“The obvious next step for us is to move from hypothetical willingness to actual interaction and behavior,” the researchers explained. “We would like to examine how people’s psychological need satisfaction, trust, perceived agency, and emotional responses develop when they interact with real AI systems over time.”
They also hope to explore how specific design principles — such as giving users meaningful choices or creating appropriate forms of social connection — might support these underlying needs. A key question will be whether these design features work universally or require adaptation for different cultural contexts.
“Once we start giving AI roles that involve education, healthcare, mental health support, or assistance with everyday life, we are also deciding what kinds of human responsibilities we are willing to delegate to machines,” the researchers concluded.
The study, “Psychological Needs and AI Delegation Across Four Social Domains A Cross-Cultural Analysis of 35 Nations,” was authored by Magnus Liebherr, Ala Yankouskaya, Mohamed Basel Almourad, Justin Thomas, Guandong Xu, and Raian Ali.
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