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The Conversation — AI · September 17, 2026 · On the brief until October 1, 2026

Why do some robots feel creepy? We deliberately built one to find out

PsychologyDesignRobotics
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Researchers engineered a social robot named Spike with literature-based unsettling traits to investigate what makes robots feel creepy, testing it across 104 diverse participants. The study revealed that creepiness is deeply subjective and personal rather than dictated by universal design formulas, with participants labeling the robot as everything from unsettling to cute. For instructors in psychology, design, and robotics, this demonstrates the significant difficulty of predicting human emotional reactions when introducing embodied autonomous systems into shared spaces.

Summary written by AI Business Lens with an AI model from the article at theconversation.com. It is not the article, and the publisher has not reviewed it. For publishers.

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Students can examine why deliberately engineered visual and behavioral cues fail to trigger uniform psychological reactions, challenging standard assumptions in human-robot interaction design.

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