Hello, Hi, it's the old to do list you found tucked in a book, haunting and taunting you like a creep. Let's talk creepiness. Is this a study? This is a study? Shirt iss. Did it have a name? No, it didn't. It's too niche to listen. We very very rarely hear at ologies have to coin an ology. Usually there's something in the literature. But in this case I had to do it, and it took me a while, and then
I figured it out. So surpo means to creep in Latin, like a serpent, and this expert kind of blazed a shadowy, overgrown trail to study what makes something creepy? Why are some dolls creepy? Why does AI creep you out? How do you know if you are creepy? When isn't a version to creepiness unfair? And when is it warranted? And where does this come from in our lineage? So we're
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You're on the bus an hour from home, in bumper to bumper traffic, creeping forward a few inches at a time, someone's kids are screaming, and suddenly your back is too. Luckily, Panadal extra film coated tablets are boosted by caffeine and they get to work in as little as ten minutes for powerful relief. That's more than just paracetamol. That's one for Pana doll speed based on absorption data contains paracetamol. Always read the label or leaflet.
Okay, let's get into it. This guest is a professor emeritis of psychology and Knox College in Illinois, and studied psychology at King's College, got a PhD in experimental psychology from the University of Maine. They focus on human social behavior from an evolutionary perspective, why do we feel what we feel? And Yes, for this episode, we'll talk about
their work in creepiness. So let's dive into that as we kick off a month of Spootober episodes just to delight and keep active the hairs on the back of your neck. But it's fun. Okay, let's learn what's creepy and why with Professor experimental Psychologist Ick Authority and thus let's just say serpopsychologist doctor Frank McAndrew. When I got the note back that you had said yes to this, I remember I was on the freeway. I was like, oh, my husband was driving.
I was like, we got the creepy guy. Well, it is what it is, right.
I'm sorry to call you the creepy guy, because you're exactly not that, because you study creepiness.
Well, let me stop you right there, because there's an old saying in psychology that research is me search, which means, of course that psychologists study things that are issues in their own life. So don't jump to any conclusions.
I understand that one of the first papers on creepiness from you was this in twenty sixteen that it.
Came t sixteen, right?
What led up to that? Were you doing me search about creepiness and could find nothing in the academic record?
Well, I was doing research, not necessarily mesearch. I don't know what prompted it exactly. I started noticing how often I was hearing the term. You know, people would say, Oh, I'm not this guy, just creep me out, or you know, I was in this place that was really creepy, and I was hearing it over and over and again, and so I started asking people, well, when you say that, what do you mean. Is it the same thing as being afraid? Is it a same as being disgusted? And
they always said no, it's something completely different. And so I got curious, Well, what is this thing we call creepiness? And being a good academic, I went to the literature and I was just blown away. There was not a single study, not even one ever done on creepiness. So I saw the chance to do something kind of fun and new. And I was working with a student who was looking for a research project, Sarah Kenke, who was the co author on the first paper.
And Sarah Keanke, Frank tells me, worked as a model as well, this gorgeous woman in higher education who also happened to be born without a complete arm, and she was an athlete and represented the state of Illinois in the Beijing Paralympics. And she would tell Frank that she had discovered that, in addition to just guys hitting her up, there's this whole world of men out there that are
apparently attracted to disabled women. But Frank tells me, naturally, she was very interested in the topic of creepiness, and Sarah co authored his first paper on creepiness, the twenty sixteen Study on the Nature of Creepiness, which was published in New Ideas and Psychology. And also just a reminder of why science benefits from inclusivity. Science is only as strong as the questions it answers, and who is asking
the questions really matters. And for more on that, we have an episode on disability sociology with the wonderful doctor Gwen Chambers. But yeah, let's dive into the nuts and bolts of what that study revealed. Well, what is creepy. There's things that are scary and there's things that are creepy. Not all scary things are creepy. Not all creepy things
are scary. Imagine there's some sort of Venn diagram here, what's the difference that makes your shoulders kind of like go up and protect your neck.
I think of creepiness is sort of a precursor to scariness. Creepiness is all about uncertainty. There's something that's not right. You're not sure if it's something bad or dangerous that you need to worry about, but you're kind of wallowing in discomfort and you're like hyper vigilant. And this can be you're dealing with a person or a place. So maybe you're interacting with a guy who's sending you a weird vibe. There's you know, his nonverbal behaviors are off,
he's steering the conversation and weird directions, and you're very uncomfortable. Now, this could just be an awkward person, right, who's not very socially skilled, and it'd be kind of rude to like start screaming and running away from him if that's
the case. But on the other hand, if there is something to worry about from this person, you need to know that and you need to be ready to deal with it, and the creepiness, the being creeped out feeling, is what you're experiencing when you're trying to figure this out. You're lasered in on what's going on here. You're trying to make your mind up is this somebody I need to worry about or not? And the same thing happens
with places. You can be walking around in a place you know it's dark and there's a lot of shrubbery and you can't see very far into the distance, and you don't know that there's anything there that's going to harm you. Sure, but you're not sure. Yeah, and so again you're hyper vigilant trying to figure out if there's something to be afraid of. So creepiness is all about ambiguity,
the uncertainty. Once you figured out there is something to be afraid of and you know what it is, that's where the scary thing comes in.
Got it. So it's like crosses that line and that must be evolutionarily wired to just usure you feel someone's eyes on you, or there's a puma that snapped a twig or something.
Right, Yeah, we're programmed to think of worst case scenarios. So imagine your caveman ancestor walking through the woods and it's getting dark and they hear some things rustling in the bushes. Okay, it could be a predator, It could be an enemy waiting to get you, or it could just be a small animal or the wind or something like that. Oh, I see, Okay, what kind of mistake do you want to make here?
All right?
If you decide it's probably just the wind or a rabbit and it's not, those genes get removed from the population.
Pretty quickly because your chill ass has died.
On the other hand, if you overreact and you're scared and you're really looking at this and you're getting ready to run, and then you find out it is just a rabbit, well what's the cost of that. It's pretty small, right, And so people were selectively bred, so to speak, to be cowards in situations like this. To think about the worst case scenario. When you were talking about the precursor thing, I like to think of creepiness, horror, and fe as sort of links in a chain that go in a
certain order. Good horror movies are the ones that walk us through all three of those. So think of the beginning of the good horror movie where you know it's normal life at the beginning, and then suddenly the characters in the movie are noticeding something isn't quite right. They're a little confused, a little apprehensive. That's the getting creeped
out part. They move into the horror stage, when they start to realize, Okay, there really is a problem here, there is something to worry about, but at that stage they may not know exactly what it is or how to deal with it. And then the fear stage is when aha, I know exactly what the problem here is and I know what I should be trying to do
to deal with it now. Bad horror movies sometimes skip steps, like the guy comes running out with the chainsaw right at the beginning, right, and there's no kind of foreplay building.
Up to it, I was going to say.
And then some movies kind of flop because they spend too much time in one stage as opposed to the other. So you spend too much time being creeped out, but nothing really happens, and then it gets kind of boring.
So anyway, do you like horror movies or do you just see through them too much?
Uh?
No, I like them, but I don't get to see them very much because my wife hates them, and so we go to the movies that she's willing to see, which are not horror movies.
I am a lot like your wife where I do not like to be scared in general. Did you have to exclude people with anxiety disorders from your research because they would be too far on the bell curve? No.
One of the studies we did actually was interested in personality, like what predicts getting creeped out? And keep in mind, I'm not the one doing the scaring people stuff. I have some colleagues in Denmark in something called the Recreational Fear Lab where they're doing some really amazing stuff with
virtual reality. They have people, you know, living in this virtual world where basically they're getting feedback from the person's biological reactions the things that are scaring them the most, and that steers the virtual reality even more and more in the direction of things that will scare them. They also work with commercial haunted houses where people volunteer to have their heart rate monitored and fill out questionnaires and all that. So they're doing some really.
Cool stuff, such as studies titled Scared Together, heart Rate Synchrony and Social closeness in a high intensity horror setting, recreational fear across childhood, across sectional study of scary activities that children enjoy, and of course the twenty twenty four paper, First they scream, then they laugh, the Cognitive Intersections of Humor, which notes that fear is energizing and stressful and it activates our sympathetic nervous system and floods our bloodstream with
adrenaline and cortisol. Now humorous amusement, on the other hand, it says, is palliative, involving soothing anddogenous opioids. So how did these scientists study it? It's a good question by examining horror comedy movies like Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, and looking at online scare prank videos and the relative terror of the childhood game Peekaboo, where your caregiver is suddenly disappeared from planet Earth and then boom, they're back.
But frank I basically ask people how creeped out they are by pictures that they're looking at or hypothetical things that they're imagining.
Where are you getting these pictures? Do you have a Pinterest board of just the creepiest people like, how do you select what you're going to show to people?
Well, actually I had several students working with me, and so it was their job to scour the Internet for pictures of creepy people, creepy places, and creepy things. And we got one hundred and some of these together, and then we had a smaller group of people rate them on a variety things creepiness, how confusing are they, how scary are they, and so on down the line. And so from that we pulled out the ones that got the highest scores on creepiness.
What kind of pictures were they that made the cut?
Well, the creepy places tended to be dark nighttime. One was like this big underwater hole that a person was kind of perched at the edge of. Creepy people were people who were like these spooky little girl identical twins that were in a black and white photo, a baker who makes pies with human faces on them where they're bleeding and all of that.
How much of what we're creeped out by is innate and how much is cultural? Like if you had seen the shining, two little girls standing in a hallway means that there's going to be blood gushing out of an elevator in a second. And how much is just like whenever you see a face that's a pie that has boys and berry coming out of the eyeballs, then like it's no go. What is innate and what is cultural? Do you think? Well?
I think anything that is potentially dangerous or threatening to us is going to be a universal thing that's going to be innate. So fears of dark alleyways late at night and things like that. I mean, if there was a place where it was very normal to see two strange looking identical little girls standing in the hallway, they would not think anything of that. It's all in what you're used to. So I'm going to lean in the direction of saying it's mostly an aid. It's wired into us.
Yeah, And you know, going back a little bit to your co author on that first paper, Sarah, I believe and this notion of predators like our cave people ancestors in the forest, it seems like sexual predators men in particular, seem to give us the creeps much more than people who present as non male or who are femme. Is that this actual threat of just not knowing what might happen or is it a link to aggression? What makes certain people are certain genders creepier to us?
Well, one thing we found very strongly males are creepier than females. And this is true whether you're a male or a female yourself. You're more easily creeped out by men than by women. And I think there are a number of reasons for that, but I think the big one is simply males are more threatening and dangerous in a physical sense than females are. Whether your male or female yourself, you're more likely to have something bad happen to you at the hands of a man than a woman.
Women often reported that, yes, I think creepy people are likely to have a sexual interest in me. Yes, there's something about their sexual tastes that's part of their creepiness. So I think this is one of the things that are on women's minds a lot more than they are and men for good reason.
So I've been ropped by two guys in broad daylight with kitchen knives, but now I've never been assaulted by a clown. But it does feel knock on wood, you're still done.
Yeah right, I mean it's not over yet.
It's not over yet I don't know what I'm doing wrong, but I've never felt threatened by clowns. But at the same time, when you start with the adjective creepy, the noun that follows I feel like it is most often clowns. Where did that come from? Is it because they are in disguise and around children? Like? What's the seed in there?
All right, you're getting me started on clowns. So okay, Well, first of all, I had no interest in clowns. I it was not something I was studying. But one of the things they did in my first study was to rate the creepiness of different occupations, and the one that finished number one was clowns. And that's pretty munch all I had to say about it. I said, Okay, I heard the ratings. There were four that kind of stood out as the creepiest on our list. Clowns were number one,
but taxidermists were right up there. Oh, funeral directors and sex shop operators.
Really, yes, I wonder if that's changed in recent years or not. Again, this is Frank and Sarah's twenty sixteen study on the nature of creepiness, which explains that occupations that signal a fascination with threatening stimuli like death or quote. Non normative sex may attract individuals who would be comfortable
in such a work environment. Hence, it says some occupations may be perceived as creepier than other occupations, and their research revealed that only four occupations were judged to be significantly higher than neutral on the creepiness rating scale, and ranked number four on the list was funeral directors and number three was sex shop owners.
But anyway, clowns and taxidermists were number one and two. Anyway, I was asked to write an article because I don't know if you remember the creepy clowns scare in twenty sixteen.
I do, I do. I had forgotten. I had forgotten.
At Emerald Commons apartments off White Horse Road say they're on edge after kids reported seeing a man dressed in a clown costume wandering through the woods near these dumpsters Monday night.
There were clowns allegedly lurking in the woods, luring children in, attacking people with knives. There were all these stories about creepy clown sightings. People were looking out their door at night and there's one under the street light in front of their house. This was very much in the news,
and it was around Halloween. Now, I'm not the one who is saying clowns are creepy, right, I'm just saying, given that people think they are, why would that be Well, I became sort of the poster boy for clowns for ruining their occupatients for their career. Yes, I was the one that was visibly saying things and in the news about clowns being creepy. There was this ringleader clown on the way Coast who started stalking me on social media and doing everything he could to destroy my reputation. He
was leaving angry voicemails on my phone. He even contacted the president of the dean of my college to have me, if not fired, at least disciplined. Now, this was all in an attempt, by the way, to show me that clowns are not creepy. Right now, Yeah, my wife and I were terrified that this little car was going to pull up in front of our house sometime with the
clowns piling out. But oh no, I had to go inhead and have a meeting with the dean in the college about this clown business and anyway, so I digress here, getting back to why they're creepy. Well, first of all, they've never been good, right, If you go all the way back in history, clowns were always pranksters. If you go to the circus and they pull somebody out of the audience, you know that nothing good is going to happen, right.
And it's again it's about unpredictability. You don't know what they're going to do, right, And a lot of the things that we use to decide if somebody is creepy is do they seem to be playing by the rules or not. When you're interacting with somebody, we have a script that we follow, right, you know how you're supposed to behave when you meet somebody, and what's okay to say and what isn't and how you're supposed to act.
Clowns break all those rules that they have, the funny clothing, they have, the makeup, so you can't even tell who they are, and you can't really tell what they're feeling, right, So you can't read them the way you read other people. If I'm having a conversation with you, I'm looking at your face to see if you're paying attention, if you're smiling or frowning. The clown has this smile painted on his face, but I'm guessing he's not really happy, and
so we're on our guard against him. All this stuff that we talked about earlier about having your creep detectors active to figure out if there's something to worry about the clown sets that up off big time. Everything about the clown triggers that. So they've always been something that puts us on our guard, especially when you encounter them in places that you don't expect to. Okay, if you go to the circus, all right, you paid your money, you know they're going to be clowns there. You're ready
to enjoy the act and laugh. But you know when you run into one in a restaurant or you know, at a kid's birthday party.
Working garage, yeah.
Your front yard at night, you know, it's like, okay, now I'm creeped out. So they're okay when they are where they're supposed to be, but when they step out of that they become even more threatening.
Also, just a side note, some of the sightings in the twenty sixteen Clown Hysteria were from an indie short film marketing campaign that went more viral than probably anybody anticipated. And honestly, there is an ology for clowns which is exciting. It's colorology, cool cool rology. Either way, I'll save the pronunciation of that and the in depth research for a
full episode. Clowns deserve their own episode. We'll go into the makeup and the French schools and the Italian operas and clowning on all the continents modern clowning and stuff.
But I will give you the tidbit in this episode that the originator of the so called hobo clown, which is named Weary Willy, with the white makeup and the saggy jowls and the kind of downturned sad mouth that like thick Grace double, he emerged during the depression, when seeing your economic struggles reflected in entertainment was no doubt a comfort to people who are spending what little money they had on a trip to the circus. And Weary Willy was played by Emmett Kelly and just a fun fact,
Emmitt Kelly was It's not fun at all. He was performing at the nineteen forty four Hartford Circus when this fire erupted. It killed over one hundred and sixty five people. It was a disaster, and Kelly or Willy growing I'm sure even more weary, held up the flaming tent flaps to help dozens of people escape the flames. And I was like, why did this huge tent immolate? So suddenly it's because to keep the canvas watertight. Back then they coated it in a mixture of gasoline and paraffin wax.
They made a candle that was a huge dome and put hundreds of people in it. Also, authorities thought that it was just a flicked cigarette that led to the tragedy, but they later discovered that an arsonist was traveling with the circus because he hit a few more shows. So while you may look at a down trodden clown in tattered clothes and in need of a shave, you may be creeped out, you may be weary of his willy,
but he turned out to be an actual life saver. Yeah, he stopped talking to his own son, Emmett Kelly Junior for years when the younger followed in his old man's gigantic, floppy footsteps and ripped off the weird Willy character. But hey, it turns out that the regular looking arsonist was the one to fear all along. So perhaps clowns enjoyed some great pr from the Depression until about nineteen eighty.
And I think this all started with the John Wayne Gacy thing, the guy who dressed like a clown. He worked kid's birthday parties as a clown, used to paint pictures of clowns. And then they found out, you know, you have thirty three bodies buried in the crawl space of his house. And so right away you said, when you hear the word creepy, the noun that pops into your head first is clowns. That kind of kicked it off.
And then all the horror movies started, right the Killer Clowns from Outer Space, Stephen King's it, you know, penny Wise. So now it's very much in the public imagination, So that connection is there, I think for good.
I always think too of the hobo clown sort of trope, where it's a clown, but it is also almost working on our fears of others, or fears biases that we might have about socioeconomic status or sort of lifestyles that we consider good or bad. Is there any sort of biases with someone being creepy who is just downtrodden and we're afraid or we're more cautious around them. I just feel like the hobo clown is like people afraid of poverty and someone who might suddenly tickle them, you know.
Yeah, yeah, I haven't really thought about this before. But again, if you're interacting with a person who's in a very different circumstance than you are, that immediately makes them less understandable to you. If you're interacting with somebody who looks like you and comes from the same place that you come from, you both understand the same rules and therefore you know what to expect with this person.
It will be interesting to see in a hundred years if the clowns shake the stigma, there is going to be like, can you believe people were afraid of clowns and now it's one of the most respected positions. I don't think so. And I know someone who was collecting like thrift store clown paintings for a gallery wall, and I just can't imagine waking up to that or having to walk down the dark hallway to the bathroom at
night in a gallery of creepy clowns. But can I ask you some questions from listeners who know that you are coming on sure, yes, okay, and patrons hooms are not creepy. We will get to your questions in a moment, but first, let's donate to a cause of theologists choosing in this week Frank shows. The Peoria, Illinois PBS station WTVP love that so find out more about them at WTVP dot org. And that donation was made possible by sponsors of the show.
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You're on the bus an hour from home in bumper to bumper traffic, creeping forward a few inches at a time, someone's kids are screaming, and suddenly you're back.
Thank two.
Luckily, Panadal extra film coated tablets are boosted by caffeine and they get to work in as little as ten minutes for powerful relief. That's more than just paracetamol. That's one for Panadal speed based on absorption data contains paracetamol. Always read the label or leaflett.
Okay, madears, Let's skulk into the Patreon mail bag to answer some questions like this good one from so many questions Magpie Laughs and Michael Paul about confirmation bias, and Gordon has asked, is there a correlation between feeling creeped out and a belief in scientifically unsubstantiated phenomena such as ghosts or spirits? And in patron Holly's own words, so Holli Joe from Bothel, Washington said, I'm a first time
question asker and I'm super curious. How is creepiness connected to intuition and other psychic abilities that people might have in order to perceived danger? Thanks, So, intuition, creepiness, psychic abilities, what's up with that?
Certainly, if you believe in paranormal things, that opens up the whole realm of things you can be afraid of. Yeah, and therefore you can be more creeped out by them. So, if you are going into a house that is thought to be haunted, and you know that and you believe in ghosts, when you start hearing creaking sounds or flapping sounds or thumping sounds right away, you're considering the possibility that there's a ghost or some other scary thing there.
If you absolutely don't believe in this stuff, you're not is creeped out because you just assumed it's the wind or you know, something like that going on.
Now, if you think you have psychic abilities, you might be priming your brain for some creepiness. Frank explains, like your internal soundtrack is just an ongoing theorem.
In on the one hand, they believe in this whole world of unseeable things that may be threatening, which means they would be on their guard more often and more creeped out. On the other hand, if they are smugly confident of their intuition, what that means is they aren't uncertain about things as much as other people are. They feel like they know the answer and therefore won't feel
as creeped out. So it could go either way. I guess I think what we need to do is find one hundred people who believe they have psychic abilities and they do the experiment.
Yeah, just a side note. Frank also wrote the October twenty twenty one article why some people see ghosts and others don't, which referenced polls by the Pew Research Center finding that eighteen percent of Americans say they've been in the presence of a ghost. Eighteen percent. You're sitting at a dinner with five people about one of them is like, yeah, I've seen a ghost.
I think if you've already seen one, I don't know that that necessarily means you're going to see another one. But the same thing that made you see the first one will also help you see the second one.
Right.
This question comes from patron Kate, who wrote, okay, but the people need to know does theologists believe in ghosts? And then five question marks, all of them warranted. Have you ever seen a ghost? I have not, has anyone you know ever? Soworn said Frank for real, I saw a ghost. It was at the edge of my bed. It was a Civil War soldier holding a hatchet. Like you ever get that.
All the time?
Yea?
And it isn't even usually that vivid where they see this ghost at their bed. It's most often an encounter with a long less relative, you know, a parent or a child who's died, or they swear that they've seen them, that they've interacted with them, and they are very sincere and they absolutely believe this. So yes, I do have that experience.
Has it led you at all to think maybe there is something else out there? Or has it just sort of doubled down on me. We are just wired for survival, or we just see things we want to see, like an encounter with someone that we miss.
Yet more the second, I'm kind of a kill Joe.
No, you're a scientist, you've got the data.
Well. Yeah. People who are firm believers in this become very upset, very quickly, because what you're telling them is that you don't believe that. I believe they're experiencing what they're experiencing. My interpretation of the cause behind it is a little different. So I don't think they're lying, but they think that they're telling me what they believed they saw should be all I need.
Mm hmm, you need a little more than that. I do, Yes, And if Jelly tat first time Questionsker says, being creeped out is a really unpleasant sensation. No one wants to walk down a dark straight at night and get that feeling of creepiness. So why do so many of us seek it out for entertainment? They say, I'm thinking everything from old school ghost stories to creepy pasta on the internet. Have you heard of creepy pasta?
I don't think I have no.
Okay, let's take a step backwards into the shadowy bushes of the Internet. Skimpy toilet whrizzlers, let me six seven use some Ohio definitions. So copy pasta is a genre
of meme. It involves like the cut and paste of paragraphs of text that are sometimes lousy with emojis, usually are a little saucy or offensive or just unexpectedly daft, and these paragraphs look like if a tender mistake you should have blocked found a stash of krat and text to do a long paragraph with thoughts they should have kept inside their head, and or a lot of peach
and squirt and winki tongue out emojis. So the copy pasta genre's kind of creative genius, I guess is that it could be real if someone were unhinged enough, but
usually it's kind of a trolling joke. So creepy pasta is a derivative of that, and it's copy pasted and shared widely, but it's mostly kind of takes the form of spooky stories like fan art, or ghouls like Slenderman, or characters like Jeff the Killer, or these increasingly unnerving diary entries from a doomed spolunker named Ted they're kind of spine shivering because they may contain this kernel of
urban legend or creepy folklore. And yes, in case you're like the caves, we do have a speleology episode about caves. Ten out of ten would not enjoy caving. To be honest, why do we love creeping ourselves out?
It is kind of perverse, right. We spend money to go to scary movies or haunted houses to be in the presence of things we would avoid, like the plague in day to day life. And because it is such a universal thing, it's part of human nature. And there are a lot of hypotheses about why we do this, but one of the ones that I find most compelling is it's a very adaptive trait. If you are in a movie theater or a commercial, haunted house, or wherever
it is, you're voluntarily being scared. Deep down, you know you're safe, right, You know that this is all make believe, but it's realistic enough that you have a chance to mentally rehearse living through something like this, and so you're learning from the experiences of the people in the movie or whatever it is the ghost story you're reading. Here are some things that worked. I might keep that in mind. Here are some things you don't want to do. I'm going to keep that in mind. And we did the
same thing with like Jaws. When you're exposing yourself voluntarily to scary things, you're learning something about yourself, right, You're learning here's what I can handle, Here's what I can't handle.
I don't trust myself in those situations. I don't think I would make a good decision under pressure like that. I think I would freeze. But I do know people who listen to too much true crime and then they have this intense paranoia where it goes from I'm feeling prepared to I'm always under threat. It seems like in the quest to learn more and rehearse more, you can
end up going a little too far. Yeah so Frank sites At twenty twenty two, Steady titled Caught in a Dangerous World Problematic news consumption and its relationship to mental and physical ill being, which very unsurprisingly reveals, with a sad predictable dirge of a drum.
Roll, people who spend a lot of time watching the news about murders and violent crime and sort of that thing dramatically overestimate the likelihood of that occurring. Right, When you ask people to estimate how likely something is to happen, they their estimate is very much based on how quickly
they can think of an example. So if you ask somebody, Okay, how likely is it you're going to get attacked by a shark if you go swimming in the ocean, or how likely is it that you will die in a plane crash, they dramatically overestimate the probabilities because they can very easily think of an example. Right, they saw story just last week where a plane crashed, where they saw story just last week where somebody got killed by a shark,
and so it's right there. If you ask somebody, how likely is it you're going to slip in the shower and fall and kill yourself, they look at you and say, no, that's never going to happen. But in fact, that happens every day somewhere, happens all the time, but it doesn't make national news, right, New jerseyman falls in shower and yeah, you know you don't. You don't hear that. So they under estimate the probability of that because they can't think of an example of it happening.
So one study a systematic program to reduce the incidents and severity of bathtub and shower area injuries, found that over one hundred thousand bathtub and shower falls occur every year just in America. But it's bound to be more because that paper was a typewritten blurry copy published in nineteen seventy five, and I only can go from older pictures,
but I don't know if they showered as much. But a relatively more recent paper from twenty eleven titled Incidents of symptoms and Accidents during baths and Showers among Japanese general public found that in the forty to seventy four year old age group, over eight hundred thousand combined shower and bathtub falls. But you're about seven times more likely to have an accident falling in the bathtub than the shower. So grab bars, rubber mats, go slow, try not to
have a wet floor. Also, this study noted that people bathe every day usually, so don't freak out because if you're hearing this, let's say you're twenty five, you've probably bathed like eight thousand times already and you haven't died even once, So what will kill you? Then? If not
bathtubs or a disease. Let's ask The study unintentional injury details in the US for ages one to forty four from nineteen eighty one to twenty twenty three, which says that unintentional injuries are the leading cause of death for
Americans aged one to forty four years old. So if you're not an infant and you have a job, your riskiest job is logging, followed by commercial fishing, so they don't call it the deadliest catch for nothing, although I'm sure lumberjacks now would be like, I'm catching what over here, and I'd like to have a word. And then after those,
we have airplane pilots, roofers, and sanitation workers. And if you're like huh, you can see our discard anthropology episode about garbage and you can bake some cookies for your local pickup team. Trust me, after that you're gonna want to. But honestly, car accidents have been eclipsed in this age group by accidental opioid overdose and suicide. So mental health care saves lives. We have a suicideology episode, invite you to listen to it now. The study also noted that
being married lowers your risk. So until that do your part, it gets delayed of it, which might actually be worth the cost of matching tablecloths and a tower of fondon and frosting. And my spouse, I'll tell you he sold his motorcycle right after we got married because it was a widow machine. And I swear if that man even glances at a ladder to check on our solar panels, he will get an earful of me insisting he's not
to do it alone. He better let me hold that thing, and he better fall on my body if he does. And as you may know, your grandpad, my dad passed away a few years ago, and it was some sort of miracle that it was from cancer and not from climbing up to the pitched roof to scrape snow off a satellite dish in his seventies, despite all of us begging him to not do that. So no clowning around people. You're scaring your loved ones. We don't like it well.
In terms of clowns and slipping in the shower. The thing that I'm probably most afraid of right now is the robots taking over. And I know you wrote, you wrote why lifelike dolls and robots creep you out. We had a ton of people ask about Uncanny Valley. So many patrons Nikki g Ray, Press, Pafka thirty four, Remacfee, Ameliadhoff, Emily McLeod, Sarah Man's, Tim Farr, Kim Grenier, are a Victor adds Adam Weaver, RG and Sage Scarberry plus Kate
Tim's all had such similar curiosities on this. It was like uncanny, which means strange or mysterious, especially in an unsettling way. I thought this was a great question from Sarah Swank says, along with the Uncanny Valley questions, why do AI images of people make my hair stand up when they're just a little bit off? Or what is it about life like dolls and robots in that Uncanny Valley?
I think there are different kinds of creepiness, and some other researchers have kind of pointed this out, and mine was all about the ambiguity of threat. You know, is there a danger here, but it's clear that a doll is not going to kill you. Probably there's another way of thinking about creepiness. I think it's called categorical ambiguity.
The problem with creepy dolls and robots and lifelike AI images that are a little off is our caveman brains aren't prepared for things to look so human but aren't human, and so we would respond to them as if they're real people, but consciously we know they're not. And so there's this battle going on between our conscious processing of what's going on here, but our unconscious involuntary response to that.
As something looks more and more human, we like it better until it into that value where it's almost exactly human but it isn't.
I'm almost afraid of the AI image is getting better and better to where it's undetectable. That's when it starts to creeping out, Like when they start having like AI models that have like a ZiT here and there. I'll be like, wait a minute, now, I can't tell you know.
And for more on uncanny Valley, that quantifiable dip in comfort when something is real looking but it's not real enough, you can see the twenty twelve paper Danger Avoidance an evolutionary explanation of Uncanny Valley from the journal Biological Theory, which explains that many species are known to bury, hide, or otherwise isolate their dead members. And being cohabiting social animals.
It explains primates have also developed burial as a mechanism of separating the dead from the living, and necrophobia, or fear of the dead, is deemed to be one of the reasons behind human burial practices, at least since the early Iron Age, and it's thought to be one of the reasons that people find human like response more important than appearance in robots, because when something looks a lot like us but it is a little off, we're like, that's a corpse and we don't like it. So what
dead stuff schivs us out? I'm glad you asked, because the researchers ranked the rank and in order from the least defensive to the most defensive. Are you ready? Okay, least defensive a dead insect? And the paper says, as a matter of fact, many of us kill insects without even having the feeling of regret. Also, I should note we have some great episodes on spiders and bugs and ants. Okay, moving on, a decomposing insect body is a little grosser.
Next a dead small animal, then a decomposing small animal. We're going up the scale, a dead large animal, and then a decomposing large animal, think like a dead cow, or like a deer or something, and then a human corpse. And I thought that was it. I thought that was the apex of the list, like the summit of what's creepy, But it turned out it was just a paragraph break. And then it continued on the next page with the
penultimate a decomposing or freshly dead mutilated corpse. And then this paper says that the top tier creepy thing human brains want to avoid is so specific a freshly dead, mutilated corpse with sudden movements. This again, is a scientific paper. I think, I think the research speaks for itself there. I think we get it now. As far as Uncanny Valley in animated dolls, one of the creepiest things out there,
many paranormal fans agree, is this particular one. It's a raggedy ann type doll named Annabel, which legend has it tried to strangle a pair of roommates in the nineteen seventies, and then Annabel found her way into the hands of these paranormal researchers, Ed and Lorraine Warren, who deemed the all to be possessed by demons. They kept it in a glass box to keep everyone safe. Annabel has been kept for decades as this like totem of terror, like
the most haunted object. And although ed and Lorraine they passed into their own realm post life, this Annabelle doll, It's still around and it was just this year was touring the country for horror fans and in July it was in a hotel room with Dan Rivera, it's fifty four year old handler, the lead investigator for the New England Society for Psychic Research. When Dan died suddenly of what was determined to be a cardiac event. Was he scared to death in a hotel room with this doll.
We're never going to know, But that was just a few months ago, and in I guess a testament to just how Batshit twenty twenty five has been. You may not have even heard about this demon possessed doll killing or handler, or the fact that the doll is now in possession of the recently disgraced comedian Matt Rife, who bought Edien Lorraine's spooky house in Connecticut and has least the right to be Annabelle's handler for the next five years because he loves the lore of this particular haunted
doll who was featured in the movie The Conjurings. Okay, there's simply too much going on in the world. And speaking of dolls, Kurt s one or so is a creepy doll type of creepy related to the creepy guy at the bar type of creepy. And I think it seems like it's both that a little bit of that uncertainty.
And I know you've written on how not to creep women out, and I'm wondering with this creepy guy at the bar type of creepy, what have you found about not creeping women out, either online or in person.
Well, I haven't done any actual research on creepy guys other than my own personal experience. But again, what you have to keep in mind, it's all about playing by the rules, you know, like not doing something that a normal person wouldn't do. You're interested in this woman and you want her to like you, but you're afraid she's
going to reject you. So you're all nervous to start with, and so you get all twitchy, and you're trying to be funnier than you are and smarter than you are, the situation pulls creepy behaviors out of you, that makes the woman start to think, this is not a normal guy. And if he doesn't understand these basic rules of interaction, what other rules doesn't he understand? So it's all about
just being normal, you know. Try to overcome your anxiety about approaching somebody and don't let that interfere with just being you. Now you also have to be conscious of you don't start touching people, you don't start talking about sex right away. There are certain things you got to do right or not do. Is the case?
Maybe, well, what if you're not really normal but you're not harmful. We're going to circle back to that. Aaron White, ariel Vincent, puzz Goddess, and Ki Kiani wanted to know. Aaron wanted to know, how does one know if you are being creepy to others? I assume I am not, they say, But then again, people who act toward me in ways that I find creepy don't seem to realize they are. Is there any way to detect creepiness in yourself?
That's a really good question. One of the things we ask people in our original study, and this is about thirteen hundred people, do you think creepy people know they're creepy, And overwhelmingly the response was no, they don't think creepy people understand that they're creepy. Another interesting side effect of my having done some research on this is I get messages from guys who are worried about exactly this thing. They're starting to think now that people think they're creepy,
and they find this very troubling. I don't think we're very good at detecting it in ourselves. We seem perfectly normal to ourselves, right. I think a lot of people who just send out the wrong vibe are very lonely people, right, because people run away from them, they don't want to form a close relationship with them. And then the whole
thing kind of snowballs. You become creepier because you become more desperate, and then in your interactions with people, your desperation is unusual, and it just kind of feeds on itself.
If your eyebrows are up in a is this play about us way? Let me say that I'm with you socially awkwardly, and I would like to know about neurodivergence. Along with my siblings and possible research Anna Elizabeth Keran h Anton Kleinsheldt protect trans lives, as well as questions about cultural norms and even racism asked by Flora and the Fawn analysta Young Genesis, Will Clark, Felipe Jimenez, Meghan Walker,
Jeremy Green, and Bia Hagen. Do you ever have to account for neurodivergence on either side of the research?
Well, now, this had never even crossed my mind when we were doing the original creepiness stuff.
But remember this research was conducted nearly a decade ago, and since then we've had better screening and public awareness and first person outreach of the flavors of social norms and just more understanding of neurodivergence in popular culture. And we have several episodes on ADHD which we'll link in the show notes, as well as a coming in the future one about autism, which is not caused by tile at all.
If somebody is neurodivergent in some way, autistic or whatever, if you don't know that and you're interacting with the person, you're trying to figure out what's going on there. On the other hand, if you understand where the person's coming from, that puts you at ease because now you have an explanation and you're not worried.
I think that that's interesting. The more we try to hide what is innate to us and maybe mask over it, maybe the creepier it is, like trying to suppress who you are in a certain way. Maybe that's creepy. But yeah, if I knew that I were talking to someone with anxiety, I would probably have a really different experience than if they were like I get sometimes just kind of twitchy and weird. You know. Maybe it's like disclosure makes everyone
more comfortable. Listener Eleanor Wall shares their experience of this kind of bias and has a question I.
Would particularly like to know about creepiness as it relates to discrimination. I grew up in the special education system, and I experienced a lot of ill treatment and a lot of rejection from my peers because of it. How exactly can the impulse of rejection be suppressed when it turns into something harmful to society, particularly to its most vulnerable members.
And again, as we discussed in the recent human Technomorphology episode with Mary Roach and in the Systems Biology episode with doctor Emily Ackerman and the ADHD episode and the
personality Psychology episode and in the Disability Sociology episode. So many biases and projections are deeply harmful to people who are introverted or appear to be outside of really narrow so called norms, And much of that perception can simply be based on a lack of exposure to people of diverse appearance and ability, Like whose fault is it that someone else doesn't know a broader array of people? And again,
it's why representation and diversity matter so much. So newsflash, shocking people are assholes to others who do not fit beauty standards, and another reason why it's important to break down beauty standards. We talk all about this in the Ecolology episode, which we'll link in the show notes. And we had another listener who asked about specific creeped outedness. Hi, Ali, my name is Kayla.
How come different people have different phobias or are creeped out by certain things? Like people always have that one thing that really bugs them, Like I have a friend who is really creeped out by my lar balloons floating away from her. It really really bothers her. If they could answer that question, that would be.
Great, and I will say that there is a word for this kind of and that the fear of balloons is called globophobia, and it usually refers to like the terror of latex balloons and most often that potential for them to pop. And just to circle around, I found one article titled life on the Autism Spectrum, A balloon for the Misbegotten, and it notes that the sudden sensory overload of a popped balloon can be particularly aversive for
neurodivergent folks. But honestly, anyone can have a bad reaction to a suddenly pop balloon and develop globophobia, even like Oprah probably actually really, she said. In one interview, Oprah said, I really don't like balloons. And for my fortieth birthday, my entire staff decided to surprise me, she says, And I come downstairs and the entire audience is filled with balloons. Literally, I'm stepping over balloons, having to walk through balloons, and
I'm so like, ah, when is one gonna pop? Said Oprah. So a treatment for this phobia, we talked about this in a recent OCD episode, is exposure and response prevention therapy. So yeah, you got to get yourself around a bunch of balloons, even working up to popping them for that phobia to go away. Now, as for the mylar ones, Kayla,
I looked around. I couldn't find anything. I am not a doctor in any capacity, but maybe ask if it has something to do with the environmental or ecological anxiety, or maybe thanophobia, just the fear of death and slipping away into the unknown and unseen. Or maybe it has something to do with a little thing we call cosmic vertigo, which is an unease a lot of people have about just how big the universe is. Just this fathomless void with a bunch of gas and fire and aliens. It
keeps going and going and going. You don't know what's out there. We talk about this in the Cosmology episode with doctor Katie Mack.
But when you think about the modern world, snakes and in spiders, things like that are not really a threat to most people most of the time, and yet people are still terrified on them. But think of the things that are really dangerous now, guns, electrical wires, automobiles. I mean, these kill people all the time, but we don't have phobias about them, yeah, most of us.
Yeah, But Mel Roswell. Great question from New Zealand where they have a lot of creepy crawleys are scary crawleys. So I'm sure everyone's had that thing where you feel like someone is looking at you, and sure enough you turn around and there is someone looking straight at you and it feels super creepy. Is that a known phenomenon or do we do that a lot and there's no one there and we only remember the times when there's someone there.
I think that's more likely.
Hmmm. Okay, because we have.
Something that's called a confirmation bias. So if you believe that something is true, we actively look for examples that fit the store and convince us that it's true. And if we see things that don't apply, we just kind of ignore them or don't notice them. So, yeah, if you believe you can tell when somebody's looking at you, and you look around and nobody's looking at you, you just don't remember it. Yeah, all it takes is that one time where you see it and aha, you know,
it really reinforces it. We believe in a lot of stuff like okay, the full moon and its effects on behavior, A lot of people really believe that it's not true, the full moon doesn't do anything. But what happens is if something weird happens and there happens to be a full moon. You notice that, You say, ahaha, But what about all the time, is there was a full moon and nothing weird happened, or all the time something weird
happen and there was no full moon. You know, all it takes is that one incident to reinforce your belief.
I think about penny Wise and the guy who plays him is very hot, and it makes no sense that he's scariest clown ever because under that makeup he looks like a male model. His name is Peter Sarsgard. I started typing up and then I googled it and realized, no, it is Bill Scarsgard.
Peter Sarscar no relation to Stellin, Alex Gusta philu Volto. He is sar'scar. They are scars New and I.
Should have known that. Because if you need a musical and visual disambiguation, I will link that song by Jared Sleeper in the show notes. A few people Melanie Aang, Rachel Robinson, and Fiona wanted to know. Fiona asked, what's up with attractive people doing saying creepy shit and getting away with it, while less attractive people are instantly considered creepy. And Melanie asked, will someone be good looking objectively reduce their creepiness scales even if they are a creep.
Yes, you can get away with a lot more if you're good looking than if you're not.
Dear.
There's something called a halo effect that's all the opposite of It's called the horns effect, you know, like devils and angels. If a person is good looking, we know they have one desirable good quality, and that leads us to jump to the conclusion that they must have other ones as well. Whereas if a person isn't advertising any good quality that's visible, we're inclined to think, well, they got one bad thing going on. I wouldn't be surprised
if they've got more going on as well. So we're already biased in favor of We're against people based on their appearance, and so now the good looking person can't eventually convince you that they're creepy, but it's going to take more work, whereas the other person, you're gonna say, okay, a lot quicker.
A few people asked about eye contact, Marina Buckley, They'll be listening. Timbo and Gina H asked. Miranda said, why is eye contact from strangers so unnerving? Gina H says, I'm flirty and I can make infinite eye contact. Am I creepy? Timbo mentions that intense eye contact can seem so close to erotic intimacy and serial killer vibes at the same time. Is there a certain amount of contact with someone that's too much?
Yeah, the way icon And this is something that's very culture specific. There are some cultures that are much more intimate in the way people interact with each other, a lot more eye contact, closer interaction distances, more touching, and then there are others that are much more standoffish. The thing about eye contact, and this is true for primates as well, baboons and chimps and so on. Direct eye contact,
first of all, is very arousing. Your heart rate increases, adrenaline starts moving through your system because eye contact from another person is a strong social signal of intention. Now, the intention can be positive as in romantic attraction and I love you, and it can be threatening in terms of violence. If you look at two boxers before boxing match, the stare down right. Yeah, they're looking at each other
right in the eye. And to knows, a baseball umpire and a manager having a fight there right in each other's faces. Think of eye contact as turning up the volume on whatever's going on in the interaction. If it's a pleasant interaction, eye contact makes it more pleasant. If it's a threatening or aggressive or unpleasant interaction, more eye
contact makes it more unpleasant. There was a study done a bazillion years ago where they had people who were in an interview getting positive or negative feedback about themselves. They'd taken a personality test and the interviewer was either telling them good things about themselves or bad things about themselves, And what they manipulated was how much eye contact did
the interviewer use? Oh God, And it turned out that if the interviewer was using a lot of eye contact and telling you good things about yourself, you really liked the interviewer. If the eye contact was coming from the interviewer or who was telling you bad things, you really hated that person more than if they didn't use so much eye contact.
See the twenty eighteen Frontiers and Psychology paper Effective Eye Contact and Integrative Review for a very deep, soulful gaze into that research.
So your listener is right in saying that eye contact automatically makes you feel something, and too much of it or too little of it can be disturbing. Now, the other person you mentioned who said she's a flirt and she can maintain eye contact, does that make her creepy? The fact that she can do it doesn't make her creepy, but whether she does it or not and when she does it. But the fact that she's female, I think helps a lot.
And that is an assumption, of course, based on the name Gina and also fun fact, gender is not binary, so my sis queer, trans and babies. We discussed that in the wonderful Neuroendocrinology episode, which we'll link in the show notes.
We were already talking about males being more threatening and creepier. Women really have to work at it to come across as creepy because they're not threatening usually.
What about goths. I used to be goth for a long time, all black. Yeah, a lot of fish nets, still wear fish nets, but you know, I used to hang out with people with a lot of face makeup and stuff. Do you think that some people self select to be creepy, to be like almost like how poisonous sprogs have bright colors? Is this to say like, don't come near this?
Yeah, I think there's some posing that goes on. You know, what you're trying to do is show that you're you know, you're not tied down by convention and you're not a conformist. You want to look like all the other goths, right, yeah, yeah, exactly, And I don't think that style is creepy if you're in a society. Okay, I'm a college professor. The goth thing comes and goes, and I've had lots of goth students knowing that that's a fashion and a style that
people of a certain age like to adopt. I don't think of that person as creepy because I understand they're just trying to kind of fit in. They're trying to say something about themselves. Yeah, and that's within the norm. But if you were to be goth and go to a place where people have never seen this before, then yeah, you'll creep them out.
Right, But it takes much more innovation and work to creep people out with your fashion than simply going a hot topic.
Yeah, essentially, I would say.
I am gagged and so read that it hurts. Joe Hall I had a great question last listener question that I think is such a good one, and it was echoed also by Deborah Brunner. But Joe asked, Hi.
Ali, this is Justine Lorenzo Hall. My question is about the specific creepiness that happens right before you realize you're being scammed. On on that scammers try to seem trustworthy, but the Celtics heals off an unusual turn of phrase and request that's out of character.
Yeah.
I think that's a great example. I hadn't thought about that one before, but I think that's exactly analogous to, you know, the predator in the woods waiting to get you.
Mm hmm.
Okay, you may not be physically at risk, but you're financially at risk. You're about to possibly have all kinds of hassles and problems, but you're not sure, and it's this uncertainty that is creating. I think that's exactly the same thing. And if you've already sort of gone down the road aways, you've already agreed to certain things given certain information, it's really hard to reverse that. So I think that's an excellent example. I'm glad he shared that because I'm going to use that.
Yes, that happened to my husband recently where he was called by his bank to say that there was someone scamming him. And he had this moment where he was like on FaceTime with them and they wanted him to green record, and I suddenly saw him go wait a second, and he realized like, oh, this is not the bank at all warning me, Like there's this little like a squikiness, you know this where suddenly you just want to retract into yourself like an armadillo or a pillbug and just say,
don't you dare you know? I think they call that conglobate in the you know, natural world. I do have another episode coming up on animal defenses like spikes and scales and stinks with doctor Ted Stankowitch and it's a good one. Last questions I always ask are the hardest thing about doing your research? Like, what is something that's difficult in the process of doing this well?
With the creepiness research, I think the big difficulty is making it as realistic as you would like. You can show people pictures of faces and ask them to make judgments. About the creepiness of the person. You can ask them to imagine situation and have them rate how they feel, but to actually create a real life situation where the
person is getting creeped out is something. First of all, it's practically hard to do, but even if you could do it ethically, you probably shouldn't, and so not being able to make the research as realistic as you would like is probably the big difficulty.
What about your favorite thing in terms of research and creepiness, any moments that have just been like, oh love.
A lot of the stories that I've gotten to tell, like about the clowns and the experiences I've been able to have because I've done creepiness research has been kind of rewarding. Absolutely.
I mean, you've changed the way we all make eye contact with clowns and bars, that's for sure, and.
That's a good things.
So ask lovely people creepy questions, because why not involve your head when you're watching your back. Thank you to doctor Frank mccandrew for letting me barrage him with so many spooptober topics at once, and stick around for the month of learning to love your least favorite bugs? What's in Haunted Lakes with GEO, the history of poison control and the weight of the word evil. It will be
a spook tabular month. Also, we will link more studies and social media handles on our website, which is linked right in the show notes, and we are at ologies on Instagram a blue Sky. I'm Ali Ward with one L. On both you can find a whole catalog of about four hundred almost five hundred episodes by hitting ologies dot com. We have kid friendly, Classroom Safe episodes two in their own feed. They're called Smologies SMO l O g I E S. They're linked in the show notes. Ologies Merch
is available at ologiesmerch dot com. You can join Patreon at patreon dot com slash Ologies to support the show and leave questions for theologists, including audio ones before we record. Aaron Talbert adminsiologies podcast Facebook group. Aveline Malick makes our professional transcripts. Kelly R. Dwyer does the website. The Comforting Noel Dilworth is our scheduling producer overseeing the dark Corners as managing director is Susan Hale. Jake Chafy edits with
Sharp Eyes and Ears and lead editor. The bodyguard of audio is Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio and Happy, Happy, Happy, big big Birthday this week to my flashlight in the inky black the lumens in the dead of night Jared Sleeper. You can find that wonderful song by your pod mother, as well as many other bangers and poems at Jared Sleeper on TikTok. And he also makes shirts that I love at jbstink dot com jbstink dot com, including He's got some coyote and bug ones. I love whatever he makes,
it's so good. Nick Thorburn made the theme music. And if you stick around until the end, I tell you a secret, and I will tell you the most scared I have ever been in my life. I was home alone, Jar was out of town, and I had had way too much coffee on top of dealing with a too abrupt cessation of effects or and everything was terrifying. And in the bedroom it was like ten thirty at night.
I heard someone banging around in my bedroom closet. Freaked out, rushed out, called some friends and then they urged me to call the non emergency line of the LAPD, who came in with guns drawn to clear the house and it turns out that my full rack of clothes in the closet had detached itself from the wall, and the noise I heard was boxes on the shelf slowly sliding into the door like an elbow, and readers. It is
the scariest The ambiguity got me. Okay, the world is scary, though, and we are going to try to make spootober fun cool. Bye bye pachadermatology, hobiology or doo zoology, lithology, zechnology, meteorology, oology, apology, seriology, elinology.
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