Uncanny Valley: When Cute Becomes Creepy

The uncanny valley is a psychological response we have to “non-living” objects that resemble humans, but not quite enough. The term “uncanny valley” was coined by Japanese robotics engineer Masahiro Mori, and is used to describe something that looks both too human and too artificial, which causes us a great sense of unease.

To help depict this bizarre phenomenon, the uncanny valley can be viewed as a scale within a graph—the X-axis measures the “human-likeness” of objects, while the Y-axis measures our familiarity with the object on a scale of 0 to 100. Interestingly, the uncanny valley feeling only falls within a quite specific section of the graph.

The graph shows that when an object increases to around 70% of “humanness,” our affinity with the object rises quite steadily. However, when it begins to reach 80%, our affinity drops rapidly, which causes our uncomfortableness to spike.

When the likeness of the object starts to increase between 90-100% humanness, we begin to feel more comfortable. This rapid drop and rise creates a “valley” within the graph that is now known as the “uncanny” area.

When robots are made for purely industrial reasons, we don’t feel much affinity with them, as they have no no human-like qualities. Think of a Roomba, for example: we can program it and it will move around according to our instructions, but we don’t necessarily feel much connection to it, as we will only view it as a piece of equipment.

When objects start to resemble us on a small scale, such as children's toy robots, we find ourselves drawn to them. But when these objects reach a higher level of likeness to humans, around the 80% mark, that creepy feeling starts to emerge from the pit of stomachs.

It seems that the 80% mark isn’t enough for us to accept the object as being “normal,” and instead it will start to feel slightly sinister to us.

However, not every uncanny valley experience is down to the advance of robots. Even things like animated characters, dolls, and AI-generated images can cause us to experience this uncomfortable sensation.

A few examples include:

Many people experience this eerie sensation when it comes to dolls. Around the 20th century, toy manufacturers were able to give their dolls more human-like qualities, but still kept them looking somewhat cartoonish.

These 20th century dolls were designed with slightly oversized eyes and more realistic facial expressions, which began to make consumers uncomfortable.

Dolls that have a permanent smile don’t necessarily bring us joy or make us feel happier, as to humans, a 24-hour grin would very quickly become frightening. Imagine making eye contact with someone and they smile at you for around 30 seconds—it'd be sure to creep you out.

Naturally, a doll made to look somewhat human, smiling incessantly, would easily evoke a sense of unease.

If you search for “Polar Express” and “uncanny valley,” you will find many websites discussing the eerie feeling viewers felt whilst watching this film.

For a Christmas movie, it should feel warm and cosy, bringing with it feelings of joy. But there is something about the animation of the characters that just doesn’t sit right with many people.

The characters have been created to be quite human-like, but it feels like the characters in this particular movie fall directly into the 80% group, and leave us feeling uneasy.

Wax figurines can also have an uneasy effect on us. Some museums create replicas of celebrities that are so near-perfect, that we can do nothing but marvel at the craftsmanship.

However, some pieces tend to slip within the uncanny valley dip. They’re not bad wax works, they’re just not quite good enough.

The figure of Barack Obama within the Museo de Cera Wax Museum in Madrid is certainly making me feel uneasy…

Erica is a humanoid robot created by Osaka University, Kyoto University and the Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International. She was made to become a news TV presenter in Japan, but has since been cast in a Hollywood feature film.

Although her acting career has certainly taken off, Erica is quickly becoming a point of contention for many people due to her life-like appearance. Even the way she interacts with other humans has been described as eerie—she can recognize when people laugh, and can even decide whether she would like to laugh along with you.

The uncanny valley phenomenon is something that we will all probably experience at some point.

Many of us have a fear of dolls, but that isn’t what the uncanny valley is. It isn’t a phobia or fear that we are aware of, but instead a horrible gut feeling of impending danger, unease, and just the downright heebie-jeebies, usually caused by objects that don’t quite appear human enough.

But why? Well, the answer is unclear.

Although we have not found an exact reason as to why we react this way—or why it is such a particular part of the scale that triggers us—there have been a few ideas bounced around.

This hypothesis is said to come from an evolutionary “pressure” driven by the threat of illness, disease, and, subsequently, death. The threat avoidance theory suggests that we may view “imperfections”  in human-like entities as “deformities.”

Humans are incredibly good at recognizing faces, features, and involuntary movements, so when we see a face that doesn’t quite look right—and when we can’t pick up on “micro-expressions”— our evolutionary threat antennas become alert and we sense something is off.

This could be our way of connecting the transmitting of diseases or illnesses with physical deformities, fearing these pathogens could be spread from the said entity to ourselves.

This theory delves into the importance of physical attractiveness. Humanoid objects that are considered attractive are valued for the same traits we look for in other humans, such as facial symmetry and proportions.

It seems we do the same for humanoid robots. These life-like objects that are perceived as more attractive tend to receive lower “eerieness” levels.

So, if we see a robot that we don’t initially perceive as attractive, we will instead perceive them as creepy.

The mind perception hypothesis is based on the idea that human-like objects give us a sense of unease because they seem so realistic that we believe they have the ability to act and sense as we do.

The idea of a robot—no matter how human-looking it is—being able to feel real, human emotions makes us feel very uncomfortable, as it goes out of the realm of expectation of what they are capable of.

We are happy for human-like robots to perform human-like tasks, but for them to feel genuine emotion? This makes us feel incredibly uncomfortable.

This theory suggests that people may have certain expectations for humanoid robots. We may look at one of these entities and expect them to be able to perform tasks to the levels we can, but this could be something as simple as moving fluidly.

When we observe humanoid robots struggling with simple movements, such as walking or even climbing stairs, this mismatch of our expectations and the robot's “failure” leads us to feel negative emotions such as frustration and even second-hand embarrassment. This can cause us to feel uncomfortable.

The uncanny valley is certainly an interesting psychological process, even though we don’t quite know where it comes from. Whether we are products of our evolutionary selves or we're just uncomfortable with the advances of humanoid robots, one thing seems for sure: we will all be affected by the uncanny valley scale at some point.

Featured image: Maximalfocus/Unsplash; Additional images: Science and Industry Museum; Susan Holt Simpson/Unsplash; Museo de Cera