• Question: why are we scared of things? I thought that we were scared of things because it has a human like appearance, like a teddy with human teeth. Or an animatronic that acts like a human. Thank you for your time and can all of you give different answers. Thanks :) :)

    Asked by 536merf39 to Angus, Catherine, Jenni, Melissa, Waqar on 15 Jun 2016.
    • Photo: Melissa Ladyman

      Melissa Ladyman answered on 15 Jun 2016:

      I haven’t looked this up so I might not be technically correct but fear is caused by chemicals being released in the brain in response to something that we find frightening. We all have different opinions of what is scary- I have a fear of spiders, but my brother is more than happy to pick them up! When we find something scary our brain reacts by giving out chemicals that make us ready to run or fight- our heart rate gets faster, we breath faster and we tense up.

      I think some fears can be traced back to our biology. For example a fear of certain animals might be because our ancestors who were scared of those animals were more likely to survive and pass on the DNA for that fear.

    • Photo: Angus Cook

      Angus Cook answered on 15 Jun 2016:

      It sounds like you’re talking about what’s called the Uncanny Valley. It’s a term used to describe an interesting feature of how people respond to things which look more and more real or lifelike.

      It gets its name from the dip in a graph like this:

      As you go from left to right you are moving from completely un-human-like things (like a phone, in that example), and making things that look more and more human-like, until you eventually get to an actual human.
      The graph shows that, in general, the more human something looks, the more people tend to like it. On the graph they use the example that we like the stuffed animal more than we like the Industrial Robot, and we like the Humanoid Robot more than we like the Stuffed Animal.

      The ‘Valley’ we talk about is the weird dip in how people react to things that look ALMOST human, but not quite. This can actually cause a BAD response (i.e. people prefer the phone, the completely un-lifelike thing, to the thing which is almost human).

      The best explanation I’ve heard about this effect is that our mind stops judging the robots / puppets / objects as OBJECTS, and starts thinking about them as HUMANS. The problem is that they don’t quite work the same as ‘healthy’ humans, there are things that they do wrong which our brain picks up on.

      So, why does our brain tell us to be scared or careful when we see a human who’s not behaving in the way we’d expect? It’s probably an evolutionary instinct.
      When we were developing as a species, really the only times our brain would think someone else was behaving strangely was when someone else WAS behaving strangely (we didn’t have puppets or robots back then). This might be due to some disease, or some danger, and if so then our feeling of fear or caution might help us avoid the disease, or danger, so that feeling of fear can help us survive.

      Here’s a good little summary (first two minutes are directly relevant, latter bit is how this effects game design, if you’re interested).

Comments