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.