How to judge an alien by its looks
Ottawa researcher delves into why the extraterrestrials from science-fiction films and TV so often look ... like us
The android Commander Data once commented on TV’s Star Trek: The Next Generation that he’d encountered 1,754 nonhuman races during his time in Starfleet.
So why — except for bumpy foreheads or weird ears — do so many of them look pretty much just like us?
On Star Trek stories, humanoid sentient species outnumbered non-humanoid ones about 240 to 29.
To non-fans, it might suggest a “lack of creativity,” suggests Jim Davies of Carleton University’s Institute of Cognitive Science.
But when he tackled that Trekker topic for a chapter in a new book on the psychology of Star Trek, he came to what might be a surprising conclusion based on a string of psychological studies.
Simply, “more creativity isn’t always better” when it comes to making aliens compelling to people.
Turns out that human minds are ready for a certain amount of divergence from what we know. New creatures — whether they’re aliens, gods in new religions or the supernatural denizens of folk tales — can’t be so familiar that they’re boring nor so unfamiliar that they’re incomprehensible. “There’s a sweet spot,” Davies said.
In conversation, he points to the emphatically non-humanoid aliens in Arrival and Solaris, the former squid-like, the latter a living ocean. They’re not characters viewers relate to but mysteries for humans to solve, he said.
“In space opera typically — Star Wars and Star Trek, Doctor Who — the aliens are very recognizably human in their psychological outlook,” he said. “It actually makes some kind of sense, not only budgetary sense, which is also a factor, but it makes sense that they are human-like, because people find them more interesting.”
Hence Star Trek’s Betazoids (“basically humans with black eyes and telepathy”) and Cardassians (“humans with ridged skin and photographic memories”) but also a host of other characters that are strange but still feel strangely familiar.
Davies, who creates computer models of human thought at the university’s Science of Imagination Laboratory, is behind two chapters in the new book Star Trek Psychology: The Mental Frontier.
He’s also the author of Riveted: The Science of Why Jokes Make Us Laugh, Movies Make Us Cry, and Religion Makes Us Feel One with the Universe, which argues there’s a reason why some things — from sports and religion to art — are compelling.
Is it about people, conflict and stories? Does it have recognizable patterns but leave something unexplained so we want to know more? Does it engage emotions — particularly negative ones?
“When it comes to aliens, the theory helps to explain why the aliens seem to be, at face value, of limited creativity, because if they don’t have facial expressions, if they don’t have human-like psychology and desires, it’s hard to relate to them,” Davies said.
So when people are asked to create aliens in psychology experiments, their creations aren’t very exciting — they tend to mix-andmatch pieces of real people and animals with body parts and facial features in the expected places. Tests by Davies’ student, Jessica Cockbain, bore this out.
Meanwhile, humans tend to judge fictional aliens like we judge other humans. Recall both cuddly E.T. of the classic 1982 movie and the sinister Greys of Whitley Strieber’s Communion.
“We really relate to ET because, basically, it triggers all of those same things that would be triggered in a human,” Davies said. “E.T. is supposed to be a spacefaring, intelligent species. Designers, either consciously or subconsciously, they put in triggers for what we consider intelligent in their designs.”
E.T. has a small nose and big eyes on a big, hairless head. So do the Greys — who’d have to be pretty smart to zip through space to abduct hapless humans and experiment on them.
Studies show that we think people are smarter if they have big eyes. We notice the nose area first in another person and make judgments about their intelligence within 39 milliseconds.
Davies and student Meaghan McManus tested the phenomenon, showing people images of aliens with varying features. People rated the aliens as “smarter” when they were taller and had bigger eyes and smaller noses.
“We attribute intelligence to aliens in the same way we attribute it to people,” Davies concluded.
In Star Wars, for example, the Kaminoans who created the clones are tall, bald and saucer-eyed; Jabba the Hutt’s Gamorrean guards are piglike with paunches, wide mouths bristling with teeth, and beady eyes.
“We immediately assume that the Gamorreans aren’t as intelligent, based on how they look,” Davies said.
Don’t believe it? Imagine a movie character claiming they’d been abducted by a fat, hairy, tiny-headed alien with a big mouth and nose and tiny little eyes.
“People would look at you like, ‘What?’ ” Davies said. “That doesn’t sound like an intelligent species. It’s ridiculous, of course, but the fact is those are the things that trigger our immediate impressions of people’s intelligence. So for the alien abduction story that’s been so popular, part of the reason that it’s been able to catch on is that it conforms to our ideas of what an intelligent being looks like.”