It is a hypothesis proposed in 1970 by the Japanese Masahiro Mori. According to this robotics expert, the more anthropomorphic traits and behaviors we give to robots, the greater our empathy with them. We tend to react better to machines that have eyes or mouths, even if they are not necessary elements to carry out their functions.
But that relationship is not linear. Mori theorized that there comes a time when the emotional response turns negative , as the artificial self appears more and more human. If we represent the phenomenon in a graph, we would see that there is a valley in which the robots give us an unsettling sensation before their resemblance to us becomes so high that the emotional response becomes positive again.
The phenomenon has been studied in primates, with similar results. In 2009, Princeton University showed a group of monkeys photographs of other monkeys and three-dimensional computer-generated images with varying degrees of realism. The emotional response was similar to that generated by people .
