The Uncanny of Mind in a Machine: Humanoid Robots as Tools, Agents, and Experiencers

The uncanny valley hypothesis suggests that a high (but not perfect) human likeness of robots is associated with feelings of eeriness. We distinguished between experience and agency as psychological representations of human likeness. In four online experiments, vignettes about a new generation of robots were presented. The results indicate that a robot’s capacity to feel (experience) elicits stronger feelings of eeriness than a robot’s capacity to plan ahead and to exert self-control (agency, Experiment 1A), which elicits more eeriness than a robot without mind (robot as tool, Experiments 1A and 1B). This effect was attenuated when the robot was introduced to operate in a nursing environment (Experiment 2). A robot’s ascribed gender did not influence the difference between the eeriness of robots introduced as experiencers, agents, or tools (Experiment 3). Additional analyses yielded some evidence for a non-linear (quadratic) effect of participants’ age on the robot mind effects.