Social, but still uncanny

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 priming) or a neutral topic, and then rated images of robots on human-likeness, likability, 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 context can improve their acceptance, this does not change our inherent discomfort with increasing human-like robots.

Keywords

Subject (DDC)

330 - Wirtschaft
300 - Sozialwissenschaften, Soziologie, Anthropologie

Project

Event

International Conference on Social Robotics (ICSR)

Exhibition start date

Exhibition end date

Conference start date

Conference end date

Date of the last check

ISBN

978-981-96-3518-4
978-981-96-3519-1

ISSN

Language

English

Created during FHNW affiliation

Yes

Strategic action fields FHNW

Publication status

Published

Review

Peer review of the complete publication

Open access category

Closed

License

Citation

Kühne, K., Bendel, O., Fischer, M. H., & Zhou, Y. (2025). Social, but still uncanny. In O. Palinko, L. Bodenhagen, J.-J. Cabibihan, K. Fischer, S. Šabanović, K. Winkle, L. Behera, S. Sam Ge, D. Chrysostomou, W. Jiang, & H. He (Eds.), Social Robotics. 16th International Conference, ICSR + AI 2024, Odense, Denmark, October 23–26, 2024, Proceedings (Vol. 2, pp. 397–403). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-96-3519-1_36

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