Why do realistic robots creep people out?
By: Joshua Hehe
Tags: Robotics, Aesthetics, Future, Entertainment, Psychology

Why do realistic robots creep people out?

Exploring the Uncanny Valley

In the philosophy of aesthetics, the “uncanny valley” is a hypothesized relationship between the degree of an object’s resemblance to a human being and the emotional response to that object. So, the uncanny valley is a steep drop-off in how likable or relatable one finds a humanoid character or robot in regards to appearing human. The uncanny valley was first proposed in an essay written by the Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori, back in 1970. He hypothesized that a person’s affinity for a robot would increase as the robot became more and more human-like. Of course, this can apply to a number of other objects, as well, such as a doll or toy for instance. Mori even provided examples of this by plotting human likeness against likability for things such as puppets. As a result of this, he came up with a graph containing a sharp dip. That is the uncanny valley, which is shown below.

As the graph shows, at worst a still android will remind people of a corpse, while an android in motion can seem like a zombie. Of course, the main detail that people look for is in the eyes. This is because the window to the soul can be the most revealing aspect of an android versus a human. This fact was confirmed in a 2010 study, which was published in the journal Psychological Science. However, the notion that uncanniness can cause uneasiness has been known about for much longer. After Mori coined the term in 1970, it was first translated as “uncanny valley” in the 1978 book Robots: Fact, Fiction, and Prediction by Jasia Reichardt. This forged a link to Ernst Jentsch’s concept of the uncanny introduced in a 1906 essay entitled “On the Psychology of the Uncanny”. This was then elaborated on by Sigmund Freud in a 1919 essay entitled “The Uncanny”. He wrote about “the uncanny,” as the terror caused by things that remind us of the familiar.

Of course, the obsession with the uncanny valley itself didn’t really take off until relatively recently. This first became relevant to pop culture in 2004 with the theatrical release of The Polar Express. The thing is that the vast majority of CGI movies and video games that attempt realism tend to flop because they end up freaking people out. This is a direct result of the uncanny valley effect that Hollywood and Silicon Valley will do anything they can to overcome. That’s why in 2005 Masahiro Mori’s essay was translated into English, and American psychologists started to seriously study the unsettling phenomenon. For instance, in one study, published in 2016, 342 participants looked at 80 different real-life robot faces and found a clearly delineated uncanny valley curve. Unfortunately, there isn’t really a good explanation of what might actually cause our revulsion.

There are, however, many different hypotheses circulating around the world of academia. As one example, the “pathogen avoidance hypothesis” suggests that disgust towards uncanny faces could have helped us avoid someone who might be carrying a transmissible disease. Then again, the “mortality salience hypothesis” suggests that uncanny faces, like wax figures and dolls, might literally remind us of death, hence the corpse and zombie associations that I mentioned earlier. In yet another example, the “categorical uncertainty hypothesis” tries to make sense of how our minds process uncanny faces. This notion argues that there’s uncertainty at any category boundary. As yet another example, the “violation of expectation hypothesis” suggests that uncanny faces might lead us to think that they will behave in a way that is human-like and then violate that expectation.

The list of speculations just goes on and on. The “mind perception hypothesis” suggests that we find robots uncanny when we think that they might be capable of thinking and feeling. One 2012 study surveyed 165 participants and found that if they believed that a robot could experience things, then that played a role in making an android seem creepier than a robot. The study also revealed that a non-humanoid automaton could be made creepy if participants were told that it was capable of human-like consciousness. Similarly, the “dehumanization hypothesis” looks at the same idea from a different angle. That is to say that certain robots aren’t creepy because they look and act like humans, but because they look like us, but they just don’t act enough like us. The problem is that none of the current hypotheses really have enough evidence to support the claims of why we freak out.

When Masahiro Mori wrote his famous essay in 1970, he was deeply interested in figuring out how roboticists and animators could overcome the uncomfortable effects of the uncanny valley. The thing is, what if we’re not meant to? When you think about it, maybe we aren’t supposed to be fooled by realistic-looking androids. After all, humanity may very well be headed toward a future populated with both humans and androids alike, so it may be useful for us to have the uncanny valley in order to emotionally distance ourselves from our realistic robotic companions. With that being said, in the not-too-distant future, we may very well find that the uncanny valley is our biggest asset. In line with this, Ferrari, Paladino, and Jetten found that the increase of the anthropomorphic appearance of a robot leads to an enhancement of threat to human distinctiveness and identity. That is to say, the more an android resembles a real person, the more it represents a challenge to our social identity as human beings. Consider the android version of Hiroshi Ishiguro, pictured below. With that in mind, maybe, just maybe, we should be creeped out by all of this.