Creeped Out By Dolls, Anyone? (And SF Fans, the Same Can Apply to Lifelike Robots)

“Don’t blame Hollywood.” the come-on via Facebook’s SUPERNATURAL TALES page began, including a link to “The History of Creepy Dolls” by Linda Rodriguez McRobbie on SMITHSONIANMAG.COM.  So okay, I’ll bite.  McRobbie’s piece starts with a note about Pollock’s Toy Museum in London.  And in it, just before the exit, the “Doll Room”:  Dolls with “sleepy eyes”, with staring, glass eyes.  Dolls with porcelain faces, with “true-to-life” painted ragdoll faces, with mops of real hair atop their heads, with no hair at all.  One-hundred-and-fifty-year-old Victorian dolls, rare dolls with wax faces.  Dolls with cheery countenances, dolls with stern expressions.  Sweet dolls and vaguely sinister dolls.  Skinny Dutch wooden dolls from the end of the 19th century, dolls in “traditional” Japanese or Chinese dress.  One glassed-off nook of a room is crammed with porcelain-faced dolls in 19th-century clothing, sitting in vintage model carriages and propped up in wrought iron bedsteads, as if in a miniaturized, overcrowded Victorian orphanage.  The point then being that charming as the museum may be in general, some people can’t quite take the Doll Room, even going back all the way to the entrance to leave.

So I have a friend who doesn’t like puppets, but the thing is he’s not alone, that people in general may be creeped out by dolls and other human-like objects — Japanese designing overly anthropomorphic robots are reportedly contending with the same problem — and, according to McRobbie, it isn’t just because of movies with Chucky and [image error]other murderous play toys, but goes much deeper.  Much, much deeper.

According to psychologist Frank McAndrew, dolls inhabit [an] area of uncertainty largely because they look human but we know they are not.  Our brains are designed to read faces for important information about intentions, emotions and potential threats; indeed, we’re so primed to see faces and respond to them that we see them everywhere, in streaked windows and smears of Marmite, toast and banana peels, a phenomenon under the catchall term “pareidolia.”  However much we know that a doll is (likely) not a threat, seeing a face that looks human but isn’t unsettles our most basic human instincts.

“We shouldn’t be afraid of a little piece of plastic, but it’s sending out social signals,” says McAndrew, noting too that depending on the doll, these signals could just as easily trigger a positive response, such as protectiveness.  “They look like people but aren’t people, so we don’t know how to respond to it, just like we don’t know how to respond when we don’t know whether there is a danger or not  . . .  the world in which we evolved how we process information, there weren’t things like dolls.”

But, hey, it’s a lovely, sunny Sunday afternoon outside so let’s save the rest of this for tonight, as shadows lengthen and, perhaps, even a tiny chill wafts through the air.  Look behind you first, and make sure that noise you just heard is the cat, and then continue by pressing here.