Mortality salience and the uncanny valley

Abstract

It seems natural to assume that the more closely robots come to resemble people, the more likely they are to elicit the kinds of responses people direct toward each other. However, subtle flaws in appearance and movement only seem eerie in very human-like robots. This uncanny phenomenon may be symptomatic of entities that elicit a model of a human other but do not measure up to it. If so, a very human-like robot may provide the best means of finding out what kinds of behavior are perceived as human, since deviations from a human other are more obvious. In pursuing this line of inquiry, it is essential to identify the mechanisms involved in evaluations of human likeness. One hypothesis is that an uncanny robot elicits an innate fear of death and culturally-supported defenses for coping with death's inevitability. An experiment, which borrows from the methods of terror management research, was performed to test this hypothesis. Across all questions subjects who were exposed to a still image of an uncanny humanlike robot had on average a heightened preference for worldview supporters and a diminished preference for worldview threats relative to the control group