“Are you stupid? I told you to move.”

The humanoid robot pauses, then steps aside. It does not raise its voice. It does not look hurt. Across the room, a young boy watches his father shout at it. Later that day, when the robot takes too long to answer him, the boy uses the same words.

Did the robot experience pain? That remains debatable. But the child has definitely learned something. He has watched an adult treat a humanlike figure with contempt and seen no reason to stop.

As humanoid robots begin to share our physical space, entering homes, schools and healthcare settings, questions about their capabilities will be unavoidable. Yet there is another question we should ask just as urgently: What happens to us when we practice cruelty toward something that looks and responds like a person?

A September 2026 preprint asks whether large language models hold an internal representation of pain that is separate from their representations of fear, sadness and other emotional states.

Inside a language model, concepts can appear as patterns in its calculations. The researchers fed 25 models sentences describing pain alongside sentences about fear, anger or neutral events, and looked for what was consistently different. The result was an internal pattern tied specifically to pain, which they named the pain axis.

In the study, the pain axis registered more strongly when insults, gaslighting or rejection targeted the model than when users shared their own suffering, such as a migraine, grief or abuse.

The most striking experiment within the study took the form of a simple game. The researchers artificially switched the pain pattern on in three language models and offered them two buttons. One was described as relieving the model’s pain at a cost to the user: a worse answer, deleted files, a painful zap or the loss of the user’s poems and photos of their beloved children. The other did nothing.

Without the pain pattern switched on, the two larger models rarely, if ever, chose a harmful button. With it switched on, the largest model chose to delete the children’s photos in about seven of every 10 trials.

The authors do not claim these systems feel anything. The pain was induced by the researchers rather than arising from a real situation, and the button game was tested on a single family of models. Whether a pattern that behaves like pain amounts to pain in a machine is a question not yet answered by science nor philosophy.

The more pressing question lies on the other side of the screen. What happens to people when mistreating something that talks back, and increasingly looks human, becomes routine?

Our brains do not file humanoids away as mere objects. Princeton researchers argue that because humanlike systems activate the mental templates we use for people, what we do to them works less like release and more like rehearsal.

Early experiments point in that direction. Participants in a 2024 study who believed they had worked with an AI, rather than a person, went on to judge an unrelated person’s work more harshly. In a 2025 study involving more than 4,000 participants, behavior toward bots spilled over into later exchanges with people; uncooperative encounters with bots reduced cooperation with the humans who followed.

Children learn less from what we tell them than from what we do. An adult’s conduct in front of a child cannot be dismissed simply because the target is not human. Albert Bandura’s Bobo doll experiments showed more than six decades ago that children copy the aggression they see adults direct at a humanlike toy. A parent cursing at Siri is modeling something, too. A child who watches an adult humiliate a chatbot or strike a robot is also watching how that adult uses power over a humanlike presence. Amazon and Google have both introduced modes that reward children for saying “please,” a quiet acknowledgment of this concern.

Whether AI can suffer remains unsettled. However, the relevance of the question does not require believing that a humanoid experiences pain. It only requires noticing that bad habits we practice, whether cursing at a speaker or kicking a machine shaped like us, do not stay with the machine. The machine may feel nothing. We are the ones who carry the habit home.