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Empathy with Inanimate Objects and the Uncanny Valley

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Abstract

The term “uncanny valley” goes back to an article of the Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori (Mori 1970, 2005). He put forward the hypothesis that humanlike objects like certain kinds of robots elicit emotional responses similar to real humans proportionate to their degree of human likeness. Yet, if a certain degree of similarity is reached emotional responses become all of a sudden very repulsive. The corresponding recess in the supposed function is called the uncanny valley. The present paper wants to propose a philosophical explanation why we feel empathy with inanimate objects in the first place, and why the uncanny valley occurs when these objects become very humanlike. The core of this explanation—which is informed by the recently developing empirical research on the matter—will be a form of empathy involving a kind of imaginative perception. However, as will be shown, imaginative perception fails in cases of very humanlike objects.

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Notes

  1. For a study on the emotional valence of the expressions “eerie” or “creepy” in contrast to “strange”, see Ho 2008.

  2. Lucia Modesto from PDI/Dreamworks quoted in Wischler (2002).

  3. Landmarks were the Humanoid Robots and Humanoids workshop 2005 in Tsukuba/Japan organized by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE-RAS) and the Toward Social Mechanisms in Android Sciences workshop by the Cognitive Science Society 2006 in Vancouver/Canada.

  4. In a later article (MacDorman and Ishiguro 2006) MacDorman himself expresses some doubts on the this matter.

  5. Rozin and Fallon 1987 claim that the relevant feeling is disgust. Yet, disgust does not seem to play a role for the uncanny valley, at least it was not among the feelings subjects reported after having been confronted with creatures judged to be uncanny (see MacDorman and Ishiguro 2006, p. 312).

  6. For some more general reservations on morphing as a means to investigate the uncanny valley, see MacDorman/Ishiguro 2006, 308.

  7. It has been argued that the distinction between appearance and behavior is of particular importance (Götz et al. 2003).

  8. This ability seems to be related to the propensity of neonates to mimic facial expressions (Meltzoff and Moore 1983).

  9. Evidence for this is provided, for instance, by studies finding a reliable correlation between deficits in face-based emotion recognition of some emotions with deficits in producing the relevant emotions. For an instructive discussion in the context of simulationist models of emotion recognition, see Goldman and Sripada 2005. That this is, however, an intricate matter is shown by the fact that Goldman and Sripada also mention some evidence to the contrary.

  10. This might involve something like a blending mechanism (Fauconnier and Turner 1998, 2002).

  11. Hanson refers here to studies by Etcoff 2000, as well as several articles in Rhodes and Zebrowitz 2002.

  12. It seems to be promising to pursue in this context the approach to study eye-movement in human-android interaction (MacDorman et al. MacDorman 2005a, b, Minato 2005).

  13. There are some interesting parallels between the perception of animacy and causality (Scholl and Tremoulet 2000).The particular problems autistic children have with the perception of animacy are also very instructive in this context (Rutherford et al. 2006).

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  1. Department of Philosophy, University of Tübingen, Bursagasse 1, 72070, Tübingen, Germany

    Catrin Misselhorn

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Misselhorn, C. Empathy with Inanimate Objects and the Uncanny Valley. Minds & Machines 19, 345–359 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11023-009-9158-2

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