Sinister valley

In 1978, Japanese scientist Masahiro Mori conducted a survey examining the emotional response of people to the appearance of robots. At first, the results were predictable: the more the robot looks like a person, the prettier it seems - but only to a certain limit ^[1] . The most humanoid robots unexpectedly turned out to be unpleasant to people due to small inconsistencies of reality, causing a feeling of discomfort and fear ^[1] . An unexpected decline in the graph of “sympathy” was called the “Evil Valley” ^[2] , while Masahiro Mori found that animation reinforces both positive and negative perceptions.

The reason for this psychological phenomenon has not yet been elucidated. Perhaps the problem is that the person is so arranged that on an unconscious level he analyzes the slightest deviations from "normality". Maybe the reason is that at a certain level of similarity between a robot and a person, a machine ceases to be perceived as a machine and begins to seem like an abnormal person or a animated corpse, cadaver. In addition, the cause of hostility may be the symmetry of the face of the robot, which is rarely observed in humans and looks a little frightening. Facial expression also plays an important role: the more frozen the face looks, the worse people treat it ^[3] ; the same applies to articulation of speech. In addition, the situation is aggravated by unnaturalness, “twitching” of movements, unnaturalness of speech (in particular, “wrong” pitch of voice, slow speed of pronunciation of words, emotionlessness), inaccurate synchronization of lip movements.

In addition to the concept of “ memento mori ” from Masahiro Mori, other explanations of the effect were proposed (which, however, do not exclude each other):

• The threat perception theory - was proposed by Mins Kahn in 2009 ^[4] . He wrote that the androids that are in the space between the categories of “robot” and “human” introduce us into a state of constant cognitive dissonance and are faced with the unknown: what exactly can we expect from such a creature, are we managing the situation? If there is no answer to these questions, then this causes fear. Similar ideas, based on the theory of cognitive dissonance, are developed in modern research.

• The theory of inability to empathy Katrina Misselhorn. The effect of rejection is based on the fact that we are not able to understand the feelings of such an object and this again leads to a feeling of obscurity. Similar ideas can be traced in the earlier history of psychology and explained through the self-concept: the way we perceive ourselves can give a serious crack if a humanoid creature does not respond to us as we expect.

• The “Theory of Psychopaths" by Angela Tinwell ^[3] is that we are afraid not so much of being incapable of empathy, but of the fact that android is incapable of empathy - in other words, we perceive such a creature as a psychopath.

Also, if we talk about neurosciences, the phenomenon is closely associated with the activity of mirror neurons that are excited in response to similar actions, and facial mimicry, that is, copying the expression of another person - receiving conflicting information negatively affects our emotional perception. Moreover, in one study, subjects were shown videos of people, robots, and androids, recording their performance in fMRI - in the first two cases, people's reactions were quite typical, but the brain literally broke out on androids, especially in the parietal regions and places of accumulation of mirror neurons. This is interpreted as the result of a dissonance between reality and expectation.

For a long time, the creators of films, literature, games and animations have been using the phenomenon of the “sinister valley” to evoke a feeling of fear ^[1] - just remember the Frankenstein monster , various cyborgs in human flesh, zombies , nurses from the Silent Hill computer games series and the movie of the same name , frightening the disproportion of the boy in the psychedelic picture of Bill Stoneham, The Hands Resist Him or Sadako from the movie “The Call ”.

Artificial characters that should be sympathetic should not be too similar to people, especially if they are animated - animators know this very well.

Fear arising from the contemplation of a "man" having small deviations from the norm, and the increase in impression due to his movement were noticed back in 1818 by the writer Mary Shelley in the novel Frankenstein, or Modern Prometheus :

How to describe my feelings in this terrible sight, how to portray the unfortunate person I created with such incredible difficulty? Meanwhile, his members were proportionate, and I picked up beautiful features for him. Beautiful - Great God! The yellow skin was too tight on his muscles and veins; the hair was black, shiny and long, and the teeth were white as pearls; but the more terrible was their contrast with watery eyes, almost indistinguishable in color from the eye sockets, with dry skin and a narrow cut of a black mouth. <...> It was impossible to look at him without a shudder. No mummy brought back to life could be worse than this monster. I saw my creation unfinished; it was ugly even then; but when his joints and muscles began to move, something more terrible than all of Dante’s inventions came about.

- Mary Shelley. Frankenstein, or Modern Prometheus

Observations about the mannequin Ivan Ivanovich were described in his book “With a man on board” by a test pilot, engineer-methodologist of the first cosmonaut squad and writer Mark Gallay :

In contrast to them, the mannequin, as an inanimate being (which, for example, was unable to overeat with something), it would seem, could not cause any discussion problems. It should not have ... However, it only seemed so. As it soon became clear, one of the eternal common problems of modeling - about the optimal measure of approximation of the model to nature - showed itself here.

In one of the rooms of the annex to the assembly and test building, there were “rescuers” —the representatives of the design bureau that created the ejection chair and the astronaut's spacesuit. A few days before the launch of the satellite ship — it was, if I’m not mistaken, just on the day of my first arrival at the cosmodrome — they presented to Korolev and several “persons accompanying him” all of their household equipment assembled: a chair and a safety belt attached to it belts clothed in a bright orange spacesuit mannequin.

The manufacturers of the mannequin tried to ensure that everything - at least everything accessible to the public - was “like a human being” in it. And therefore, they made him a completely humanlike face: with a mouth, nose, eyes, eyebrows, even eyelashes ... I could not resist the cue that, supposedly, having seen such a figure somewhere in the field or in the forest, I probably would have accepted it at the first moment for the dead man.

And indeed, there was something deadly unpleasant in the mannequin sitting in front of us. Probably, after all, it is impossible for a person to be too much like a person.

- Gallay M. L. With a man on board. - M .: Soviet writer , 1985. ^[5]

• Bunraku
• Xenophobia
• Coulrophobia

• Bryant D. The Uncanny Valley. Why are monster-movie zombies so horrifying and talking animals so fascinating . - 2005.
• MacPherson Kitta. Like humans, monkeys fall into the 'uncanny valley' . Princeton University (Oct 13, 2009). - Press release, Princeton University. Date of treatment November 5, 2009. Archived March 12, 2012.
• Steckenfinger Shawn A., Ghazanfar Asif A. Monkey visual behavior falls into the uncanny valley (English) (HTML + PDF). PNAS (Oct 12, 2009). Date of treatment November 5, 2009. Archived March 12, 2012.
• Manaenkov Alexander. The effect of the "sinister valley" (neopr.) . N + 1 (Nov 7, 2016). Date of treatment November 5, 2016.