ㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤ𝖳𝗁𝖾 𝖴𝗇𝖼𝖺𝗇𝗇𝗒 𝖵𝖺𝗅𝗅𝖾𝗒ㅤㅤ
Have you ever seen something almost human but not quite human? The eerie feeling of witnessing such a thing is called The uncanny valley effect, which is a psychological phenomenon.
We, humans, generally like things that resemble us, such as emojies. But the more these things become human-like, our comfort level drops. Researches expected things to become more reliable with looking more human-like, but what happened was completly the opposite.
The first time that this name was mantioned was by the japanese robotics professor, Masahiro Mori. He begun an experiment on how people react to robots and based on their appearance. He expected the result to be simple, the more human-like the robots look, the more likable they become. But it didn't happen. He called the gap in our comfort chart toward those robots, "the uncanny valley".
Things get ugly the second we realize that we actually don't know why this makes us feel uncomfortable. There are many theories about this and we're gonna dive into some of them together:
Evolutionary survival

This theory suggests we developed the uncanny valley to protect ourselves from ill people or corpses, which is why we feel wrong about lifeless eyes, stiff movements and unnaturally pale skin. This theory is the most logical one out there.

Category boundary

This one says our brain fails to categorize what we're seeing, because it's not fully human or non-human and this cause that unsettling feeling.

Expectation violation

This one is also connected to how brain works. When we see something human-like, we expect that thing to act human-like too. But when it shows blank expressions or stiff movements, it triggers how brain calculate it's behavior, better say, it violates the pattern our brain expect the thing to show, which will lead to the unease sense we call the uncanny valley effect.

The imposter predator

The last but not least. This theory suggests that the early humans were facing a predator that could mimic the shape of a human or looked almost like a human. And that fear stayed with us untill now.