This past weekend, I had a run-in with a stranger who for some reason immediately creeped me out. She looked emaciated and pale, she had a weird shark-eyes quality to her and her basic motor skills were labored and erratic. (Yes…I know…I’ve got to stop the late night Zombieland viewings.) Everyone in the group that I was with actually had the same reaction to her, and the best way I can describe it was an immediate, visceral reaction to quickly remove ourselves from her general vicinity. As we did just that, I thought to myself “Gah! This is like the Uncanny Valley!”
First off, I should mention that she was with a group of friends and partaking in a mid-day “pubathon” in my town (in other words, I knew she wasn’t really deathly ill…she just really looked like it). And granted…I already had the Uncanny Valley on the brain, as it is another one of the Universal Principles of Design that I was mulling writing a post over. But then, I started to wonder…if the Uncanny Valley describes the feeling of revulsion after an interaction with a human-like anthropomorphic form…why would an interaction with a human being elicit the same creepiness factor?
Masohiro Miro's Uncanny Valley chart mapped to pictures of mannequins
Up until now, I’ve mainly understood the Uncanny Valley in terms of Masohiro Miro’s seminal research, which focuses squarely on the human-robot interaction. His now-famous chart (see above) shows that as a robot is made more human-like in its appearance and motion, the emotional response from a human-to-robot will become increasingly positive and empathic, until a point is reached beyond which the response quickly becomes that of strong revulsion. However, as the appearance and motion continue to become less distinguishable from a human being, the emotional response becomes positive once more and approaches human-to-human empathy levels.1
However, more research has been done to explain what cognitively happens for humans to move so quickly from empathic to revulsion of human-like forms…and there are a few theories that postulate that we have innate, subconscious mechanisms that have evolved for pathogen avoidance—that is, detecting and avoiding people who are sick or dead.2
I think it was these qualities against which we recoiled on Saturday. The fact that it happened to a group of us at the same time also seems to indicate that there was something happening on a subconscious level. I am still taken back by my lack of empathic response to the girl; it was too immediate for me to have judged her on any level beyond a purely instinctual one.
For a fantastic discussion on the Uncanny Valley, see Chris Fahey’s The Human Interface (or: Why Products are People, Too) presentation from this year’s IA Summit. He focuses more squarely on the issues surrounding the human-computer interaction than the cognitive theories of why the Uncanny Valley exists. His talk is a thought-provoking look at why as designers it is important for us to design technologies that are more like us, as opposed to the other way around.
It can get really creepy in the Uncanny Valley.
(The “Uncanny Valley” is, appropriately enough, the 13th of 125 universal principles of design that I will cover this year.)
References
1. Bukimi No Tani (The Uncanny Valley) by Masahiro Mori, Energy, 1970, volume 7(4), p. 33-35.
2. Universal Principles of Design by William Lidwell, Kritina Holden, Jill Butler, Rockport Publishers, 2010, p. 242-243.
Also see:
Facial Attractiveness: Evolutionary, Cognitive, and Social Perspectives, by Rhodes, G. & Zebrowitz, L. A. (eds) (2002). Ablex Publishing.
