Feeling robots and human zombies: mind perception and the uncanny valley.

By Kurt Gray, Daniel M. Wegner. 2012

822 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Sociology and Political Science

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Citations in the corpus

Can we control it? Autonomous robots threaten human identity, uniqueness, safety, and resources (2017, background): “Gray and Wegner (2012) showed that the ability of robots to experience, but not become an agent, leads to uncanny feelings towards a robot.”
Service Robots Rising: How Humanoid Robots Influence Service Experiences and Elicit Compensatory Consumer Responses (2019, background): “The accounts for why humanoids cause discomfort typically draw on evolutionary mechanisms and can be unified by the idea that people feel threatened by humanoids (Gray and Wegner 2012).”
Individual differences predict sensitivity to the uncanny valley (2015, background): “…sensations could be caused by uncertainty about the category to which an entity belongs and especially by uncertainty about whether the entity is living or nonliving, human or nonhuman (MacDorman & Ishiguro, 2006), or sentient or insentient (Gray & Wegner, 2012; Waytz, Gray, Epley, & Wegner, 2010).”
Examining the effects of robots' physical appearance, warmth, and competence in frontline services: The Humanness‐Value‐Loyalty model (2021, background): “Specifically, when a robot looks more like a human being, customers infer human qualities from the robot (Aggarwal & McGill, 2007), such as a higher capability to adapt to customer's needs and demands (Belanche et al., 2020a) and a higher reliably because of experience (Gray & Wegner, 2012).”
Algorithm appreciation: People prefer algorithmic to human judgment (2019, neutral): “Anthropomorphizing machines, like the self-driving car, influences our trust in them (Waytz, Heafner, & Epley, 2014) and can backfire (Gray & Wegner, 2012).”
To Err Is Human(-oid): How Do Consumers React to Robot Service Failure and Recovery? (2020, background): “A stream of social psychology research has examined the notion of mind perceptions in various nonhuman contexts, such as animals, God, and, most importantly, machines (H. M. Gray, Gray, and Wegner 2007; K. Gray and Wegner 2010, 2012; Waytz et al. 2010).”
Task-Dependent Algorithm Aversion (2019, background): “Mirroring research on humanness, machines (such as robots) are seen as having some degree of agency but no experience (Gray, Gray, and Wegner 2007), and endowing robots with experience creates more negative reactions than endowing robots with agency (Gray and Wegner 2012).”
How artificial intelligence will change the future of marketing (2019, background): “In particular, we suggest that machines become unnerving when people ascribe to them experience (the capacity to feel and sense), rather than agency (the capacity to act and do) ” (Gray and Wegner 2012, p. 125).”
Should Machines Express Sympathy and Empathy? Experiments with a Health Advice Chatbot (2018, neutral): “28 For example, a supercomputer described as being able to feel some form of hunger, fear, and other emotions (with experience) was perceived as more uncanny than a control supercomputer and even one that can ‘‘independently execute actions’’ with ‘‘self-control and the capacity to plan ahead.’’”