Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

While conventional addiction arises from disengagement with reality and can be prevented through increased psychological flexibility, intimacy with AI fosters emotional closeness and a sense of reciprocity, particularly when users attribute both agency and experiential capacity to their AI partners. It remains unclear whether psychological flexibility likewise mitigates addictive AI intimacy. The study recruited 116 Chinese college students with prior romantic interactions with AI partners and assessed their psychological flexibility, AI intimacy addiction level, and implicit attitudes toward these AI entities. Our results revealed a paradoxical role for psychological flexibility: among college students, it was associated with a stronger tendency to anthropomorphize AI, which in turn served as a significant indirect pathway to addictive behaviors. This suggests that the very ability to adaptively engage with internal experiences may, in this specific context, become a potential cognitive vulnerability, fueling anthropomorphism of AI and subsequent dependence.