Uncanny Valley Research Paper

Have you ever walked into a wax museum and shivered at the figures? Or maybe you’ve gone to a clothing store and shied away from the mannequins because they were downright freaky. Or, like most children, you were traumatized by the terrifying animatronic Chuck E. Cheese. The concept behind this feeling is known as the theory of the uncanny valley and, though it is only a hypothesis and is often discredited due to lack of scientific proof, I believe this phenomenon to be very real.

Proposed by robotics professor Masahiro Mori in 1970, the theory of the uncanny valley suggests that the more a robot, doll, cartoon, etc. looks like a human-though we know it is not based on its actions, looks, or movements-the more repulsed and creeped out we become. He called this feeling “bukimi no tani” which literally translates from Japanese into English as “uncanny valley” (“Explanation of Uncanny Valley”, n.d.). With technology becoming more advanced as time goes on, robots and other graphics are starting to look and move more like humans. So, how long will it be before we can’t even watch movies anymore because of how creepy …show more content…
Thomas Hills calls the mortality salience the “if-you-ran-you-lived” effect because it suggests that the uncanny valley fires up the threat engine in your brain that tells you to flee the situation or something bad, like death, will happen (Hills, 2015). The perceptual/cognitive conflict occurs when things don’t seem to add up and your perceptual/cognitive system finds itself off-kilter. It sends your consciousness mixed messages along with a warning that things are not what they seemed. Though neither of these theories have much research to back them up, that does not necessarily mean that there is not some validity to them. However, this lack of research tends to be the focal point of skeptics’ arguments against the uncanny