Stuff You Should Know - Selects: Is The Uncanny Valley Real?

Episode Date: March 25, 2023

In 1970, roboticist Masahiro Mori wrote an essay that said the closer robots come to lifelike, the more they unsettle humans. His theory became the Uncanny Valley, and science has been evaluating it ��� and what makes something creepy - in recent years. Learn all about it with Josh and Chuck in this classic episode.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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My name is Joanne McNeil on my new podcast main accounts the story of my space I'm revisiting the early days of social media through the people who lived it listen to main accounts The story of my space on the I heart radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you find your favorite shows Hey everybody in this week's select. It's Josh by the way We take a look at the uncanny Valley a theoretical phenomenon Where robots give us the creeps as they get closer to looking human, but still don't seem quite right And we explore academic research into the creeps, which is pretty cool. So enjoy this episode Welcome to stuff you should know a production of I heart radio

Hey and welcome to the podcast I'm Josh Clark and there's Charles W. Chuck Bright and there's Jerry over there doing the robot Which means this is stuff you should know Robot stop I Knew I'd get a laugh out of you sooner or later. Did you do the robot? Can you do the robot? I think I've seen you do pretty bad robot. I don't know about pretty bad robot. I can do a pretty great robot Oh, that's what you've seen. I can't do any of that stuff. Yeah, I can't really either and then really if If if your claim to fame is like a really great robot dance, I don't know Maybe take up some other hobbies as well kind of round that out

You don't want that to be the only thing you're good at The right because if you list that on a dating site, you might turn ladies off Yeah According to e-harmony. Yeah, that's foreshadowing. I love that one. Don't you? Yeah, I had some issues with that hole. Oh, yeah, bit. Yeah, we'll get to that. This is tad All right. Well, let's start at the at the beginning almost the beginning Chuck Let's go back to 1970 which was the beginning of the greatest decade in the history of humanity

Yeah, neither one of us are born yet. I can finally even say that I'm still not even born It must feel good. Yeah, okay. Well Welcome to the club. I guess. Yeah, thanks and in 1970 We're not just going just anywhere in 1970. We're going to Japan in 1970. I bet Japan was pretty cool in the 70s Yeah, a lot of bell bottoms a lot of a ninja running around still. Yeah There were Calculators being wielded all over the place probably it was a good time. Yeah, good time for Japan, right? and

One of the one of the things that was going on in 1970 I could not for the life of me find what issue of This journal it came out in what month but at some point in 1970 there was an obscure journal a Japanese academic journal called energy and at some point during that year it published a A article by a Japanese roboticist and his name is Masahiro Mori. Nice. Thank you I have a lot of practice and Masahiro Mori Published this article and he named it Bukimi no Tani Gen show is actually the full name of the whole thing

Yeah, and as we'll see it's kind of difficult to translate into English, right and And it took many many years after he wrote this article for it to be translated into English for anybody Even try to attempt it. So basically Mori was this roboticist and he wrote this essay and at the time he just put it out there and went back to work Started teaching more and more roboticists a whole new generation of roboticists learned under him and his his work just kind of sat there unobserved that article I should say and then in 2005 a Rough translation of it was leaked out. It wasn't intended for publication and the world entirely changed Right because Masahiro Mori had in his article put his finger on something that no one had before in his

Capacities a roboticist and a human and that was What we call today the uncanny valley? Yeah, so that's the idea that You're making a robot and we'll see this applies to more than just robots But in his case you're making a robot and you want to make it look like a person Which I guess not all roboticists do some of them like the clunky jets and style robots Shh, you're like Rosie, but I guess if you're Mori you're you're on the path to designing life-like robots And the closer you get to that life-like look everything's going great. Everything's going great people are like this is so cool

This is so cool. Yeah, then all of a sudden people go. Oh Yeah, like right as it approaches its most or basically when it reaches its most life-like Capacity that this whoever's making it can conjure people are repulsed by it. Yeah Which is something that most people who ever hear of the uncanny valley are like yeah, you know That's I've noticed that that's happened to me before too But the thing is Chuck it doesn't it doesn't actually make sense right like we know a robot is a robot Yeah, so You know, maybe you could be afraid that it's gonna like pick you up and break you in two or something like a cartoon

But that's different than being creeped out by it like why would we be creeped out by a robot? And this is what Mori put his finger on was there's something to this and it doesn't make sense and He he didn't it wasn't even just this article that he wrote he he created a graph as well that's become quite famous that Really kind of gets the point across more than anything else Yeah, and he wasn't even the first person to to go over this and to put a put some thought to it Freud of course because he liked to think about everything

He thought about a little bit and before Freud there was a a German named ants Yencht. Oh nice. I did not realize it's how his last name should be pronounced. Yencht. It's good stuff I think I put a T on the end, but that's he's in the middle Yench. Yeah, I think that's right. I've been saying Jench Well, we'll have to look that up then. I think you're no, I think of the two of us you get the German down And the he had a little term called um Heimlich That he called it so like, you know different languages had different names for it And you go back in time all the way back to like the 17th century and people were and I guess, you know Robots didn't look super lifelike back then, but whatever their version of lifelike was right in the 1600s

People were like, I don't like that. Why is it looking at me? Yeah, it's got a quill and it's writing things But like you said Mori made this graph Because he was a roboticist and he thought, you know, let's look at this on a Plotted out so we can stare at it and on the x-axis he Had human likeness then on the y-axis he had affinity like whether or not you like the way this thing looks, right? and just as we're talking about the graph went up and up as Things got more lifelike and people like the way it looked and then at a certain point. There's that valley. There's a big dip That really just kind of says it all right and

Again, this all makes sense intuitively, but as we'll see that's it's been very difficult to prove And one of the reasons why it's confounded research thus far is because it we were we're not even a hundred percent sure what Mori Meant by some of the words he chose at least as far as translating them to English, right? For example, Bukimi, right? Yeah, it was translated in 2005 as uncanny But again that that original translation was not intended for publication, but it leaked out And so uncanny valley became, you know, the the way we all think of it here in the West

But Bukimi More closely resembles something like eerie like I've seen it explain that a word like Bukimi Means more than uncanny is just weird or remarkable or noteworthy It's not necessarily something that gives you the creeps Bukimi is something that that gives you the creeps like Steve Bukimi Yeah, nice exactly So Bukimi probably more should be should have been translated the eerie valley but by the time an actual official translation that Mori signed off on came out in 2012 if the cat was out of the bag

Everybody knew of it as the uncanny valley and there was no way anybody was gonna come back and be like no no No, everybody stop calling it that it's now the eerie valley. Okay, right? All right, and it may be one of those things where we're so used to uncanny valley now that it's hard to imagine eerie valley But right, I think that was the issue. Yeah, like nobody's gonna go along with that So this graph like I said it starts off on that left-hand side and this is where you have things that are super robotic Like, you know a packaging robot in a factory, right? that You know apparently most people don't have fondness for I do because I love mechanical processes

Right, right. Okay, so there's there's part of the problem. It's like that's not necessarily the the kind of feeling that Masahiro Mori was talking about right he was like yeah, yeah You're interested in robotics and robotic arms and the industrial processes and you love watching how it's made, right? What he was talking about was more like How it resembles a human and then how it makes you feel in relation to its resemblance of a human, right? Well in that case it makes me feel nothing because it doesn't look at all like a human, right? Okay, so that would be it about the origin of the graph

It has no resemblance to a human really and it's not eliciting any real affinity in you at all As far as it looking like a human, right, but lots of affinity as a thing. That's just that's called props so you go a little bit further on the graph and then you have things like little stuffed animals and I know C3PO is a common one that's mentioned because C3PO You know is built to look like a human. He does a great robot Kind of talks like a human and acts like a human But when it comes to that face and as we'll see the face is kind of the key to all this Mm-hmm for the most part C3PO looks nothing like a human in the face, right?

So everything's still good and people love C3PO, right? So if you're looking at the graph C3PO is going up in human likeness because he kind of you know he's got some some commonality there and We are feeling affinity for him based on that human likeness. So it's he's going up. Yes, okay We're going everything's going pretty well so far, right Chuck. That's right Okay, so then we're going to start hitting some areas where things start looking a little more human a lot more human I would say than C3PO like say the characters in Moana or frozen Pixar characters that kind of thing where they look like they're supposed to be human like they're based on human

But they have very exaggerated features that you would never confuse at first glance for an actual human, right? So you they have like be a guy's small noses things that make them cute, right? And so our affinity for them is going up as the human likeness is going up again Things are going really well so far. That's right because in Moana and frozen They look a little bit more like people and we like them a lot more for that reason, right? And then like you said earlier out of nowhere The whole thing this line that's just been going up very pleasantly And a nice little slope just drops downward, right?

And it doesn't drop just downward it goes actually below the x-axis Into negative territory and now this is the uncanny Valley That's right, and that's why it has that name because it's a valley, right? And this is where those things like really really lifelike androids live or Or corpses live or zombies live because Mori He he had the idea that if something's moving is even creepier than something similar to it That's not moving so he actually created two lines on this graph One for things that are animate and one for things that are inanimate

So if you look at this uncanny Valley on the inanimate line the non-moving line You've got corpses are at the bottom of it, but if you look at the animate line It's even it dips even further below than the inanimate line and at the bottom of those are zombies So dead people up and moving around and saying brains is as creepy as it gets as far as this graph is concerned Yeah, and he Mori wasn't the only one that Ernst Jynch that we talked about the German psychiatrist He also talked about the fact that if you are looking at something that should not be moving and it moves Mm-hmm. I mean, I think we can all agree that a Baby doll that suddenly turns its head and looks at you, right?

Probably one of the creepier things you can witness, right? You know, yeah It's about as creepy as it gets or have you ever been to an open casket funeral? A few I'm not a fan at all. No, it is It makes sense, you know We've really kind of closed or put a lot of space in between us and death way more than we used to have in like the 19th Century. Oh, they would sit up with the dead. Sure, right? So this seems to be like kind of a holdover from that but if you've ever been to an

Open casket funeral and have just stared at the corpse long enough like maybe it's arm or it's fingers or something Your brain is so anticipating that they it's about to start moving that sometimes you can creep yourself out and make Yourself think you did actually see it move. You'll also be asked to leave the funeral Well, you shouldn't be like giving a commentary about this out loud, but you can you know, you can do it to pass the time In the funeral if you're looking to kill some time So here's the thing with all this We know this happens because everyone kind of has this feeling but no one and all this research has been done and no one Exactly sure why this happens?

so Maury's essay and especially once it was translated a lot of research started happening in this area and It's problematic though because There there are a few different problems one is Well, it's it's Subjective this dependent variable whether you have an affinity for something is very subjective So it's hard to kind of nail that down Scientifically, right? All right. So the number two is human likeness, right? This is the independent variable. Yeah, and

if you have human likeness Like what does that mean? Like what looks human? What doesn't look human though? Like we haven't pinned that down. So like if you can't pin these the dependent variable down and the independent variable down It makes it really tough to study Correct, and then there's a third one too. I love this one. Yeah, the third one is You know the original hypothesis. It doesn't have a mathematical model that like really Specifies the shape of this curve, right? So

It's still hypothetical I guess right which means that So if you look at Maury's graph, it was he just basically made a line, right? It wasn't based on any studies he'd done. The whole thing was really an essay more than anything else So researchers who are trying to seriously study this scientifically have nothing that they're actually trying to place their findings against which leads to Put it puts them at risk for what's called the Texas sharpshooter fallacy. Yeah, greatest name fallacy around and It's it's based on the idea that if you take a sharpshooter on Texas and have him shoot at the side of a barn a bunch of times some of them are inevitably going to hit the barn and then the Texas sharpshooter walks up and then draws the bullseye around the

bullets that he already Sunk into the side of the barn. That's the Texas sharpshooter fallacy It's ignoring data like the ones where he missed the barn in favor of ones that fall into what you're looking for The the bullet holes in the barn. You could do the same thing with the Data that you get from testing the uncanny valley if you have no model to fit it into already Yeah, I think they would have done better if they would have just instead of trying to prove something To maybe just research and call it a thought experiment, right, you know, right? But people are taking it seriously and we'll we'll talk about some of this research right after this Chuck. I

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There there are people out there who are really studying the uncanny valley and trying to pin it down Yeah, one of these people is at Dartmouth College Psychologists and I didn't look up there mascot the the the Pub darts the fighting pub darts at Dartmouth College. We're gonna hear from Dartmouth, but her name is Talia Wheatley and she's done some research and has found that it's not just like

Some uniquely Western thing or American thing. It's kind of all over the world. She studied tribes in Cambodia and They have these same sensitivities to these things that look human, but aren't human And they've even found that and I think it kind of all comes down to the eyes But they found just looking at the eye can be enough Yeah Somebody can tell whether it's a human or not just looking at a picture of the eye, right? Yeah, and that's where I think people lose Credibility in and we'll talk about movies and sculpture and all that stuff But they just never get you can't get the eyes right like you can't put life in lifeless eyes. Yeah

Hard they try only God can't And There was this other experiment where they You know like where you can morph a face Digitally or whatever like that Michael Jackson black or white video. Yeah, I think some people were creeped out by that even sure But they would show this doll image and it would morph into a human face and basically they would have people mark where they Where they thought that it would look more human than doll and it you know It landed at about the 65% mark as far as morphing into human, which I mean you can't really apply that necessarily but just it's interesting off hand

65% point is about where the uncanny valley happened in Maury's mind Yeah, I would think it would be higher than that. Yeah, but um, yeah, it's still super interesting And you were saying that the eyes You're and that's what you're betting on is that it's gonna turn out to be the eyes, right? Yeah So trying to investigate what constitutes a human likeness There's a researcher named Angela Tinwell and she basically says like yes It's all about the upper facial features and that we we detect those we we Read those and so if there's any anything that's even just slightly off and like, you know

The eyes or the brows or the wrinkles that form That will lead to the the uncanny valley. That's the creeping part or the smile too. She also says well Yeah, and all these things kind of come down to evolution and her point is like you can't battle millions of years of evolution That has honed our our dumb little human brain to detect something that's off about a face, right? It's just too much to overcome basically, right this other researcher named Carl F. McDormand Who's from the University of Indiana who actually here's he's basically like dedicated his career to this now?

he found that Certain kinds of people if you do like a personality inventory before testing for uncanny valley sensitivity Yeah, some types of people are Predictably more sensitive to the uncanny valley than others Specifically, he found that very religious people that makes total sense. Yeah neurotic people. Yeah and People with high sensitivity to animal reminders. I don't even know what that is It's basically anything that reminds you that hey, you're super civilized and you drive a car and you know how to play poker

But you're still an animal just as much as that ape over there is right an animal reminder People who are sensitive to that kind of thing tend to go off on the uncanny valley as well And then people who are anxious are more likely to experience the uncanny valley as far as McDormand is concerned Yeah, that the anxious thing makes sense too because they're probably just more prone to be I don't know just have a reaction to a lot of things like this, right? But but we should say The science in all this the fact that the independent and the dependent variable are still not defined the sciences This this is like the scientific equivalent of that backward over-the-head half-court basketball shot

Yeah, that's the level of science that these people are carrying out at this point because they're they're a lot of them Sadly are conducting experiments based on something that again doesn't have a set Dependent or independent variable. So how can you do that is my question? Well, yeah, I mean because in each experiment, they're going to be using different stimuli Different faces right whether it's a doll or a wax figure or a CGI character And then they're gonna be doing different things and have different expressions and each person has their own subjective take So it is very tough thing to kind of nail down

Yeah, and I think some of them are actually trying to form the basis of this field of study right now They're doing the the the groundwork But I think some of them also are like just chasing headlines like there's no better way to get get into the media cycle with your study Then then releasing some findings on the uncanny valley. I was gonna people just like that up. Sure They love it. One thing I thought was interesting was at Princeton They tried this with monkeys and they found the same thing happen when they had these realistic looking but fake monkey faces Mm-hmm the monkeys were like ah ah and turned away It did make me think though like all the you've seen these situations where like an orphaned animal has a

Creepy puppet mother. Yeah, I know exactly what you're talking about and they seem to like that but however and this is a bit of a spoiler but Um Toward the end of this article it points out that human babies don't have this reaction at first either and that it's kind of learned So maybe that explains it maybe with the animals. I know you're talking about that that cage Like wire monkey mother It's super creepy. Is it black and white photo? Well, no, I mean they do it There's all kinds of animals. Well, they'll they're have like a fake tiger or a fake duck or whatever

Huh, just so the animal will feed or I mean, it's usually an animal that that milks from the mother. I guess I see but um It's a common thing they do for orphaned Milk feeding or breastfed animals and they're always creepy, huh? Well, I mean to us. Yeah, but to a dumb baby monkey They're just sweet. Give me the teeth. Yeah There's a t-shirt Maybe even a band name Sweet give me the teeth. Yeah Yeah, this kind of falls into the long band name category. Yeah, sure

But here's the thing is not everyone agrees with this Whole thing like you said earlier, there's a man named David Hansen and he's a roboticist as well and Plano, Texas and He did a very very basic study It was a survey Where they showed Images of two different robots that were animated to simulate human facial expressions and basically just asked hey What do you think of this and 70% said I like them

Yeah, I can see why people had trouble with this study though. Yeah, he said not one person said they were disturbed. Yeah, okay sounds good For the most part though studies into the uncanny valley are like now we're finding something here Yeah, although we should be suspicious of ones that basically show the uncanny valley That Maury just graphed out of his like with freehand, right? Like if you if you come across a study that shows that same thing, they're probably cherry-picking data Are you about to say out of his butt? There was another study Edward Schneider at SUNY Potsdam in New York, I bet they don't even have a mascot

they got together 75 characters from cartoons and video games everyone from Mickey Mouse to Laura Croft and Who is very attractive by the way? She's a computer character. Yeah, I used to take my Angelina Jolie. Well. No, I'm talking about playing Tomb Raider Yeah, I never played. Yeah when it first came out, you know, I played Tomb Raider and I was like, oh Wow, look at her. Laura Croft is kind of hot She well, she's she gets a lot of stuff done. That's very attractive Not sure what that means. Well, she travels a lot. Oh, sure. She's an independent person. Yeah, that's what I meant

I was attracted to her mind and her adventures, right? So anyway, they asked people in the study How attractive do you think these characters are or how repulsive do you think they are? and again there was a A graph with a dip in it at a certain point as you would expect. Yep careful careful everybody So if you're if you're a robot designer, right?

One of the things like even back in his essay written in 1970 Masahiro Mori said There's there's problems here with movement there's problems here with the smile it has something to do with the face, right? Yeah and Somebody else said I don't remember who it was but there's there always seems to be a lag time between how realistic a designer can make a robot and how realistic a An engineer can make that robot look. Yeah, right and that that disconnected Mori's mind was a big part of the uncanny Valley but he also seemed to focus on the smile on the eyes and

And one of the things that's at stake like besides this just being like an interesting Topic of discussion like there are actual real-world implications for this whole thing, right? Like if you're a robot designer You want to create something that's not gonna freak people out Because the whole purpose of robots is to interact with humans and you want them to interact with humans I should say life-like looking at robots, right? Because like Ford Motor Company is ever gonna buy an Android that looks human to just work on an assembly line when they can get the same thing that does the same job Cheaper when it just looks like a robotic arm or something, right?

Yeah, the whole purpose of a life-like looking robot is because that robot's being designed to interact with humans And if you are going to run into this spot Some people say it's not even a valley. Some people think it's insurmountable a cliff or a wall So if you're gonna run up against this you you want to figure out how to overcome it because you don't want to creep people out with Your creations. Well, and you don't want to spend a lot of money to develop a robotic Walmart greeter at every store Because it's it's happening like this is coming people. Yeah, there's a robot called Geminoid F or

or Actroid F depending on who you ask I've also seen her called Ellie And she is out of this lab by a guy named Hiroshi Ishiguro And he is probably the world's leading roboticist if you've seen any life-like android It probably came out of this guy's lab, right? Yeah, and she is starting to get out there in the world She's been a debriefer of soldiers coming back from war with PTSD Based on the idea that they might share more with a robot that they knew was just a robot than they would an actual human Yeah

She's in a play She stars as an android good role Right, and then there's uh Casper. There's a little robot called Casper Yeah, Casper is a robot boy With a great cause created to help children with autism learn to read facial emotions Um, if you look up photos of both of these Geminoid F Looks great and really like Ishiguro is doing great great work. Yeah, he really is um Casper looks terrifying

Right, and so Casper is creepy, but that's not his purpose at all, right? No, of course his purpose is to Like teach kids with autism how to connect, but if he's repelling them Through this uncanny valley. He's defeating the purpose. Well, they should go to Ishiguro And say hey, we have this great cause. Can you make us something that doesn't look like the stuff of nightmares? Right, exactly. I wonder if Casper has been, um Effective, you know, I don't know I don't know. Oh Now I feel bad. I didn't look into that. Well

Uh, I just I don't know. He's very creepy looking. I agree wholeheartedly. It's kind of like no, he's not finished Get back to the drawing boy Either that or and this is what mori said like go the other way like just make him not Um human at all just cute or approachable, right? So the roboticists are not the only ones who are facing this chuck There is a I a pretty powerful moneyed contingent of people who are interested Stakeholders in overcoming the uncanny valley or at least figuring out if it's totally Insurmountable and that is Hollywood. Yeah, um, Hollywood has a uh, sort of a rich history

Of getting it wrong when it comes to creepy CGI characters Um Pixar had their very first short film actually is called tin toy Uh, it's a little five minutes short and they showed it to this, you know, this preceded toy story and everything Yeah, it was actually kind of like the the outline of toy stories plot Yeah, but they showed it to test audiences and they made the mistake of making uh, the baby billy look too realistic and

Everyone loved tin toy and everyone hated billy. Yeah. Have you seen it? Yeah. Yeah, so I hate billy He yeah, he's pretty hateable for sure and he is the antagonist But he he struck some chord with viewers that the Pixar did not mean to strike right and they actually I mean this is Extraordinarily fortunate for Pixar. Oh, sure. This is very early on in their history and um, they uh, They learned from it. Actually, they're like, okay, note to self Don't try to make any of these characters life like let's go a different direction. And so they came up with those Um Exaggerated features that that we've all just come to know and love

Yeah, which was a great great direction to go in. Yeah, obviously because they've had tons of success with that model Right. You can make the case that it may have Saved the the company because other companies and other movies for sure have not been nearly as fortunate Yeah, uh, one of the first big uh, photo reel, uh, computer animated movies was final fantasy Colen the spirits within you should never have a colon in your movie title by the way So that was the first mistake, right? But this one was from 2001 and uh, based on the video game and it was, uh Off-putting to a lot of people and it was a big big bomb

For columbia pictures and but this is before Uncanny valley had really been established before morris essay was translated. So So reviewers didn't quite know what to say now. They would just say we've tumbled into the uncanny valley again All right, uh, but they would say things like uh, peter travers great, uh, reviewer from rolling stone Said at first it's fun to watch the characters ellipsis ellipse ellipse But what's an ellipsis is that two of them? A couple of them

But then you notice a coldness in the eyes a mechanical quality in the movements familiar voices emerging from the mouths of replicants He wrecked a distance Yeah, so he's describing the uncanny valley. He just didn't have the name of it yet, right? Um, and then a couple years later you had the polar express Which became I think even more famous than final fantasy. Oh, totally as far as the uncanny valley goes But again, it's like you said, you know, the reviewers didn't know how quite to put their finger on it And I'm not quite sure how final fantasy was done, but I know that polar express used similar, um

software and hardware to what um roboticists are using now Where it's like motion capture, but rather than translating the motion to the robot It's translating the motion into like a digital 3d rendering of the character, right? Yeah So polar express was really Really expressive, but not quite there So it fell really hard in the uncanny valley and um, I think

David Germain of the Associated Press Uh compared the kids in this heartwarming family Christmas movie to the children from village of the damned Which is not what you want. It's not at all what the studio wanted and I think it lost a pretty decent amount of money Yeah, uh, there was another one And these are all by the way courtesy of robert zemeckis. He really had his He went all in on this technology. Mm-hmm. Uh, I don't know why I think he just I think sometimes you as an artist you can get so wrapped up in

The coolness of wow look what we can do now That you don't step back and look at what You're doing like should should we be doing this? Uh, because he also uh had a part in the uh bale wolf movie in 2007. That was a huge bomb Um, and the new york times said this about that people who are meant to be enraged Who are at risk of plummeting to their deaths? Just look a little out of sorts when it was over I felt relieved to be back in the company of uncreepy flesh and blood humans again. Mm-hmm

Sad and then uh, did you see the adventures of tin tin? Yeah, I really liked tin tin though I did too. I think spielberg I mean there is that uncanny valley a little bit But uh, the story in the movie were so good. He overcame that I think I Was about to say I think spielberg has come the closest to To overcoming that chasm Of anybody but did he do it through good storytelling or through the eyes? I I don't know I don't know if it I don't know if it was a combination of the two. Um, I don't know but it is extraordinarily

It's an extraordinary so you know those that that that stuff you'll see every once While somebody does like what beavis and butthead would actually look like in real life Or what charlie brown would look like in real life. Fantastic, right? So it it still is kind of got a cartoonish quality to it That's the same thing with the tin tin movie But it was like it was as if you were living in a dimension where humans looked somewhat cartoonish Is that making any sense or does that just make the whole thing even harder to understand? No, I get that

So so he somehow was like here. I'm not trying to to nail what humans look like I'm going to take you to another world where these people live and if you lived in this world You would look like this too. It's it's weird. It's like he he bridged an uncanny valley that doesn't exist in this dimension Yeah, he built a temporary Disintegrating bridge across the uncanny valley, right? I think the biggest example in recent years was or the one that got the most attention was in Rogue one. Did you see that the Star Wars movie? I haven't asked in any of the new Star Wars ones except for I seen the first six I guess is okay, but none of the two new new ones. No, uh, well in

Rogue one they completely bring back to life grand Moff Tarkin Who was played by the the deceased Peter Cushing? And they brought him back as a character in this movie and In the theater like when he when it first happens He's got his back to you and it's sort of in the shadows and you're like, oh, wow like That's pretty cool. And I didn't know that they would do that, but they they got too comfortable I think and showed too much

And gave them too many lines and too much light And then it it became uncanny valley. Oh really? Oh, yeah for sure think about poor Peter Cushing's family having to see that Yeah, I don't know I'll bet they just weep during that that movie Well, I'm curious about like life rights and image rights and stuff like that if they had to Get that cleared. I don't even know there. I'm sure there's a backstory there. Oh Cushing was famously mellow He would have taken and draw off his doobie and been like that's whatever man Yeah, I think he spent the last year of his life on his weed farm in northern, california, right?

What about this mars needs moms? I had never ever heard of that movie and so I went and watched the trailer and it still is like I have no idea what this is Yeah, you know that comic strip bloom county. Well, you know, I'm a huge huge lifelong bloom county fan Oh, okay. So berg, so maybe you know how to say the last name It's berkeley breathed or breathed. Oh, I said breathed, but uh, I don't know if I've ever heard it said out loud Breathed sounds nice. Let's go with that. So berkeley breathed the person the guy who did bloom county Yeah, he wrote a book a children's book called mars needs moms and basically mars had some sort of shortage of moms So the martians came and kidnapped human moms and it was up to the human kids to go get their moms back from mars, right?

Pretty cute little premise, but they took it and ran it through zemeckis's nightmare mill That's what he called this company, right? Image movers digital was the was the trade name of it But everybody knew to just steer clear of this place, right? Yeah, and this was like the apex Or the what's the opposite of the apex the valley? I guess so the deepest part of the cgi valley of the uncanny valley, right? It was What what the stuff that they created it was so off And just so spectacularly and classly off that when I guess disney came along and bought this company They came in looked around and said we're shutting you down

This movie's it. We're not doing this anymore. What you guys are doing here is wrong Um, and you're all going to jail. Yeah, here's my thoughts on that I watched the trailer and it didn't look any worse than any of the other ones to me and in fact I don't know the character's names, but there's a kid and then there's this one kind of chubby guy In mars. Yeah, the chubby guy looked pretty good. Actually. I thought I think this was a victim. I bet the movie sucked really bad Yeah, and I think it was the last straw at the end of all these Uncanny valley failures. Yeah, because this again, this is the same company that had created

A polar express. Yeah, the nightmare factory and a christmas carol did not do very well either Yeah, so yeah, I think it it definitely bore the brunt of its predecessors as well Yeah, I but I thought this was As bad as it got if you ask me, I totally saw what what disney saw with this one Yeah, anytime something is marked as the thing that killed the thing, right? It's always just the last thing Yeah, you're right, you know, yeah Anyway, but it could have also been the thing that saved the thing Had they gotten it right, you know

That's true So like I said, mori was like and every time I say mori now unless I say it like mori Just saying mori sounds like an old jewish guy think I think of the wig salesman and good fellas Yeah, mori We're originators like give me money And right leotas just in there laughing because mori's to pay falls off Yeah, imagine that guy is the guy who came up with the uncanny valley. Okay. He gives a whole different spin to it, right? So mori says

Um Just don't even try guys like you're never going to be able to do this Even if you can we're so far away from it. Yeah, this is in 1970. He was saying it and it still holds true now Yeah, yeah, we're so far away from this that that just maybe Put your put your emphasis elsewhere and the example he gave was say like a prosthetic hand, right? Yeah, rather than trying to create a life like prosthetic hand that that was In danger of creeping people out, which is the opposite of what somebody wearing a prosthetic hand wants When they're walking around the prosthetic hand. He said, you know, maybe choose some like like wood well sanded beautifully grained wood

Yeah In the shape of a human hand it gets the point across. This is my hand. I lost my hand I don't have my hand, but there's nothing to be creeped out about here. It's kind of beautiful looking, isn't it? Yeah, that was Mori's take and a lot of people side with him as well as a matter of fact You know, I said I think at the beginning that he was already an established roboticist when he wrote the uncanny valley in 1970 and he went on to teach a lot of people roboticists or a lot of roboticists as well and That very famous robot, uh, asimo asimo You know the one i'm talking about

He was one of the first ones that could jog in place and he's kind of humanoid for sure But very cute all white shiny lacquer plastic. Yeah, you've seen him before Um, he was created by one of mori's students who clearly subscribed to mori's theory that You you're not gonna you're not gonna overcome the uncanny valley So just make these things exaggerated and non-human like yeah, and you'll you'll have people love your robot Yeah, I think that's a good tech. Yeah. Uh, all right We're gonna take another break here and then uh come back and finish up With a little bit we're gonna take a step back and just talk generally about creepiness

I'm dr. Romany, and I am back with season two of my podcast navigating narcissism Narcissists are everywhere and their toxic behavior and words can cause serious harm to your mental health in our first season We heard from Eileen charlotte who was love bombed by the tinder swindler The worst part is that he can only be guilty for stealing the money from me But he cannot be guilty for the mental part he did and that's even way worse than the money you took But I am here to help as a licensed psychologist and survivor of narcissistic abuse myself I know how to identify the narcissists in your life. Each week you will hear stories from survivors who have navigated through toxic Relationships gaslighting love bombing and the process of their healing from these relationships

Listen to navigating narcissism on the iHeart radio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts My space was the first major social media company They made the internet which up until then had been kind of like a nerdy space Feel like a nightclub and also slightly dangerous and it was the first major social media company to collapse Rupert Murdoch lost lots and lots of money on my space because it turned out it was actually not a good business My name is Joanne McNeil on my new podcast main accounts the story of my space I'm revisiting the early days of social media through the people who lived it the users

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I wouldn't go digging around stirring up trouble if i was you Tune in to uncover what happened when three boys entered a tennessee cave But only one returned. This is the exact spot where we found the body's jewelry the man to walk caves man ta w auk A production of ir radio longhouse television and psychopia pictures every minute I remain a man to walk county the thick of the fog gets Listen to the mental walk caves now on the iHeart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts All right, so i promised that we would talk about creepiness

So that's what we'll do you promise chuck the creeps uh such a great phrase everyone says it gives me the creeps It's just such a it just it's one of those phrases It's a great phrase It's a great phrase Everyone says it gives me the creeps. It's just such a it just it's one of those phrases. It sums things up so perfectly It's live it as a fresh bruise and um We have

Charles dickens to thank for this evidently because he gets credit for using the creeps Uh and david copperfield in 1849 Uh people had had this feeling before this sort of unpleasant off You know what it feels like to get the creeps, but they said things like eel like or clammy Not bad Not bad, but if you said Ugh that thing makes me feel eel like today people would be like what the heck are you talking about right? I think also you would use that to describe somebody who gave you the creeps as well like that guy's really clammy

You know what I mean sure well that means you're touching them though like like peter lorry Would be clammy or eel like and some of his characters. Oh, you know peter lorry. I do too. All right um So everybody understands that there is such thing as the creeps, right? Mm-hmm, but We don't understand Why we get the creeps still to this day and again this is important and relates to the uncanny valley because another way to put the creeps Is negative affinity remember affinity was the x-axis. Yeah

And when the valley dropped down below the x-axis you dipped into negative affinity You dip into the creeps the creeps exactly right so you talked about um Ernst yinch Yeah, yeah, did I get it sure? It was probably the first person to actually sit down and study The creeps or creepiness. I bet he was creepy himself. I don't know. I think he was just kind of a neat thinking man, right? so yinch Man, I like saying his name a lot more now

He wrote an essay in 1906 called on the psychology of the uncanny. Yeah, and that's the english translation Um, the german word he used like you said is unheimlich. Is that right? Uh, not in unheimlich Unheimlich. Yeah, okay. Nice. You're getting better. Thank you Uh, he he used that word and unheimlich is a variation of the word heimlich Um, which is not just to say the maneuver. It means something else entirely which is homey or familiar Right. Yeah, unheimlich is the opposite of that. It's something strange and foreign and very frequently It's translated into uncanny here in the west. So you're here in in in england. Yeah, and he

he has uh He thought a lot about this and one of the things that he noted which I think thought was pretty interesting Was that people that he thought were more intellectually discriminating Um Are more prone to have these uncanny experiences because they're critical thinkers about the world, right? So, uh That makes sense like just they pay attention maybe a little more Yeah, or they're curious like they're they're like, why am I creeped out? Let me get to the bottom of this rather than um creeped out

I'm gonna go eat a whole thing of chips ahoy and hide under the covers Right. Uh, he also actually went even further and said it's It's possible that all of humanity's knowledge has been accrued over these millions of years from the the People investigating what's behind this creepiness. Yeah, it's a pretty weird and neat theory of knowledge Well, yeah, and speaking of theories. There are a bunch of theories on Creepiness um and why this happens and I think they're all pretty interesting Yeah, the first one is called pathogen avoidance theory and we talked earlier about evolution And um, this one kind of fits into that bucket

Uh, basically a warning That we have evolved to have in our brain It says that person is off. They are diseased even right. You don't want to go near them, right? You want to avoid that pathogen Makes sense. Yeah, it's pretty under pretty approachable. Sure Um, there's another one that I've seen that's I think a fairly recent and it's the idea that things Give us the creeps when um, when they're trying to Non-verbally mimic people. Yeah And so like a robot doesn't do it

So we're like, oh, that's unsettling or Somebody who you would describe as clammy or eel like maybe overdoes it a little bit. Yeah, like they're trying to fit in It's not natural to them. Yeah, and that can give you the creep as well. That makes sense But it doesn't really encompass everything. It's definitely not a unified theory of creepiness It just seems to kind of inhabit one corner of the creepy spectrum Yeah, uh, there's another one called violation of expectation. Um This is like, you know, you've shaken hands with thousands of people over your life but if you go and you shake a hand

And you don't know that you're going to get a prosthetic hand It may give you the creeps. Right. Uh, and that is probably very fleeting because you might just say, oh Oh, okay. Well, it doesn't give me the creeps now, but it's just unexpected for me And actually you said that was fleeting, right Chuck? So I think it was huge or somebody who said that Creepiness what gives us the creeps one time might not give us the creeps later on Yeah, which will kind of come into play later like Ernst Jynch basically he laid the groundwork for the study of creepiness And it seems to have gotten a lot of it right right out of the gate

Yeah, and like you said, if it if it doesn't give you the creeps later Then that would fit neatly into the violation of expectation because Then you can change your expectation. Right exactly. Yes. Yes. Um, another one's mortality salience theory It's good. Yeah, this one mori and uh, Freud both subscribed to and it basically said that um, we When we encounter like a robot or an automaton in Freud's day Um, they remind us of dead people Which in turn gets our mind to thinking about how we're going to die one day And so all of a sudden we find ourselves in the uncanny valley, right?

Which again raises another sorry for the sidetrack, but raises another of Jynch's points. Um, is Uncanny-ness inherent in the object or is it inside the observer who's experiencing the creeps or uncanny-ness? I think it's in the observer Yeah, I think it is too, which would explain why it can go away when you when you come to experience it again Yeah, like this when you go through that when you shake the same prosthetic hand again, you it's not creepy the second time It might even be interesting or why some people might not experience it at all like someone might sit there and See a doll and the doll's head turns and looks at them and they're like neat

Right, how much for that doll? Which means you've just met a serial killer And then the dolls creeped out after that Uh, this one I like the um, even though I can never say this word for some reason anthropomorphism Nice job dehumanization dichotomy, which basically as we attribute these human attributes to the robot Until we realize that they don't have them Right, so like we're looking at this robot that looks like a person We're saying oh look it's just like a human and they're walking and they're talking and they're smiling and then oh god Look at their eyes. Their eyes are dead. Look at the eyes. They don't they don't have any internal thoughts at all

They're not human. Yeah, and then all of a sudden on candy valley Which is a little bit about expectation too. I think those are crossover a little I think sure And so creepiness. I think especially the modern incarnation of creepiness This is my these are my thoughts. They seem to be They represent a crossroads, right where evolutionarily Creepiness, I think Was probably It's it alerts us we're on alert when something's creeping us out. We're really focused on that thing right then

But we're also bound by society not to just turn and run From anything that could conceivably be a threat You can also take it a little further and say that Evolutionarily speaking it would not make sense for us to turn and run from every single thing that could conceivably be a threat Before we've identified it as a threat because we would be using up a lot of calories and energy And we would have to find more food than we do it'd be inefficient, right? So we're kind of bound socially to stand in place until we identify something as a threat or not in which case During this period. That's when we experience creepiness

Yeah, and I think everyone has experienced this like you're in a coffee shop or something And like some super creepy dude comes in And if you're like me, you're just like, um, all right, I'm gonna I'm gonna keep my eye on that guy I'm not gonna bolt and run, but it might stay near the door Sure, you know, I might get my car keys ready. Yeah, exactly Uh, it is it's this weird social contract. Um And you know, I feel bad for people that just inherently look a little creepy Well, yeah, let's talk about that. Yeah, so there was these there were these researchers from Knox College

Who did what they build is the first empirical study of creepiness and this is in 2016 such a great study And um, it was an online survey very little heavy lifting, but it was a pretty pretty cool survey it was in four parts and um What they found overall was that yeah, physical characteristics physical traits that are almost stereotypically linked to creepy people Do have an effect. They are creepy Um, as far as as the the participants in this study are concerned. Yeah So the first section said hey, you know

What what is the likelihood that this person is creepy and there's like, you know, descriptions of them There's 44 different behaviors, right? Yeah Um, and the second part was the participants rated the creepiness of 21 different occupations. Love to see that list um, the third section It said list two hobbies that you think are creepy. I love that. They only needed two it was open-ended And then the last section, um, the participants said whether or not they agreed with 15 statements about the nature of creepy people Well, yeah, and overall again like they found like yes, if you have physical traits that people find creepy like bulging eyes or

You lick your lips a lot or you know, you you arch your fingers and then just kind of tap them together a lot Okay It's kind of creepy but the the Knox researchers concluded that those aren't creepy necessarily in and of themselves It's when it's in conjunction with other creepy behavior That somebody comes across as creepy Right And of course the one behavior they put in here. I think that was probably universally creepy Was someone who persistently steers the conversation toward a sexual topic, right? Yeah, you don't you don't do that

They uh, they also found no They also found 95 of participants and this is like I think 1800 and so no 1341 people 95 of them said that men were more likely to be creepy than women. Yeah, I think that's generally true. I'd um I don't remember getting the creeps a lot in my life by uh Strictly from the appearance of a woman, right? But a lot of dudes on a weekly basis give me the creeps sure But we we should say so there's a website called girl.com

To url.com and they went on to reddit and found a thread somewhere that they wrote a blog post about And now we're reporting on it. So it's really come full circle but it was a thread about how women can be creepy and it was written by dudes and um There are some things that apparently are universally creepy among boys With women, right? Yeah Women that are too needy can be creepy Women who use baby talk too much

Or who quote never leave a guy alone Yeah, I just uh, I'm just gonna go ahead and dump that right into the trash bin. Okay That's my only comment on that. Okay What about e-harmony? I mean if you come home and and uh, glin closes in your kitchen boiling your pet bunny Well, that's a threat Yeah, that's not even creepy. That's just a threat. Right Although I will say in fatal attraction the um The scene where she is sitting there

Clicking the light on and off listening to madame butterfly. Mm-hmm. That was that was kind of creepy. I was trying to think of like a A creepy woman. I really couldn't come up with anybody. Well, these are creepy behaviors though, you know Yeah, not like glin close close walked into the room and you're like, ooh, I don't know about that Right, right, right. There's a difference Right, there's a difference between genuine creepiness and Just doing creepy things. Yeah, I think it is much harder for women to be creepy than men Cannot think of a single actual creepy woman. No I'd like to hear from people though. Yeah

Uh, e-harmony so we talked about reddit Now we're gonna talk about e-harmony. Right. They had an article where they wrote advice to dudes It was called how to avoid the creep zone. Right. Um And their advice was For your hobbies that you list to be just sort of vanilla. All right, don't like And even if you are an amateur taxidermist, maybe don't put that down Right, they said it it can be attractive for a guy to have an off the beaten path hobby And one of the examples they gave of an off the beaten path hobby was collecting punk records

But don't get weirder than that Yeah, and if you know taxidermy in and of itself, some people might say is super creepy We did an episode on that other people might say no, it's just just beautiful artwork Right, but Norman Bates was into taxidermy for a reason in psycho. Right. It was unsettling. Yeah, you know, yeah and so um They're the the nox people who who carried out this survey the nox university researchers They basically said here's what we think it is here's creepiness explained And what they explained was what can be called is the threat ambiguity

Um theory. Yeah, this this one. I think I kind of put a cherry on top on this one Yeah, we really did like it It's just basically where you are creeped out by something because your hackles are raised right then And and it's because you haven't determined whether that thing's a threat or not. Yep, right There's another one though that I Subscribed to I think it is finally the unified theory of creepiness. I think it covers everything And it's called the category ambiguity theory Yeah, that was uh, now did david livingstone smith make this up or was he just championed this?

I think he made it up because he wrote about the nox researchers and said what they're talking about you can call threat ambiguity category Or threat ambiguity theory With category ambiguity theory, he didn't cite anybody else. So it seemed to be his own construct Yeah, so this is the idea. It's sort of like the threat ambiguity in that there is some confusion but It's not a threat like I think this dude in the coffee shop is going to kill me. It's more like I don't know how to categorize that guy and that freaks me out, right?

And it's based on what's called Essentialism yeah, right where if you are a member of a species of animal whether human or raccoon or tiger There's something about you Or there's some collection or set of things about you that that are Totally unique to your species. Yeah, it's something you possess Because you're a member of that species and because you're a member of that species You possess these things and it can be very difficult to put your finger on it But it's just one of those things that you know when you see it or know when you don't see it, right?

Yeah, and there are clear borders between these things you either have this essence fully or you don't have it at all You're lacking it. You're missing it and something's really wrong So in this article he used The example of a wax dummy Yeah, have you ever been to like Madame Tussauds? Sure. Yeah Um, I find that the ones and again with the eyes the ones that work the best or the ones where they have sunglasses on Oh, yeah, you know again Michael Jackson. That's right But the whole point with these wax dummies with the eyes is

They're fixed. They're not moving around the facial expression is locked in Uh, the skin itself, you know, they can only do so much and Madame Tussauds and museums like that are They're the best of the best and they do look pretty good But that's the whole point with the uncanny valley is You can't get 99 percent there And say we're fine. It's that one percent that still gives people the creeps Exactly That's and it sums up everything like the threat ambiguity could fall into this whether you're talking about robots

whether you're talking about a Half dog half lizard combo which Livingstone sites or Livingstone Smith sites the desert. Yeah A desert would be creepy when you saw it. Yeah, but so things that are a threat are creepy But there's also things that are creepy that aren't a threat in this category ambiguity theory figured it out So if that's true Chuck and David Livingstone Smith figured out what is the basis of creepiness? We finally have the independent variable licked And Masahiro Morty's uncanny valley graph and we can get to work. Is he still around? Yeah, he is

I wonder if he's happy about all this Uh, I get the impression that he's kind of like just whatever gone off on his own little thing. Okay, and he's fine He wrote it in 1970 after all, you know, yeah, I mean almost 50 years ago. Yeah Yeah, so he's probably up there. Yeah Uh, you got anything else? I got nothing else. Good one. Yeah If you want to know more about the uncanny valley, we should say this was based originally on a grabster article, too That's right But if you want to know more about the uncanny valley, come read that grabster article

You can type uncanny valley in the search bar at howstuffworks.com and since I said search bar is time for listener mail Well, and today it's a very special listener mail this is Josh edition because you picked out a very special one. I love this one. I'm gonna butcher the dude's name, but that's right Take it away. It's a good one. Okay. I'm gonna call this one Uh email from a real irish historian Yeah, that feels pretty good chuck. Am I out of a job? Yeah, maybe okay. Hi guys I'm a big fan of the show. It's informative and insightful and I find myself interested in things that I never looked at twice at before One subject that I'd always found fascinating was the correlation between the Native American Choctaw tribe and the people of Ireland

I didn't realize that was a thing. Did you not at all? This is a story which isn't well Okay, which isn't well known outside of some areas of Ireland and of course within the tribe But it's a really good story of solidarity between two groups of people despite being thousands of miles apart Less than 20 years after the Trail of Tears, which forcibly displaced thousands of natives the great famine hit Ireland During this time, as you know, Ireland was colonized by the British and the people of Ireland were treated poorly due to the common Misconception that Irish Catholics were a lower caliber of human He goes on to give more examples, but just suffice to say it was not good for the Irish people during the famine Word spread to America and to the Choctaw tribe. They sympathized with the Irish people so much that only 15 years after the Trail of Tears

They donated $710 during 1845 to send to Ireland as part of a relief fund This is estimated to be roughly $68,000 in today's money This was greatly appreciated by the Irish people and after the famine the bond continued In Cork, we have a sculpture honoring the tribute of the Choctaw people and in 1990 members of the tribe came to Ireland and walked The famine walk in Mayo to replicate the walk that starving people made to ask the landlord for help In 1992 an Irish commemoration group walked from Oklahoma to Mission to replicate the Trail of Tears and raised $700,000 to help poverty in Africa

These two groups continue to work together and to this day our president has declared an honorary member of the Choctaw tribe Along with the Quakers who fed Irish people to the point that their members ended starving themselves The Choctaw tribe remained some of the unsung heroes of the famine story of Ireland. Sorry, it went on so long I'm an Irish historian, so I tend to waffle. Love the show. Best of luck with yourselves Royzen Kilroy Fantastic Great story. Thanks a lot Royzen. I'm quite sure that's not the actual pronunciation of your name because there's a lot of accent marks over Letters there normally aren't. Yeah

So I apologize for that, but I nailed your last name on positive of it and Josh Clark three and a half stars Not bad out of three and a half, right? I remember what was star search. Is it four stars? Oh, I don't remember. I just Just now remember there was such thing as star search. Yeah Uh, well, uh, okay. Well, you take the end part Chuck since I took listener mail. Oh, jeez Thanks for listening Hey, if you want to get in touch with us, you can go to our official pages Stuff you should know podcast. What else?

Uh, let's see if they want to send us an email. Oh, yeah email us at stuffpodcast at howstuffworks.com And uh, have a good day. Is that what you say? That's good enough. All right Stuff you should know is a production of iHeart radio for more podcasts my heart radio visit the iHeart radio app Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows Let's get cooking and spice up your favorite games get to iHeartland We're gaming and entertainment unite for another epic event on roblox Welles Adams and Tyler Florence of two dudes in a kitchen will be there with the spiciest tastiest new podcast on iHeart radio

It's all happening in iHeartland at state farm park thursday march 23rd at 7 p.m. Eastern learn more at iHeartradio.com Slash iHeartland plus don't forget to ride the ferris wheel at the state farm neighborhood for the best views of iHeartland My space was the first major social media company They made the internet feel like a nightclub and it was the first major social media company to collapse My name is Joanne McNeil on my new podcast main accounts the story of my space I'm revisiting the early days of social media through the people who lived it Listen to main accounts the story of my space on the iHeart radio app apple podcasts Or wherever you find your favorite shows

I'm dr. Romany, and I am back with season two of my podcast Navigating narcissism this season we dive deeper into highlighting red flags and spotting a narcissist before they spot you Each week you'll hear stories from survivors who have navigated through toxic relationships Gaslighting love bombing and their process of healing Listen to navigating narcissism on the iHeart radio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts