Rachele Benjamin on Measuring Uncanny Experiences
Rachele Benjamin is a PhD Candidate at the University of British Columbia in Social/Personality Psychology. She is generally interested in what motivates people to avoid uncertainty and maintain meaningful perceptions of objects and events. Her specific research interests involve how people navigate eerie or uncanny feelings, and how they think about uncertainties with respect to the ever-changing social and political environment. Rachele is also involved in meta-statistical projects to improve the replicability of studies in existential psychology.
By Kenneth Vail, Cleveland State University. Feb 16, 2021
ISSEP: How did you first become aware of and interested in existentialism and existential psychology?
Rachele Benjamin: As an undergraduate, I was struck by how strange a task it seemed for social scientists to be modeling human behavior. On the one hand, we live complex lives, making choices and navigating our social and cultural context; and on the other hand, it was just such a strange, sometimes devastating experience to be talked about and studied as if we were these tangible, mortal beings just like any other animal. I found that juxtaposition very fascinating.
So, I wanted to learn more about the tangible mechanisms behind our complex lives filled with meaning. That led me to work with Dr. Steven Heine, at the University of British Columbia. He co-created the meaning maintenance model—which is the idea that people create and abide by their own meaning systems, that they observe and understand the predictable relationships between objects and events, that they organize their worlds in structured ways. In that view, expectation violations can be very unsettling, existentially, and produce a kind of anxious arousal.
ISSEP: In 2020, your research won the Innovation in Existential Psychology Research Award, sponsored by ISSEP. Can you tell us about your work?
Rachele Benjamin: First of all, thank you so much for the Innovation in Existential Psychology Research Award! I was really excited to receive it!
Our research developed a method of measuring people's uncanny feelings. We were really curious about what happens when people maybe subconsciously notice that something in their environment is strange—that it just isn’t what they expected—like animations that look a little too real or robots that seem a little too human. We started building our measure based on old translations of Freud's descriptions of uncanniness, and also ideas from the world of robotics, and ultimately we ended up with a two factor Likert-type instrument. The first factor measures the unnerved feeling that people have when they encounter something eerie, and the other factor measures the sense of being strangely disoriented.
And when we used the measure, we found that, yes, people feel very unnerved and disoriented by creepy looking robots that would fall into what folks in aesthetics call the uncanny valley. Our measure was able to detect that people experienced uncanny feelings when they encountered things that look a little too human to be robot, or a little too robot to be human. But our measure also found the same thing happens when watching surreal films, like David Lynch's short, Rabbits. And in the time since our initial research, we also found that thinking about the Covid-19 pandemic can also make people feel rather disoriented. We hope that the tool might have some useful applications in the future.
ISSEP: It sounds like you found a way to quantitatively measure a conscious emotional experience that reflects subconscious reactions to meaning system violations.
Rachele Benjamin: We think so! We’ve run studies where we found that the same stimuli that increase uncanny feelings can also cause people to try to compensate by affirming other unrelated meaning frameworks. People often have difficulty reporting on something that’s happening subconsciously, that theoretically they're not even able to identify, but if those processes bubble up to the surface as uncanny feelings then this measure might be a way to get a glimpse of it.
ISSEP: How did you develop an interest in learning more about uncanny feelings?
Rachele Benjamin: Well, throughout my Master’s program and 4 more years of PhD studies, I’ve had many, many, failed attempts at manipulating existential uncertainty in the lab. Eventually, my advisor and I started to wonder: How do we know that our manipulations are working? So, we switched strategies, and our new plan was to try to measure the subjective experience of existential uncertainty—such as the recognition of strange meaning violations—and that led us to the uncanny. So, we developed this tool out of necessity, because we really needed an indicator to know whether or not the existential uncertainty manipulations were doing a good job or a bad job. And now it’s also opened the door to all these fascinating new possibilities and research applications.
ISSEP: In what ways do you think your research on the uncanny might help us make sense of important human experiences, better understand important events, or inform our cultural or technological trends?
When President Trump lost re-election, the Qanon conspiracy led followers, such as the “Q-shaman” (pictured), to attack the US Congress on January 6, 2021 in a violent insurrection that left hundreds injured and at least 5 dead, including Capitol Police officers.
Rachele Benjamin: At the broadest level, I think the most useful application is in understanding why people might hold religious beliefs, or conspiracy theories, or misbehave in reaction to meaning violations. Because when the world seems confusing or disorienting, people might reach for the schemas and ideologies that suggest that everything does fit together, in some meaningful way—whether it’s simple or highly complex. The trouble is that this could push people to live in different “realities” as we each grab on to different meaning systems that explain how everything fits together. So, our research could eventually lead us to a place where we can prevent that cultural drift apart from each other, and prevent the hostilities that might arise when people with different sets of cultural meaning systems interact and violate each other’s existential expectations.
ISSEP: You’ve been studying these issues using psychological science. Do you see any interesting connections between your research and explorations of the uncanny in the arts?
Clockwise from top left: Andre Breton (1924); Philosopher’s lamp (Magritte, 1936); The lovers (Magritte, 1928); The persistence of memory (Dali, 1931); The broken column (Khalo, 1944); Memory, the heart (Khalo, 1937).
Rachele Benjamin: Yes! I've long been a fan of horror movies. Sometimes they go for overt fear, with marauding slashers and jump-scares, but the thing I love most is how they also often create a kind of eerie freak-out experience. Maybe something subtle changes from one scene to another, or someone starts to know things they shouldn’t, or their eyes might blink horizontally instead of vertically. I love when they do a good job of building that “something strange is going on here” feeling.
Surrealist art also plays on that feeling. When we think about things like Andre Breton’s surrealist manifesto, from the early 20th century, it's clear that the movement was deliberately trying to shake people out of their mundane, expected, and completely predictable existence by depicting normal things juxtaposed with very weird things. As an aesthetic decision, unnerving people with subtle expectation violations is the kind of thing that surrealists loved to do. I'm a big fan, and I’m excited to be able to apply psychology research to help better understand our human reactions to stuff like that.
ISSEP: What do you think are some of the most important next steps toward better understanding the uncanny experience?
Rachele Benjamin: One thing we’re generally excited about is learning more about how people are interacting with robots. I think the next main thing to do is to see if there are cultural differences in whether androids trigger uncanny experiences, because different cultures may have different sets of expectations about human behavior and technological mimicry. So that's a future direction we're currently thinking about. Another one is to basically sweep the social environment with this uncanny feelings measure, to get a more taxonomic sense of what bothers people the most and who is most sensitive to feelings of uncanniness and strangeness.
ISSEP: You’ve attended, and presented research at, all three Existential Psychology Pre-conferences. What has been your experience been with that event?
Rachele Benjamin: I love the existential preconference! I've actually put a lot of thought into this, so I’m glad you asked.
“When I attended that first existential preconference, all of a sudden it clicked, and I thought: “Okay. This is the work that I do, and this is the room I’m supposed to be in.””
One reason I love it is because I’ve always felt a little out of place at SPSP in years prior. But when I attended that first existential preconference in 2019, all of a sudden it clicked, and I thought: “Oh. Okay. This is the work that I do, and this is the room I’m supposed to be in.” Another reason I think it’s so cool is because it's a mix of such a diverse group of people, with interests in such diverse behavioral outcomes, but the common thread is that we’re all studying the psychological impact of these deep-seated existential concerns—from the development of narrative identities, to self-regulation, to death and cultural systems of meaning in life.
I also really appreciate that all of these huge figures in the field—people responsible for some of our biggest theories and most useful research—keep showing up to this particular preconference and engaging with the ideas. It feels so unexpected that they would all still be having such rich intellectual debates about ideas they put into the universe back in the 80s. It's just so amazing to be able to interact with them. For example, one of my biggest highlights was from the very first preconference [2019]. The keynote speaker was Tom Pyszczynski, and he gave this wonderful overview of existential psychology, and the development of terror management theory, and we got a sense of where that work came from and where it’s going. One of the speakers last year [2020], Nina Strohminger, presented research among some Buddhist monks who spent their lives deliberately attempting to become self-less and stop fearing death, but that the data showed they actually feared death more than anyone else. Fascinating!
This year [2021] was great too. I loved John Jost’s Keynote presentation about system justification theory’s research, and the rest of the preconference featured work on race and microaggressions, disgust toward the female body, and cultural experiences of climate-based existential threat. It really highlighted, again, how such a wide variety of social thoughts, and feelings, and behaviors are all tied to a common set of basic existential concerns.
ISSEP: What’s one piece of advice you would give to future students who have an interest in following in your footsteps?
Rachele Benjamin: I’ve had a lot of difficulty finding the easiest, most convenient answers to my research questions. I’ve had null findings, models that turned out to the be incorrect, and found disappointingly small effects. So, I think I would tell a future student coming in to this line of work to be flexible and willing to change their mind.
ISSEP: Can you tell us a little about yourself outside the research context?
Rachele Benjamin: I’d say my hobbies are trivia, nature, and food. Before the pandemic, I’d usually head to the pub to play trivia on Tuesdays. I also live in Vancouver, Canada, which means I can visit the ocean to surf or skid-board every once in a while, and I do a fair amount of hiking. And I love fusion restaurants, so it’s great to be able to live in a city where I can get bulgogi beef burritos and other creative foods like that. Also, since the pandemic started I’ve gotten into baking, and my roommates and I are exploring the finer points of New York style and Montreal style bagels.
What’s funny, too, is my wonderful parents got me a stand-mixer as a graduation present, for when I complete my PhD. But I haven’t graduated yet, so they just sent me a picture of it. I taped it up above my computer and that definitely helps to keep me motivated.
ISSEP: A lot of us like to listen to music in the lab; what are you listening to lately?
Rachele Benjamin: I listen to far too much classic rock, pop punk stuff, and unfortunately Kanye West will not leave my top spot – even though I don’t necessarily agree with his ideas, he’s still got some really good songs. In 2020, the song that I listened to the most was Tender, by Blur. It’s not one of the Blur songs that people care the most about, but I think it was such a bad year that the song calmed me down and kept me going, so I kept coming back.