Winter College Conversations
Karl MacDorman
Associate Professor, School of Informatics, IUPUI
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The Uncanny Advantage of Using Androids
Karl MacDorman, Informatics
The development of robots that closely resemble human beings can contribute to cognitive and social science research. An android provides an experimental apparatus that has the potential to be controlled more precisely than any human actor. However, preliminary results indicate that only very humanlike devices can elicit the broad range of responses that people typically direct toward each other. Conversely, to build androids capable of emulating human behavior, we need to investigate social activity in detail and to develop models of the cognitive mechanisms that support this activity. Because of the reciprocal relationship between android development and the exploration of social mechanisms, it is necessary to establish the field of android science. Androids could be a key testing ground for social, cognitive, and neuroscientific theories as well as a platform for their eventual unification.
Nevertheless, subtle flaws in appearance and movement can be more apparent and more eerie in very humanlike robots. This uncanny phenomenon may be symptomatic of entities that elicit our model of a human other but do not measure up to it. If so, very humanlike robots may provide the best means of pinpointing what kinds of behavior are perceived as human, since deviations from human norms are more obvious in them than in more mechanical-looking robots. In pursuing this line of inquiry, it is essential to identify the mechanisms involved in evaluations of human likeness. One hypothesis is that, by playing on an innate fear of death, an uncanny robot elicits culturally-supported defense responses for coping with death’s inevitability. An experiment, which borrows from methods used in terror management research, was performed to test this hypothesis.
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About Karl MacDorman
Karl MacDorman is an Associate Professor at the Indiana University School of Informatics at Indiana
University Purdue University Indianapolis, where he conducts research and teaches graduate courses in
the psychology of human-computer interaction.
About Winter College Conversations
Winter College Conversations are a series of interviews with faculty members who lectured during the
Winter College program in 2007. The series was produced by the IU Alumni Association with special
support from Ken Beckley and the IU School of Liberal Arts at IUPUI. Winter College
takes place in February at Sanibel Island, Florida. To learn more, visit the
Winter College home page.