Human Contact in the Digital Age as a Scarce Social Good

While the benefits of digitalisation are well documented, less attention has been paid to a potential cost: the erosion of human interaction in everyday services. What are the psychological and social implications of this shift? Across three pre-registered online studies (N = 2,918), we used hypothetical scenarios spanning four domains (education, finance, mental health, fitness) and a willingness-to-pay (WTP) task. Participants consistently valued services involving human interaction more than digital ones, and higher-income individuals were willing to pay more for human contact, but not for digital alternatives. Crucially, framing human contact as scarce further increased its perceived value. These effects were observed in both UK and Italian samples and were not accounted for by differences in digital skills or access. Our findings suggest that, as digitalisation expands, human contact may become a luxury intangible good, introducing new inequalities in access to interpersonal connection.