Word.ws English Dictionary

social valence

social valence noun: the quality of a robot or other artificial entity to be perceived as more than an object, but as a social agent, like a pet or a person.

Noun

social valence (uncountable)

  1. The quality of a robot or other artificial entity to be perceived as more than an object, but as a social agent, like a pet or a person.
    • Finally, robots, more so than other technology in our lives, have a social valence. They feel different to us, more like living agents.2014, Ryan Calo, Robotics and the Lessons of Cyberlaw in: California Law Review, Vol. 103, No. 3, pp. 513-63 (2015), page 532
    • We interact with them in ways that we don’t with inanimate appliances. (...) We do this because robots have what experts call “social valence,” meaning we ascribe to them human qualities, like personality.2015, Daniela Hernandez, Let’s not ban sex robots just yet, adriancheok.info

Origin of social valence

From valence in the sociological sense of value.

Questions about social valence

What does social valence mean?
Social valence means the quality of a robot or other artificial entity to be perceived as more than an object, but as a social agent, like a pet or a person.
What part of speech is social valence?
Social valence is a noun.

Words near social valence in the dictionary

  1. social tariff
  2. social tariffs
  3. social trading
  4. social unit
  5. social units
  6. social valence
  7. social viewing
  8. social wasp
  9. social weaverbird
  10. social weaverbirds
  11. social welfare

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: social valence (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “social valence.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/social_valence. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.