The Importance of Beliefs in Human Nature Uniqueness for Uncanny Valley in Virtual Reality and On-Screen

Abstract

The current study had two main goals—evaluation of the impact of robot stimuli presentation type (virtual reality vs. on-screen simulation) and investigation of the relation between essentialism beliefs and the uncanny valley effect. The experiment involved a virtual café in which participants confronted four characters ranging from robotic to humanlike. The results showed that robotic characters were rated more eerie than humanlike characters. The robotic character with moderate humanlikeness received the highest eeriness rating, which was interpreted by us as evidence of the uncanny valley effect. Contrary to previous research’s suggestion, participants assessed the humanlikeness and eeriness of characters in the same manner in VR and on-screen. Our results show the importance of essentialism beliefs in attitudes toward the most eerie artificial agents. Strong beliefs in the uniqueness of human nature deepen the uncanny valley effect. Additionally, groups with and without previous knowledge of the uncanny valley effect did not differ in their assessments of variables related to this phenomenon.

Data availability statement

The Supplementary Materials are available at https://osf.io/kr94u/. The additional datasets generated during and/or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 They used a very broad range of humanlike characters, including animalistic and zombies, which was dissuaded by Kätsyri et al. (2015).

2 Characters were downloaded for free from www.mixamo.com and www.cgtrader.com websites. The café model was bought from www.turbosquid.com. All accessed 04.03.2022.

3 Polish translations: “przerażający”, “odpychający”, “dziwny”, “niepokojący”.

4 https://osf.io/kr94u/

5 None of the subgroups was distributed normally according to Shapiro-Wilk tests.

6 Robot vs. Ybot: W = 224, p < 0.001, ${\eta }^2=0.15;$ Robot vs. AJ: W = 0, p < 0.001, ${\eta }^2=0.54;$ Robot vs. Brian: W = 0, p < 0.001, ${\eta }^2=0.77;$ Ybot vs. AJ: W = 135, p < 0.001, ${\eta }^2=0.35;$ Ybot vs. Brian: W = 0, p < 0.001, ${\eta }^2=0.71;$ AJ vs. Brian: W = 53, p < 0.001, ${\eta }^2=0.27.$

7 See note 5 above.

8 Robot vs. Ybot: W = 918, p < 0.001, ${\eta }^2=0.05;$ Robot vs. AJ: W = 1076, p < 0.001, ${\eta }^2=0.06;$ Robot vs. Brian: W = 951, p < 0.001, ${\eta }^2=0.08;$ Ybot vs. AJ: W = 754, p < 0.001, ${\eta }^2=0.17;$ Ybot vs. Brian: W = 551, p < 0.001, ${\eta }^2=0.20;$ AJ vs. Brian: W = 1503, p = 0.454, ${\eta }^2=0.003.$

9 Robot: U = 1263, p = 0.455; AJ: U = 987, p = 0.496; Brian: U = 1099, p = 0.969.

10 Robot: U = 703, p = 0.992; Ybot: U = 674, p = 0.992; AJ: U = 607, p = 0.662; Brian: U = 569.0, p = 0.662.

11 They did not report effect sizes, however, we calculated them on the basis of reported tests results.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Science Centre, Poland under Grant no. 2020/37/N/HS6/01372.

Notes on contributors

Dawid Ratajczyk

Dawid Ratajczyk is a cognitive scientist and a PhD student at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland. Besides a master’s degree in Cognitive Science, he also received a bachelor’s degree in Biology. His current research interest is focused on social robotics, human–computer interaction, virtual reality, and language processing.

Jakub Dakowski

Jakub Dakowski studies Cognitive Sciences at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań and Computer Science at WSB University in Poznań. His scientific interests include applications of logic, puzzles and new technologies with an emphasis on virtual reality, metaverse, and virtual avatars.

Paweł Łupkowski

Paweł Łupkowski is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Psychology and Cognitive Science and Co-founder of the Reasoning Research Group. His research interests are philosophical logic (logic of questions), formal analysis of cognitive processes, Human–Robot Interaction, attitudes toward robots, and conceptual foundations of Artificial Intelligence.