Paper „Social, But Still Uncanny“

The paper „Social, But Still Uncanny“ by Katharina Kühne, Oliver Bendel, Yuefang Zhou, and Martin H. Fischer was published in the ICSR 2024 proceedings in March 2025. From the abstract: „The Uncanny Valley hypothesis proposes that as robots become more human-like, they are initially liked better but then elicit a feeling of eeriness, peaking just before achieving full human resemblance. It remains unclear whether context can modify this effect. In an online experiment, participants were primed with a vignette about either robots as social companions (social context prim-ing) or a neutral topic, and then rated images of robots on human-likeness, lik-ability, trust, and creepiness. We found a negative linear relationship between a robot’s human-likeness and its likability and trustworthiness and a positive lin-ear relationship between a robot’s human-likeness and creepiness. Social context priming improved overall likability and trust of robots but did not modulate the Uncanny Valley effect. This indicates that, while presenting robots in a social con-text can improve their acceptance, this does not change our inherent discomfort with increasing human-like robots.“ The book – the second of three volumes – can be downloaded via SpringerLink.

Fig.: Katharina Kühne at the ICSR 2024 in Odense, Denmark