Speaker 1: Hello, Hi, it's the old to do list you found
Speaker 1: tucked in a book, haunting and taunting you like a creep.
Speaker 1: Let's talk creepiness. Is this a study? This is a study?
Speaker 1: Shirt iss. Did it have a name? No, it didn't.
Speaker 1: It's too niche to listen. We very very rarely hear
Speaker 1: at ologies have to coin an ology. Usually there's something
Speaker 1: in the literature. But in this case I had to
Speaker 1: do it, and it took me a while, and then
Speaker 1: I figured it out. So surpo means to creep in Latin,
Speaker 1: like a serpent, and this expert kind of blazed a shadowy,
Speaker 1: overgrown trail to study what makes something creepy? Why are
Speaker 1: some dolls creepy? Why does AI creep you out? How
Speaker 1: do you know if you are creepy? When isn't a
Speaker 1: version to creepiness unfair? And when is it warranted? And
Speaker 1: where does this come from in our lineage? So we're
Speaker 1: going to get to that in just a second. But first,
Speaker 1: thank you to the patrons at patreon dot com slash
Speaker 1: ologies who contribute as little as a dollar a month
Speaker 1: to support the show, and they leave their questions even
Speaker 1: in audio before we record. Thank you to everyone out
Speaker 1: there where Ologies Merch from ologiesmerch dot com. Also thank
Speaker 1: you for lifting our spirits out of the muck with
Speaker 1: your sweet reviews which I read every week, such as
Speaker 1: this just left one from it's Rosa reading, who wrote pottery.
Speaker 1: Have I ever cared before?
Speaker 2: No?
Speaker 1: Was I riveted to your latest episode? Yes. Rosa also
Speaker 1: said in the review that it was so nice to
Speaker 1: meet you recently in Reno, where I had given a
Speaker 1: talk and agreed it's always wonderful to hang out with
Speaker 1: oligites before or after a keynote or show or during.
Speaker 1: Also fun surprise, if you're in New York, mark the
Speaker 1: calendar for Monday November seventeenth. I'm doing my first ever
Speaker 1: live show there piloting it, so please save the date
Speaker 1: Monday November seventeenth in New York. Patrons will get all
Speaker 1: the details and the ticket link first, just in case
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Speaker 2: You're on the bus an hour from home, in bumper
Speaker 2: to bumper traffic, creeping forward a few inches at a time,
Speaker 2: someone's kids are screaming, and suddenly your back is too. Luckily,
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Speaker 2: Always read the label or leaflet.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's get into it. This guest is a professor
Speaker 1: emeritis of psychology and Knox College in Illinois, and studied
Speaker 1: psychology at King's College, got a PhD in experimental psychology
Speaker 1: from the University of Maine. They focus on human social
Speaker 1: behavior from an evolutionary perspective, why do we feel what
Speaker 1: we feel? And Yes, for this episode, we'll talk about
Speaker 1: their work in creepiness. So let's dive into that as
Speaker 1: we kick off a month of Spootober episodes just to
Speaker 1: delight and keep active the hairs on the back of
Speaker 1: your neck. But it's fun. Okay, let's learn what's creepy
Speaker 1: and why with Professor experimental Psychologist Ick Authority and thus
Speaker 1: let's just say serpopsychologist doctor Frank McAndrew. When I got
Speaker 1: the note back that you had said yes to this,
Speaker 1: I remember I was on the freeway. I was like, oh,
Speaker 1: my husband was driving.
Speaker 4: I was like, we got the creepy guy. Well, it
Speaker 4: is what it is, right.
Speaker 1: I'm sorry to call you the creepy guy, because you're
Speaker 1: exactly not that, because you study creepiness.
Speaker 4: Well, let me stop you right there, because there's an
Speaker 4: old saying in psychology that research is me search, which means,
Speaker 4: of course that psychologists study things that are issues in
Speaker 4: their own life. So don't jump to any conclusions.
Speaker 1: I understand that one of the first papers on creepiness
Speaker 1: from you was this in twenty sixteen that it.
Speaker 4: Came t sixteen, right?
Speaker 1: What led up to that? Were you doing me search
Speaker 1: about creepiness and could find nothing in the academic record?
Speaker 4: Well, I was doing research, not necessarily mesearch. I don't
Speaker 4: know what prompted it exactly. I started noticing how often
Speaker 4: I was hearing the term. You know, people would say, Oh,
Speaker 4: I'm not this guy, just creep me out, or you know,
Speaker 4: I was in this place that was really creepy, and
Speaker 4: I was hearing it over and over and again, and
Speaker 4: so I started asking people, well, when you say that,
Speaker 4: what do you mean. Is it the same thing as
Speaker 4: being afraid? Is it a same as being disgusted? And
Speaker 4: they always said no, it's something completely different. And so
Speaker 4: I got curious, Well, what is this thing we call creepiness?
Speaker 4: And being a good academic, I went to the literature
Speaker 4: and I was just blown away. There was not a
Speaker 4: single study, not even one ever done on creepiness. So
Speaker 4: I saw the chance to do something kind of fun
Speaker 4: and new. And I was working with a student who
Speaker 4: was looking for a research project, Sarah Kenke, who was
Speaker 4: the co author on the first paper.
Speaker 1: And Sarah Keanke, Frank tells me, worked as a model
Speaker 1: as well, this gorgeous woman in higher education who also
Speaker 1: happened to be born without a complete arm, and she
Speaker 1: was an athlete and represented the state of Illinois in
Speaker 1: the Beijing Paralympics. And she would tell Frank that she
Speaker 1: had discovered that, in addition to just guys hitting her up,
Speaker 1: there's this whole world of men out there that are
Speaker 1: apparently attracted to disabled women. But Frank tells me, naturally,
Speaker 1: she was very interested in the topic of creepiness, and
Speaker 1: Sarah co authored his first paper on creepiness, the twenty
Speaker 1: sixteen Study on the Nature of Creepiness, which was published
Speaker 1: in New Ideas and Psychology. And also just a reminder
Speaker 1: of why science benefits from inclusivity. Science is only as
Speaker 1: strong as the questions it answers, and who is asking
Speaker 1: the questions really matters. And for more on that, we
Speaker 1: have an episode on disability sociology with the wonderful doctor
Speaker 1: Gwen Chambers. But yeah, let's dive into the nuts and
Speaker 1: bolts of what that study revealed. Well, what is creepy.
Speaker 1: There's things that are scary and there's things that are creepy.
Speaker 1: Not all scary things are creepy. Not all creepy things
Speaker 1: are scary. Imagine there's some sort of Venn diagram here,
Speaker 1: what's the difference that makes your shoulders kind of like
Speaker 1: go up and protect your neck.
Speaker 4: I think of creepiness is sort of a precursor to scariness.
Speaker 4: Creepiness is all about uncertainty. There's something that's not right.
Speaker 4: You're not sure if it's something bad or dangerous that
Speaker 4: you need to worry about, but you're kind of wallowing
Speaker 4: in discomfort and you're like hyper vigilant. And this can
Speaker 4: be you're dealing with a person or a place. So
Speaker 4: maybe you're interacting with a guy who's sending you a
Speaker 4: weird vibe. There's you know, his nonverbal behaviors are off,
Speaker 4: he's steering the conversation and weird directions, and you're very uncomfortable. Now,
Speaker 4: this could just be an awkward person, right, who's not
Speaker 4: very socially skilled, and it'd be kind of rude to
Speaker 4: like start screaming and running away from him if that's
Speaker 4: the case. But on the other hand, if there is
Speaker 4: something to worry about from this person, you need to
Speaker 4: know that and you need to be ready to deal
Speaker 4: with it, and the creepiness, the being creeped out feeling,
Speaker 4: is what you're experiencing when you're trying to figure this out.
Speaker 4: You're lasered in on what's going on here. You're trying
Speaker 4: to make your mind up is this somebody I need
Speaker 4: to worry about or not? And the same thing happens
Speaker 4: with places. You can be walking around in a place
Speaker 4: you know it's dark and there's a lot of shrubbery
Speaker 4: and you can't see very far into the distance, and
Speaker 4: you don't know that there's anything there that's going to
Speaker 4: harm you. Sure, but you're not sure. Yeah, and so
Speaker 4: again you're hyper vigilant trying to figure out if there's
Speaker 4: something to be afraid of. So creepiness is all about ambiguity,
Speaker 4: the uncertainty. Once you figured out there is something to
Speaker 4: be afraid of and you know what it is, that's
Speaker 4: where the scary thing comes in.
Speaker 1: Got it. So it's like crosses that line and that
Speaker 1: must be evolutionarily wired to just usure you feel someone's
Speaker 1: eyes on you, or there's a puma that snapped a
Speaker 1: twig or something.
Speaker 4: Right, Yeah, we're programmed to think of worst case scenarios.
Speaker 4: So imagine your caveman ancestor walking through the woods and
Speaker 4: it's getting dark and they hear some things rustling in
Speaker 4: the bushes. Okay, it could be a predator, It could
Speaker 4: be an enemy waiting to get you, or it could
Speaker 4: just be a small animal or the wind or something
Speaker 4: like that. Oh, I see, Okay, what kind of mistake
Speaker 4: do you want to make here?
Speaker 1: All right?
Speaker 4: If you decide it's probably just the wind or a
Speaker 4: rabbit and it's not, those genes get removed from the population.
Speaker 1: Pretty quickly because your chill ass has died.
Speaker 4: On the other hand, if you overreact and you're scared
Speaker 4: and you're really looking at this and you're getting ready
Speaker 4: to run, and then you find out it is just
Speaker 4: a rabbit, well what's the cost of that. It's pretty small, right,
Speaker 4: And so people were selectively bred, so to speak, to
Speaker 4: be cowards in situations like this. To think about the
Speaker 4: worst case scenario. When you were talking about the precursor thing,
Speaker 4: I like to think of creepiness, horror, and fe as
Speaker 4: sort of links in a chain that go in a
Speaker 4: certain order. Good horror movies are the ones that walk
Speaker 4: us through all three of those. So think of the
Speaker 4: beginning of the good horror movie where you know it's
Speaker 4: normal life at the beginning, and then suddenly the characters
Speaker 4: in the movie are noticeding something isn't quite right. They're
Speaker 4: a little confused, a little apprehensive. That's the getting creeped
Speaker 4: out part. They move into the horror stage, when they
Speaker 4: start to realize, Okay, there really is a problem here,
Speaker 4: there is something to worry about, but at that stage
Speaker 4: they may not know exactly what it is or how
Speaker 4: to deal with it. And then the fear stage is
Speaker 4: when aha, I know exactly what the problem here is
Speaker 4: and I know what I should be trying to do
Speaker 4: to deal with it now. Bad horror movies sometimes skip steps,
Speaker 4: like the guy comes running out with the chainsaw right
Speaker 4: at the beginning, right, and there's no kind of foreplay building.
Speaker 1: Up to it, I was going to say.
Speaker 4: And then some movies kind of flop because they spend
Speaker 4: too much time in one stage as opposed to the other.
Speaker 4: So you spend too much time being creeped out, but
Speaker 4: nothing really happens, and then it gets kind of boring.
Speaker 1: So anyway, do you like horror movies or do you
Speaker 1: just see through them too much?
Speaker 5: Uh?
Speaker 4: No, I like them, but I don't get to see
Speaker 4: them very much because my wife hates them, and so
Speaker 4: we go to the movies that she's willing to see,
Speaker 4: which are not horror movies.
Speaker 1: I am a lot like your wife where I do
Speaker 1: not like to be scared in general. Did you have
Speaker 1: to exclude people with anxiety disorders from your research because
Speaker 1: they would be too far on the bell curve? No.
Speaker 4: One of the studies we did actually was interested in personality,
Speaker 4: like what predicts getting creeped out? And keep in mind,
Speaker 4: I'm not the one doing the scaring people stuff. I
Speaker 4: have some colleagues in Denmark in something called the Recreational
Speaker 4: Fear Lab where they're doing some really amazing stuff with
Speaker 4: virtual reality. They have people, you know, living in this
Speaker 4: virtual world where basically they're getting feedback from the person's
Speaker 4: biological reactions the things that are scaring them the most,
Speaker 4: and that steers the virtual reality even more and more
Speaker 4: in the direction of things that will scare them. They
Speaker 4: also work with commercial haunted houses where people volunteer to
Speaker 4: have their heart rate monitored and fill out questionnaires and
Speaker 4: all that. So they're doing some really.
Speaker 1: Cool stuff, such as studies titled Scared Together, heart Rate
Speaker 1: Synchrony and Social closeness in a high intensity horror setting,
Speaker 1: recreational fear across childhood, across sectional study of scary activities
Speaker 1: that children enjoy, and of course the twenty twenty four paper,
Speaker 1: First they scream, then they laugh, the Cognitive Intersections of Humor,
Speaker 1: which notes that fear is energizing and stressful and it
Speaker 1: activates our sympathetic nervous system and floods our bloodstream with
Speaker 1: adrenaline and cortisol. Now humorous amusement, on the other hand,
Speaker 1: it says, is palliative, involving soothing anddogenous opioids. So how
Speaker 1: did these scientists study it? It's a good question by
Speaker 1: examining horror comedy movies like Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein,
Speaker 1: and looking at online scare prank videos and the relative
Speaker 1: terror of the childhood game Peekaboo, where your caregiver is
Speaker 1: suddenly disappeared from planet Earth and then boom, they're back.
Speaker 4: But frank I basically ask people how creeped out they
Speaker 4: are by pictures that they're looking at or hypothetical things
Speaker 4: that they're imagining.
Speaker 1: Where are you getting these pictures? Do you have a
Speaker 1: Pinterest board of just the creepiest people like, how do
Speaker 1: you select what you're going to show to people?
Speaker 4: Well, actually I had several students working with me, and
Speaker 4: so it was their job to scour the Internet for
Speaker 4: pictures of creepy people, creepy places, and creepy things. And
Speaker 4: we got one hundred and some of these together, and
Speaker 4: then we had a smaller group of people rate them
Speaker 4: on a variety things creepiness, how confusing are they, how
Speaker 4: scary are they, and so on down the line. And
Speaker 4: so from that we pulled out the ones that got
Speaker 4: the highest scores on creepiness.
Speaker 1: What kind of pictures were they that made the cut?
Speaker 4: Well, the creepy places tended to be dark nighttime. One
Speaker 4: was like this big underwater hole that a person was
Speaker 4: kind of perched at the edge of. Creepy people were
Speaker 4: people who were like these spooky little girl identical twins
Speaker 4: that were in a black and white photo, a baker
Speaker 4: who makes pies with human faces on them where they're
Speaker 4: bleeding and all of that.
Speaker 1: How much of what we're creeped out by is innate
Speaker 1: and how much is cultural? Like if you had seen
Speaker 1: the shining, two little girls standing in a hallway means
Speaker 1: that there's going to be blood gushing out of an
Speaker 1: elevator in a second. And how much is just like
Speaker 1: whenever you see a face that's a pie that has
Speaker 1: boys and berry coming out of the eyeballs, then like
Speaker 1: it's no go. What is innate and what is cultural?
Speaker 1: Do you think? Well?
Speaker 4: I think anything that is potentially dangerous or threatening to
Speaker 4: us is going to be a universal thing that's going
Speaker 4: to be innate. So fears of dark alleyways late at
Speaker 4: night and things like that. I mean, if there was
Speaker 4: a place where it was very normal to see two
Speaker 4: strange looking identical little girls standing in the hallway, they
Speaker 4: would not think anything of that. It's all in what
Speaker 4: you're used to. So I'm going to lean in the
Speaker 4: direction of saying it's mostly an aid. It's wired into us.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And you know, going back a little bit to
Speaker 1: your co author on that first paper, Sarah, I believe
Speaker 1: and this notion of predators like our cave people ancestors
Speaker 1: in the forest, it seems like sexual predators men in particular,
Speaker 1: seem to give us the creeps much more than people
Speaker 1: who present as non male or who are femme. Is
Speaker 1: that this actual threat of just not knowing what might
Speaker 1: happen or is it a link to aggression? What makes
Speaker 1: certain people are certain genders creepier to us?
Speaker 4: Well, one thing we found very strongly males are creepier
Speaker 4: than females. And this is true whether you're a male
Speaker 4: or a female yourself. You're more easily creeped out by
Speaker 4: men than by women. And I think there are a
Speaker 4: number of reasons for that, but I think the big
Speaker 4: one is simply males are more threatening and dangerous in
Speaker 4: a physical sense than females are. Whether your male or
Speaker 4: female yourself, you're more likely to have something bad happen
Speaker 4: to you at the hands of a man than a woman.
Speaker 4: Women often reported that, yes, I think creepy people are
Speaker 4: likely to have a sexual interest in me. Yes, there's
Speaker 4: something about their sexual tastes that's part of their creepiness.
Speaker 4: So I think this is one of the things that
Speaker 4: are on women's minds a lot more than they are
Speaker 4: and men for good reason.
Speaker 1: So I've been ropped by two guys in broad daylight
Speaker 1: with kitchen knives, but now I've never been assaulted by
Speaker 1: a clown. But it does feel knock on wood, you're
Speaker 1: still done.
Speaker 4: Yeah right, I mean it's not over yet.
Speaker 1: It's not over yet I don't know what I'm doing wrong,
Speaker 1: but I've never felt threatened by clowns. But at the
Speaker 1: same time, when you start with the adjective creepy, the
Speaker 1: noun that follows I feel like it is most often clowns.
Speaker 1: Where did that come from? Is it because they are
Speaker 1: in disguise and around children? Like? What's the seed in there?
Speaker 4: All right, you're getting me started on clowns. So okay, Well,
Speaker 4: first of all, I had no interest in clowns. I
Speaker 4: it was not something I was studying. But one of
Speaker 4: the things they did in my first study was to
Speaker 4: rate the creepiness of different occupations, and the one that
Speaker 4: finished number one was clowns. And that's pretty munch all
Speaker 4: I had to say about it. I said, Okay, I
Speaker 4: heard the ratings. There were four that kind of stood
Speaker 4: out as the creepiest on our list. Clowns were number one,
Speaker 4: but taxidermists were right up there. Oh, funeral directors and
Speaker 4: sex shop operators.
Speaker 1: Really, yes, I wonder if that's changed in recent years
Speaker 1: or not. Again, this is Frank and Sarah's twenty sixteen
Speaker 1: study on the nature of creepiness, which explains that occupations
Speaker 1: that signal a fascination with threatening stimuli like death or quote.
Speaker 1: Non normative sex may attract individuals who would be comfortable
Speaker 1: in such a work environment. Hence, it says some occupations
Speaker 1: may be perceived as creepier than other occupations, and their
Speaker 1: research revealed that only four occupations were judged to be
Speaker 1: significantly higher than neutral on the creepiness rating scale, and
Speaker 1: ranked number four on the list was funeral directors and
Speaker 1: number three was sex shop owners.
Speaker 4: But anyway, clowns and taxidermists were number one and two. Anyway,
Speaker 4: I was asked to write an article because I don't
Speaker 4: know if you remember the creepy clowns scare in twenty sixteen.
Speaker 1: I do, I do. I had forgotten. I had forgotten.
Speaker 6: At Emerald Commons apartments off White Horse Road say they're
Speaker 6: on edge after kids reported seeing a man dressed in
Speaker 6: a clown costume wandering through the woods near these dumpsters
Speaker 6: Monday night.
Speaker 4: There were clowns allegedly lurking in the woods, luring children in,
Speaker 4: attacking people with knives. There were all these stories about
Speaker 4: creepy clown sightings. People were looking out their door at
Speaker 4: night and there's one under the street light in front
Speaker 4: of their house. This was very much in the news,
Speaker 4: and it was around Halloween. Now, I'm not the one
Speaker 4: who is saying clowns are creepy, right, I'm just saying,
Speaker 4: given that people think they are, why would that be Well,
Speaker 4: I became sort of the poster boy for clowns for
Speaker 4: ruining their occupatients for their career. Yes, I was the
Speaker 4: one that was visibly saying things and in the news
Speaker 4: about clowns being creepy. There was this ringleader clown on
Speaker 4: the way Coast who started stalking me on social media
Speaker 4: and doing everything he could to destroy my reputation. He
Speaker 4: was leaving angry voicemails on my phone. He even contacted
Speaker 4: the president of the dean of my college to have me,
Speaker 4: if not fired, at least disciplined. Now, this was all
Speaker 4: in an attempt, by the way, to show me that
Speaker 4: clowns are not creepy. Right now, Yeah, my wife and
Speaker 4: I were terrified that this little car was going to
Speaker 4: pull up in front of our house sometime with the
Speaker 4: clowns piling out. But oh no, I had to go
Speaker 4: inhead and have a meeting with the dean in the
Speaker 4: college about this clown business and anyway, so I digress here,
Speaker 4: getting back to why they're creepy. Well, first of all,
Speaker 4: they've never been good, right, If you go all the
Speaker 4: way back in history, clowns were always pranksters. If you
Speaker 4: go to the circus and they pull somebody out of
Speaker 4: the audience, you know that nothing good is going to happen, right.
Speaker 4: And it's again it's about unpredictability. You don't know what
Speaker 4: they're going to do, right, And a lot of the
Speaker 4: things that we use to decide if somebody is creepy
Speaker 4: is do they seem to be playing by the rules
Speaker 4: or not. When you're interacting with somebody, we have a
Speaker 4: script that we follow, right, you know how you're supposed
Speaker 4: to behave when you meet somebody, and what's okay to
Speaker 4: say and what isn't and how you're supposed to act.
Speaker 4: Clowns break all those rules that they have, the funny clothing,
Speaker 4: they have, the makeup, so you can't even tell who
Speaker 4: they are, and you can't really tell what they're feeling, right,
Speaker 4: So you can't read them the way you read other people.
Speaker 4: If I'm having a conversation with you, I'm looking at
Speaker 4: your face to see if you're paying attention, if you're
Speaker 4: smiling or frowning. The clown has this smile painted on
Speaker 4: his face, but I'm guessing he's not really happy, and
Speaker 4: so we're on our guard against him. All this stuff
Speaker 4: that we talked about earlier about having your creep detectors
Speaker 4: active to figure out if there's something to worry about
Speaker 4: the clown sets that up off big time. Everything about
Speaker 4: the clown triggers that. So they've always been something that
Speaker 4: puts us on our guard, especially when you encounter them
Speaker 4: in places that you don't expect to. Okay, if you
Speaker 4: go to the circus, all right, you paid your money,
Speaker 4: you know they're going to be clowns there. You're ready
Speaker 4: to enjoy the act and laugh. But you know when
Speaker 4: you run into one in a restaurant or you know,
Speaker 4: at a kid's birthday party.
Speaker 1: Working garage, yeah.
Speaker 4: Your front yard at night, you know, it's like, okay,
Speaker 4: now I'm creeped out. So they're okay when they are
Speaker 4: where they're supposed to be, but when they step out
Speaker 4: of that they become even more threatening.
Speaker 1: Also, just a side note, some of the sightings in
Speaker 1: the twenty sixteen Clown Hysteria were from an indie short
Speaker 1: film marketing campaign that went more viral than probably anybody anticipated.
Speaker 1: And honestly, there is an ology for clowns which is exciting.
Speaker 1: It's colorology, cool cool rology. Either way, I'll save the
Speaker 1: pronunciation of that and the in depth research for a
Speaker 1: full episode. Clowns deserve their own episode. We'll go into
Speaker 1: the makeup and the French schools and the Italian operas
Speaker 1: and clowning on all the continents modern clowning and stuff.
Speaker 1: But I will give you the tidbit in this episode
Speaker 1: that the originator of the so called hobo clown, which
Speaker 1: is named Weary Willy, with the white makeup and the
Speaker 1: saggy jowls and the kind of downturned sad mouth that
Speaker 1: like thick Grace double, he emerged during the depression, when
Speaker 1: seeing your economic struggles reflected in entertainment was no doubt
Speaker 1: a comfort to people who are spending what little money
Speaker 1: they had on a trip to the circus. And Weary
Speaker 1: Willy was played by Emmett Kelly and just a fun fact,
Speaker 1: Emmitt Kelly was It's not fun at all. He was
Speaker 1: performing at the nineteen forty four Hartford Circus when this
Speaker 1: fire erupted. It killed over one hundred and sixty five people.
Speaker 1: It was a disaster, and Kelly or Willy growing I'm
Speaker 1: sure even more weary, held up the flaming tent flaps
Speaker 1: to help dozens of people escape the flames. And I
Speaker 1: was like, why did this huge tent immolate? So suddenly
Speaker 1: it's because to keep the canvas watertight. Back then they
Speaker 1: coated it in a mixture of gasoline and paraffin wax.
Speaker 1: They made a candle that was a huge dome and
Speaker 1: put hundreds of people in it. Also, authorities thought that
Speaker 1: it was just a flicked cigarette that led to the tragedy,
Speaker 1: but they later discovered that an arsonist was traveling with
Speaker 1: the circus because he hit a few more shows. So
Speaker 1: while you may look at a down trodden clown in
Speaker 1: tattered clothes and in need of a shave, you may
Speaker 1: be creeped out, you may be weary of his willy,
Speaker 1: but he turned out to be an actual life saver. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he stopped talking to his own son, Emmett Kelly Junior
Speaker 1: for years when the younger followed in his old man's gigantic,
Speaker 1: floppy footsteps and ripped off the weird Willy character. But hey,
Speaker 1: it turns out that the regular looking arsonist was the
Speaker 1: one to fear all along. So perhaps clowns enjoyed some
Speaker 1: great pr from the Depression until about nineteen eighty.
Speaker 4: And I think this all started with the John Wayne
Speaker 4: Gacy thing, the guy who dressed like a clown. He
Speaker 4: worked kid's birthday parties as a clown, used to paint
Speaker 4: pictures of clowns. And then they found out, you know,
Speaker 4: you have thirty three bodies buried in the crawl space
Speaker 4: of his house. And so right away you said, when
Speaker 4: you hear the word creepy, the noun that pops into
Speaker 4: your head first is clowns. That kind of kicked it off.
Speaker 4: And then all the horror movies started, right the Killer
Speaker 4: Clowns from Outer Space, Stephen King's it, you know, penny Wise.
Speaker 4: So now it's very much in the public imagination, So
Speaker 4: that connection is there, I think for good.
Speaker 1: I always think too of the hobo clown sort of trope,
Speaker 1: where it's a clown, but it is also almost working
Speaker 1: on our fears of others, or fears biases that we
Speaker 1: might have about socioeconomic status or sort of lifestyles that
Speaker 1: we consider good or bad. Is there any sort of
Speaker 1: biases with someone being creepy who is just downtrodden and
Speaker 1: we're afraid or we're more cautious around them. I just
Speaker 1: feel like the hobo clown is like people afraid of
Speaker 1: poverty and someone who might suddenly tickle them, you know.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, I haven't really thought about this before. But again,
Speaker 4: if you're interacting with a person who's in a very
Speaker 4: different circumstance than you are, that immediately makes them less
Speaker 4: understandable to you. If you're interacting with somebody who looks
Speaker 4: like you and comes from the same place that you
Speaker 4: come from, you both understand the same rules and therefore
Speaker 4: you know what to expect with this person.
Speaker 1: It will be interesting to see in a hundred years
Speaker 1: if the clowns shake the stigma, there is going to
Speaker 1: be like, can you believe people were afraid of clowns
Speaker 1: and now it's one of the most respected positions. I
Speaker 1: don't think so. And I know someone who was collecting
Speaker 1: like thrift store clown paintings for a gallery wall, and
Speaker 1: I just can't imagine waking up to that or having
Speaker 1: to walk down the dark hallway to the bathroom at
Speaker 1: night in a gallery of creepy clowns. But can I
Speaker 1: ask you some questions from listeners who know that you
Speaker 1: are coming on sure, yes, okay, and patrons hooms are
Speaker 1: not creepy. We will get to your questions in a moment,
Speaker 1: but first, let's donate to a cause of theologists choosing
Speaker 1: in this week Frank shows. The Peoria, Illinois PBS station
Speaker 1: WTVP love that so find out more about them at
Speaker 1: WTVP dot org. And that donation was made possible by
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Speaker 1: Okay, madears, Let's skulk into the Patreon mail bag to
Speaker 1: answer some questions like this good one from so many
Speaker 1: questions Magpie Laughs and Michael Paul about confirmation bias, and
Speaker 1: Gordon has asked, is there a correlation between feeling creeped
Speaker 1: out and a belief in scientifically unsubstantiated phenomena such as
Speaker 1: ghosts or spirits? And in patron Holly's own words, so
Speaker 1: Holli Joe from Bothel, Washington said, I'm a first time
Speaker 1: question asker and I'm super curious. How is creepiness connected
Speaker 1: to intuition and other psychic abilities that people might have
Speaker 1: in order to perceived danger? Thanks, So, intuition, creepiness, psychic abilities,
Speaker 1: what's up with that?
Speaker 4: Certainly, if you believe in paranormal things, that opens up
Speaker 4: the whole realm of things you can be afraid of. Yeah,
Speaker 4: and therefore you can be more creeped out by them. So,
Speaker 4: if you are going into a house that is thought
Speaker 4: to be haunted, and you know that and you believe
Speaker 4: in ghosts, when you start hearing creaking sounds or flapping
Speaker 4: sounds or thumping sounds right away, you're considering the possibility
Speaker 4: that there's a ghost or some other scary thing there.
Speaker 4: If you absolutely don't believe in this stuff, you're not
Speaker 4: is creeped out because you just assumed it's the wind
Speaker 4: or you know, something like that going on.
Speaker 1: Now, if you think you have psychic abilities, you might
Speaker 1: be priming your brain for some creepiness. Frank explains, like
Speaker 1: your internal soundtrack is just an ongoing theorem.
Speaker 4: In on the one hand, they believe in this whole
Speaker 4: world of unseeable things that may be threatening, which means
Speaker 4: they would be on their guard more often and more
Speaker 4: creeped out. On the other hand, if they are smugly
Speaker 4: confident of their intuition, what that means is they aren't
Speaker 4: uncertain about things as much as other people are. They
Speaker 4: feel like they know the answer and therefore won't feel
Speaker 4: as creeped out. So it could go either way. I
Speaker 4: guess I think what we need to do is find
Speaker 4: one hundred people who believe they have psychic abilities and
Speaker 4: they do the experiment.
Speaker 1: Yeah, just a side note. Frank also wrote the October
Speaker 1: twenty twenty one article why some people see ghosts and
Speaker 1: others don't, which referenced polls by the Pew Research Center
Speaker 1: finding that eighteen percent of Americans say they've been in
Speaker 1: the presence of a ghost. Eighteen percent. You're sitting at
Speaker 1: a dinner with five people about one of them is like, yeah,
Speaker 1: I've seen a ghost.
Speaker 4: I think if you've already seen one, I don't know
Speaker 4: that that necessarily means you're going to see another one.
Speaker 4: But the same thing that made you see the first
Speaker 4: one will also help you see the second one.
Speaker 9: Right.
Speaker 1: This question comes from patron Kate, who wrote, okay, but
Speaker 1: the people need to know does theologists believe in ghosts?
Speaker 1: And then five question marks, all of them warranted. Have
Speaker 1: you ever seen a ghost? I have not, has anyone
Speaker 1: you know ever? Soworn said Frank for real, I saw
Speaker 1: a ghost. It was at the edge of my bed.
Speaker 1: It was a Civil War soldier holding a hatchet. Like
Speaker 1: you ever get that.
Speaker 4: All the time?
Speaker 2: Yea?
Speaker 4: And it isn't even usually that vivid where they see
Speaker 4: this ghost at their bed. It's most often an encounter
Speaker 4: with a long less relative, you know, a parent or
Speaker 4: a child who's died, or they swear that they've seen them,
Speaker 4: that they've interacted with them, and they are very sincere
Speaker 4: and they absolutely believe this. So yes, I do have
Speaker 4: that experience.
Speaker 1: Has it led you at all to think maybe there
Speaker 1: is something else out there? Or has it just sort
Speaker 1: of doubled down on me. We are just wired for survival,
Speaker 1: or we just see things we want to see, like
Speaker 1: an encounter with someone that we miss.
Speaker 4: Yet more the second, I'm kind of a kill Joe.
Speaker 1: No, you're a scientist, you've got the data.
Speaker 4: Well. Yeah. People who are firm believers in this become
Speaker 4: very upset, very quickly, because what you're telling them is
Speaker 4: that you don't believe that. I believe they're experiencing what
Speaker 4: they're experiencing. My interpretation of the cause behind it is
Speaker 4: a little different. So I don't think they're lying, but
Speaker 4: they think that they're telling me what they believed they
Speaker 4: saw should be all I need.
Speaker 1: Mm hmm, you need a little more than that. I do, Yes,
Speaker 1: And if Jelly tat first time Questionsker says, being creeped
Speaker 1: out is a really unpleasant sensation. No one wants to
Speaker 1: walk down a dark straight at night and get that
Speaker 1: feeling of creepiness. So why do so many of us
Speaker 1: seek it out for entertainment? They say, I'm thinking everything
Speaker 1: from old school ghost stories to creepy pasta on the internet.
Speaker 1: Have you heard of creepy pasta?
Speaker 4: I don't think I have no.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's take a step backwards into the shadowy bushes
Speaker 1: of the Internet. Skimpy toilet whrizzlers, let me six seven
Speaker 1: use some Ohio definitions. So copy pasta is a genre
Speaker 1: of meme. It involves like the cut and paste of
Speaker 1: paragraphs of text that are sometimes lousy with emojis, usually
Speaker 1: are a little saucy or offensive or just unexpectedly daft,
Speaker 1: and these paragraphs look like if a tender mistake you
Speaker 1: should have blocked found a stash of krat and text
Speaker 1: to do a long paragraph with thoughts they should have
Speaker 1: kept inside their head, and or a lot of peach
Speaker 1: and squirt and winki tongue out emojis. So the copy
Speaker 1: pasta genre's kind of creative genius, I guess is that
Speaker 1: it could be real if someone were unhinged enough, but
Speaker 1: usually it's kind of a trolling joke. So creepy pasta
Speaker 1: is a derivative of that, and it's copy pasted and
Speaker 1: shared widely, but it's mostly kind of takes the form
Speaker 1: of spooky stories like fan art, or ghouls like Slenderman,
Speaker 1: or characters like Jeff the Killer, or these increasingly unnerving
Speaker 1: diary entries from a doomed spolunker named Ted they're kind
Speaker 1: of spine shivering because they may contain this kernel of
Speaker 1: urban legend or creepy folklore. And yes, in case you're
Speaker 1: like the caves, we do have a speleology episode about caves.
Speaker 1: Ten out of ten would not enjoy caving. To be honest,
Speaker 1: why do we love creeping ourselves out?
Speaker 4: It is kind of perverse, right. We spend money to
Speaker 4: go to scary movies or haunted houses to be in
Speaker 4: the presence of things we would avoid, like the plague
Speaker 4: in day to day life. And because it is such
Speaker 4: a universal thing, it's part of human nature. And there
Speaker 4: are a lot of hypotheses about why we do this,
Speaker 4: but one of the ones that I find most compelling
Speaker 4: is it's a very adaptive trait. If you are in
Speaker 4: a movie theater or a commercial, haunted house, or wherever
Speaker 4: it is, you're voluntarily being scared. Deep down, you know
Speaker 4: you're safe, right, You know that this is all make believe,
Speaker 4: but it's realistic enough that you have a chance to
Speaker 4: mentally rehearse living through something like this, and so you're
Speaker 4: learning from the experiences of the people in the movie
Speaker 4: or whatever it is the ghost story you're reading. Here
Speaker 4: are some things that worked. I might keep that in mind.
Speaker 4: Here are some things you don't want to do. I'm
Speaker 4: going to keep that in mind. And we did the
Speaker 4: same thing with like Jaws. When you're exposing yourself voluntarily
Speaker 4: to scary things, you're learning something about yourself, right, You're
Speaker 4: learning here's what I can handle, Here's what I can't handle.
Speaker 1: I don't trust myself in those situations. I don't think
Speaker 1: I would make a good decision under pressure like that.
Speaker 1: I think I would freeze. But I do know people
Speaker 1: who listen to too much true crime and then they
Speaker 1: have this intense paranoia where it goes from I'm feeling
Speaker 1: prepared to I'm always under threat. It seems like in
Speaker 1: the quest to learn more and rehearse more, you can
Speaker 1: end up going a little too far. Yeah so Frank
Speaker 1: sites At twenty twenty two, Steady titled Caught in a
Speaker 1: Dangerous World Problematic news consumption and its relationship to mental
Speaker 1: and physical ill being, which very unsurprisingly reveals, with a
Speaker 1: sad predictable dirge of a drum.
Speaker 4: Roll, people who spend a lot of time watching the
Speaker 4: news about murders and violent crime and sort of that
Speaker 4: thing dramatically overestimate the likelihood of that occurring. Right, When
Speaker 4: you ask people to estimate how likely something is to happen,
Speaker 4: they their estimate is very much based on how quickly
Speaker 4: they can think of an example. So if you ask somebody, Okay,
Speaker 4: how likely is it you're going to get attacked by
Speaker 4: a shark if you go swimming in the ocean, or
Speaker 4: how likely is it that you will die in a
Speaker 4: plane crash, they dramatically overestimate the probabilities because they can
Speaker 4: very easily think of an example. Right, they saw story
Speaker 4: just last week where a plane crashed, where they saw
Speaker 4: story just last week where somebody got killed by a shark,
Speaker 4: and so it's right there. If you ask somebody, how
Speaker 4: likely is it you're going to slip in the shower
Speaker 4: and fall and kill yourself, they look at you and say, no,
Speaker 4: that's never going to happen. But in fact, that happens
Speaker 4: every day somewhere, happens all the time, but it doesn't
Speaker 4: make national news, right, New jerseyman falls in shower and yeah,
Speaker 4: you know you don't. You don't hear that. So they
Speaker 4: under estimate the probability of that because they can't think
Speaker 4: of an example of it happening.
Speaker 1: So one study a systematic program to reduce the incidents
Speaker 1: and severity of bathtub and shower area injuries, found that
Speaker 1: over one hundred thousand bathtub and shower falls occur every
Speaker 1: year just in America. But it's bound to be more
Speaker 1: because that paper was a typewritten blurry copy published in
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy five, and I only can go from older pictures,
Speaker 1: but I don't know if they showered as much. But
Speaker 1: a relatively more recent paper from twenty eleven titled Incidents
Speaker 1: of symptoms and Accidents during baths and Showers among Japanese
Speaker 1: general public found that in the forty to seventy four
Speaker 1: year old age group, over eight hundred thousand combined shower
Speaker 1: and bathtub falls. But you're about seven times more likely
Speaker 1: to have an accident falling in the bathtub than the shower.
Speaker 1: So grab bars, rubber mats, go slow, try not to
Speaker 1: have a wet floor. Also, this study noted that people
Speaker 1: bathe every day usually, so don't freak out because if
Speaker 1: you're hearing this, let's say you're twenty five, you've probably
Speaker 1: bathed like eight thousand times already and you haven't died
Speaker 1: even once, So what will kill you? Then? If not
Speaker 1: bathtubs or a disease. Let's ask The study unintentional injury
Speaker 1: details in the US for ages one to forty four
Speaker 1: from nineteen eighty one to twenty twenty three, which says
Speaker 1: that unintentional injuries are the leading cause of death for
Speaker 1: Americans aged one to forty four years old. So if
Speaker 1: you're not an infant and you have a job, your
Speaker 1: riskiest job is logging, followed by commercial fishing, so they
Speaker 1: don't call it the deadliest catch for nothing, although I'm
Speaker 1: sure lumberjacks now would be like, I'm catching what over here,
Speaker 1: and I'd like to have a word. And then after those,
Speaker 1: we have airplane pilots, roofers, and sanitation workers. And if
Speaker 1: you're like huh, you can see our discard anthropology episode
Speaker 1: about garbage and you can bake some cookies for your
Speaker 1: local pickup team. Trust me, after that you're gonna want to.
Speaker 1: But honestly, car accidents have been eclipsed in this age
Speaker 1: group by accidental opioid overdose and suicide. So mental health
Speaker 1: care saves lives. We have a suicideology episode, invite you
Speaker 1: to listen to it now. The study also noted that
Speaker 1: being married lowers your risk. So until that do your part,
Speaker 1: it gets delayed of it, which might actually be worth
Speaker 1: the cost of matching tablecloths and a tower of fondon
Speaker 1: and frosting. And my spouse, I'll tell you he sold
Speaker 1: his motorcycle right after we got married because it was
Speaker 1: a widow machine. And I swear if that man even
Speaker 1: glances at a ladder to check on our solar panels,
Speaker 1: he will get an earful of me insisting he's not
Speaker 1: to do it alone. He better let me hold that thing,
Speaker 1: and he better fall on my body if he does.
Speaker 1: And as you may know, your grandpad, my dad passed
Speaker 1: away a few years ago, and it was some sort
Speaker 1: of miracle that it was from cancer and not from
Speaker 1: climbing up to the pitched roof to scrape snow off
Speaker 1: a satellite dish in his seventies, despite all of us
Speaker 1: begging him to not do that. So no clowning around people.
Speaker 1: You're scaring your loved ones. We don't like it well.
Speaker 1: In terms of clowns and slipping in the shower. The
Speaker 1: thing that I'm probably most afraid of right now is
Speaker 1: the robots taking over. And I know you wrote, you
Speaker 1: wrote why lifelike dolls and robots creep you out. We
Speaker 1: had a ton of people ask about Uncanny Valley. So
Speaker 1: many patrons Nikki g Ray, Press, Pafka thirty four, Remacfee, Ameliadhoff,
Speaker 1: Emily McLeod, Sarah Man's, Tim Farr, Kim Grenier, are a
Speaker 1: Victor adds Adam Weaver, RG and Sage Scarberry plus Kate
Speaker 1: Tim's all had such similar curiosities on this. It was
Speaker 1: like uncanny, which means strange or mysterious, especially in an
Speaker 1: unsettling way. I thought this was a great question from
Speaker 1: Sarah Swank says, along with the Uncanny Valley questions, why
Speaker 1: do AI images of people make my hair stand up
Speaker 1: when they're just a little bit off? Or what is
Speaker 1: it about life like dolls and robots in that Uncanny Valley?
Speaker 4: I think there are different kinds of creepiness, and some
Speaker 4: other researchers have kind of pointed this out, and mine
Speaker 4: was all about the ambiguity of threat. You know, is
Speaker 4: there a danger here, but it's clear that a doll
Speaker 4: is not going to kill you. Probably there's another way
Speaker 4: of thinking about creepiness. I think it's called categorical ambiguity.
Speaker 4: The problem with creepy dolls and robots and lifelike AI
Speaker 4: images that are a little off is our caveman brains
Speaker 4: aren't prepared for things to look so human but aren't human,
Speaker 4: and so we would respond to them as if they're
Speaker 4: real people, but consciously we know they're not. And so
Speaker 4: there's this battle going on between our conscious processing of
Speaker 4: what's going on here, but our unconscious involuntary response to that.
Speaker 4: As something looks more and more human, we like it
Speaker 4: better until it into that value where it's almost exactly
Speaker 4: human but it isn't.
Speaker 1: I'm almost afraid of the AI image is getting better
Speaker 1: and better to where it's undetectable. That's when it starts
Speaker 1: to creeping out, Like when they start having like AI
Speaker 1: models that have like a ZiT here and there. I'll
Speaker 1: be like, wait a minute, now, I can't tell you know.
Speaker 1: And for more on uncanny Valley, that quantifiable dip in
Speaker 1: comfort when something is real looking but it's not real enough,
Speaker 1: you can see the twenty twelve paper Danger Avoidance an
Speaker 1: evolutionary explanation of Uncanny Valley from the journal Biological Theory,
Speaker 1: which explains that many species are known to bury, hide,
Speaker 1: or otherwise isolate their dead members. And being cohabiting social animals.
Speaker 1: It explains primates have also developed burial as a mechanism
Speaker 1: of separating the dead from the living, and necrophobia, or
Speaker 1: fear of the dead, is deemed to be one of
Speaker 1: the reasons behind human burial practices, at least since the
Speaker 1: early Iron Age, and it's thought to be one of
Speaker 1: the reasons that people find human like response more important
Speaker 1: than appearance in robots, because when something looks a lot
Speaker 1: like us but it is a little off, we're like,
Speaker 1: that's a corpse and we don't like it. So what
Speaker 1: dead stuff schivs us out? I'm glad you asked, because
Speaker 1: the researchers ranked the rank and in order from the
Speaker 1: least defensive to the most defensive. Are you ready? Okay,
Speaker 1: least defensive a dead insect? And the paper says, as
Speaker 1: a matter of fact, many of us kill insects without
Speaker 1: even having the feeling of regret. Also, I should note
Speaker 1: we have some great episodes on spiders and bugs and ants. Okay,
Speaker 1: moving on, a decomposing insect body is a little grosser.
Speaker 1: Next a dead small animal, then a decomposing small animal.
Speaker 1: We're going up the scale, a dead large animal, and
Speaker 1: then a decomposing large animal, think like a dead cow,
Speaker 1: or like a deer or something, and then a human corpse.
Speaker 1: And I thought that was it. I thought that was
Speaker 1: the apex of the list, like the summit of what's creepy,
Speaker 1: But it turned out it was just a paragraph break.
Speaker 1: And then it continued on the next page with the
Speaker 1: penultimate a decomposing or freshly dead mutilated corpse. And then
Speaker 1: this paper says that the top tier creepy thing human
Speaker 1: brains want to avoid is so specific a freshly dead,
Speaker 1: mutilated corpse with sudden movements. This again, is a scientific paper.
Speaker 1: I think, I think the research speaks for itself there.
Speaker 1: I think we get it now. As far as Uncanny
Speaker 1: Valley in animated dolls, one of the creepiest things out there,
Speaker 1: many paranormal fans agree, is this particular one. It's a
Speaker 1: raggedy ann type doll named Annabel, which legend has it
Speaker 1: tried to strangle a pair of roommates in the nineteen seventies,
Speaker 1: and then Annabel found her way into the hands of
Speaker 1: these paranormal researchers, Ed and Lorraine Warren, who deemed the
Speaker 1: all to be possessed by demons. They kept it in
Speaker 1: a glass box to keep everyone safe. Annabel has been
Speaker 1: kept for decades as this like totem of terror, like
Speaker 1: the most haunted object. And although ed and Lorraine they
Speaker 1: passed into their own realm post life, this Annabelle doll,
Speaker 1: It's still around and it was just this year was
Speaker 1: touring the country for horror fans and in July it
Speaker 1: was in a hotel room with Dan Rivera, it's fifty
Speaker 1: four year old handler, the lead investigator for the New
Speaker 1: England Society for Psychic Research. When Dan died suddenly of
Speaker 1: what was determined to be a cardiac event. Was he
Speaker 1: scared to death in a hotel room with this doll.
Speaker 1: We're never going to know, But that was just a
Speaker 1: few months ago, and in I guess a testament to
Speaker 1: just how Batshit twenty twenty five has been. You may
Speaker 1: not have even heard about this demon possessed doll killing
Speaker 1: or handler, or the fact that the doll is now
Speaker 1: in possession of the recently disgraced comedian Matt Rife, who
Speaker 1: bought Edien Lorraine's spooky house in Connecticut and has least
Speaker 1: the right to be Annabelle's handler for the next five
Speaker 1: years because he loves the lore of this particular haunted
Speaker 1: doll who was featured in the movie The Conjurings. Okay,
Speaker 1: there's simply too much going on in the world. And
Speaker 1: speaking of dolls, Kurt s one or so is a
Speaker 1: creepy doll type of creepy related to the creepy guy
Speaker 1: at the bar type of creepy. And I think it
Speaker 1: seems like it's both that a little bit of that uncertainty.
Speaker 1: And I know you've written on how not to creep
Speaker 1: women out, and I'm wondering with this creepy guy at
Speaker 1: the bar type of creepy, what have you found about
Speaker 1: not creeping women out, either online or in person.
Speaker 4: Well, I haven't done any actual research on creepy guys
Speaker 4: other than my own personal experience. But again, what you
Speaker 4: have to keep in mind, it's all about playing by
Speaker 4: the rules, you know, like not doing something that a
Speaker 4: normal person wouldn't do. You're interested in this woman and
Speaker 4: you want her to like you, but you're afraid she's
Speaker 4: going to reject you. So you're all nervous to start with,
Speaker 4: and so you get all twitchy, and you're trying to
Speaker 4: be funnier than you are and smarter than you are,
Speaker 4: the situation pulls creepy behaviors out of you, that makes
Speaker 4: the woman start to think, this is not a normal guy.
Speaker 4: And if he doesn't understand these basic rules of interaction,
Speaker 4: what other rules doesn't he understand? So it's all about
Speaker 4: just being normal, you know. Try to overcome your anxiety
Speaker 4: about approaching somebody and don't let that interfere with just
Speaker 4: being you. Now you also have to be conscious of
Speaker 4: you don't start touching people, you don't start talking about
Speaker 4: sex right away. There are certain things you got to
Speaker 4: do right or not do. Is the case?
Speaker 1: Maybe, well, what if you're not really normal but you're
Speaker 1: not harmful. We're going to circle back to that. Aaron White,
Speaker 1: ariel Vincent, puzz Goddess, and Ki Kiani wanted to know.
Speaker 1: Aaron wanted to know, how does one know if you
Speaker 1: are being creepy to others? I assume I am not,
Speaker 1: they say, But then again, people who act toward me
Speaker 1: in ways that I find creepy don't seem to realize
Speaker 1: they are. Is there any way to detect creepiness in yourself?
Speaker 4: That's a really good question. One of the things we
Speaker 4: ask people in our original study, and this is about
Speaker 4: thirteen hundred people, do you think creepy people know they're creepy,
Speaker 4: And overwhelmingly the response was no, they don't think creepy
Speaker 4: people understand that they're creepy. Another interesting side effect of
Speaker 4: my having done some research on this is I get
Speaker 4: messages from guys who are worried about exactly this thing.
Speaker 4: They're starting to think now that people think they're creepy,
Speaker 4: and they find this very troubling. I don't think we're
Speaker 4: very good at detecting it in ourselves. We seem perfectly
Speaker 4: normal to ourselves, right. I think a lot of people
Speaker 4: who just send out the wrong vibe are very lonely people, right,
Speaker 4: because people run away from them, they don't want to
Speaker 4: form a close relationship with them. And then the whole
Speaker 4: thing kind of snowballs. You become creepier because you become
Speaker 4: more desperate, and then in your interactions with people, your
Speaker 4: desperation is unusual, and it just kind of feeds on itself.
Speaker 1: If your eyebrows are up in a is this play
Speaker 1: about us way? Let me say that I'm with you
Speaker 1: socially awkwardly, and I would like to know about neurodivergence.
Speaker 1: Along with my siblings and possible research Anna Elizabeth Keran
Speaker 1: h Anton Kleinsheldt protect trans lives, as well as questions
Speaker 1: about cultural norms and even racism asked by Flora and
Speaker 1: the Fawn analysta Young Genesis, Will Clark, Felipe Jimenez, Meghan Walker,
Speaker 1: Jeremy Green, and Bia Hagen. Do you ever have to
Speaker 1: account for neurodivergence on either side of the research?
Speaker 4: Well, now, this had never even crossed my mind when
Speaker 4: we were doing the original creepiness stuff.
Speaker 1: But remember this research was conducted nearly a decade ago,
Speaker 1: and since then we've had better screening and public awareness
Speaker 1: and first person outreach of the flavors of social norms
Speaker 1: and just more understanding of neurodivergence in popular culture. And
Speaker 1: we have several episodes on ADHD which we'll link in
Speaker 1: the show notes, as well as a coming in the
Speaker 1: future one about autism, which is not caused by tile
Speaker 1: at all.
Speaker 4: If somebody is neurodivergent in some way, autistic or whatever,
Speaker 4: if you don't know that and you're interacting with the person,
Speaker 4: you're trying to figure out what's going on there. On
Speaker 4: the other hand, if you understand where the person's coming from,
Speaker 4: that puts you at ease because now you have an
Speaker 4: explanation and you're not worried.
Speaker 1: I think that that's interesting. The more we try to
Speaker 1: hide what is innate to us and maybe mask over it,
Speaker 1: maybe the creepier it is, like trying to suppress who
Speaker 1: you are in a certain way. Maybe that's creepy. But yeah,
Speaker 1: if I knew that I were talking to someone with anxiety,
Speaker 1: I would probably have a really different experience than if
Speaker 1: they were like I get sometimes just kind of twitchy
Speaker 1: and weird. You know. Maybe it's like disclosure makes everyone
Speaker 1: more comfortable. Listener Eleanor Wall shares their experience of this
Speaker 1: kind of bias and has a question I.
Speaker 9: Would particularly like to know about creepiness as it relates
Speaker 9: to discrimination. I grew up in the special education system,
Speaker 9: and I experienced a lot of ill treatment and a
Speaker 9: lot of rejection from my peers because of it. How
Speaker 9: exactly can the impulse of rejection be suppressed when it
Speaker 9: turns into something harmful to society, particularly to its most
Speaker 9: vulnerable members.
Speaker 1: And again, as we discussed in the recent human Technomorphology
Speaker 1: episode with Mary Roach and in the Systems Biology episode
Speaker 1: with doctor Emily Ackerman and the ADHD episode and the
Speaker 1: personality Psychology episode and in the Disability Sociology episode. So
Speaker 1: many biases and projections are deeply harmful to people who
Speaker 1: are introverted or appear to be outside of really narrow
Speaker 1: so called norms, And much of that perception can simply
Speaker 1: be based on a lack of exposure to people of
Speaker 1: diverse appearance and ability, Like whose fault is it that
Speaker 1: someone else doesn't know a broader array of people? And again,
Speaker 1: it's why representation and diversity matter so much. So newsflash,
Speaker 1: shocking people are assholes to others who do not fit
Speaker 1: beauty standards, and another reason why it's important to break
Speaker 1: down beauty standards. We talk all about this in the
Speaker 1: Ecolology episode, which we'll link in the show notes. And
Speaker 1: we had another listener who asked about specific creeped outedness. Hi, Ali,
Speaker 1: my name is Kayla.
Speaker 10: How come different people have different phobias or are creeped
Speaker 10: out by certain things? Like people always have that one
Speaker 10: thing that really bugs them, Like I have a friend
Speaker 10: who is really creeped out by my lar balloons floating
Speaker 10: away from her. It really really bothers her. If they
Speaker 10: could answer that question, that would be.
Speaker 1: Great, and I will say that there is a word
Speaker 1: for this kind of and that the fear of balloons
Speaker 1: is called globophobia, and it usually refers to like the
Speaker 1: terror of latex balloons and most often that potential for
Speaker 1: them to pop. And just to circle around, I found
Speaker 1: one article titled life on the Autism Spectrum, A balloon
Speaker 1: for the Misbegotten, and it notes that the sudden sensory
Speaker 1: overload of a popped balloon can be particularly aversive for
Speaker 1: neurodivergent folks. But honestly, anyone can have a bad reaction
Speaker 1: to a suddenly pop balloon and develop globophobia, even like
Speaker 1: Oprah probably actually really, she said. In one interview, Oprah said,
Speaker 1: I really don't like balloons. And for my fortieth birthday,
Speaker 1: my entire staff decided to surprise me, she says, And
Speaker 1: I come downstairs and the entire audience is filled with balloons. Literally,
Speaker 1: I'm stepping over balloons, having to walk through balloons, and
Speaker 1: I'm so like, ah, when is one gonna pop? Said Oprah.
Speaker 1: So a treatment for this phobia, we talked about this
Speaker 1: in a recent OCD episode, is exposure and response prevention therapy.
Speaker 1: So yeah, you got to get yourself around a bunch
Speaker 1: of balloons, even working up to popping them for that
Speaker 1: phobia to go away. Now, as for the mylar ones, Kayla,
Speaker 1: I looked around. I couldn't find anything. I am not
Speaker 1: a doctor in any capacity, but maybe ask if it
Speaker 1: has something to do with the environmental or ecological anxiety,
Speaker 1: or maybe thanophobia, just the fear of death and slipping
Speaker 1: away into the unknown and unseen. Or maybe it has
Speaker 1: something to do with a little thing we call cosmic vertigo,
Speaker 1: which is an unease a lot of people have about
Speaker 1: just how big the universe is. Just this fathomless void
Speaker 1: with a bunch of gas and fire and aliens. It
Speaker 1: keeps going and going and going. You don't know what's
Speaker 1: out there. We talk about this in the Cosmology episode
Speaker 1: with doctor Katie Mack.
Speaker 4: But when you think about the modern world, snakes and
Speaker 4: in spiders, things like that are not really a threat
Speaker 4: to most people most of the time, and yet people
Speaker 4: are still terrified on them. But think of the things
Speaker 4: that are really dangerous now, guns, electrical wires, automobiles. I mean,
Speaker 4: these kill people all the time, but we don't have
Speaker 4: phobias about them, yeah, most of us.
Speaker 1: Yeah, But Mel Roswell. Great question from New Zealand where
Speaker 1: they have a lot of creepy crawleys are scary crawleys.
Speaker 1: So I'm sure everyone's had that thing where you feel
Speaker 1: like someone is looking at you, and sure enough you
Speaker 1: turn around and there is someone looking straight at you
Speaker 1: and it feels super creepy. Is that a known phenomenon
Speaker 1: or do we do that a lot and there's no
Speaker 1: one there and we only remember the times when there's
Speaker 1: someone there.
Speaker 4: I think that's more likely.
Speaker 1: Hmmm. Okay, because we have.
Speaker 4: Something that's called a confirmation bias. So if you believe
Speaker 4: that something is true, we actively look for examples that
Speaker 4: fit the store and convince us that it's true. And
Speaker 4: if we see things that don't apply, we just kind
Speaker 4: of ignore them or don't notice them. So, yeah, if
Speaker 4: you believe you can tell when somebody's looking at you,
Speaker 4: and you look around and nobody's looking at you, you
Speaker 4: just don't remember it. Yeah, all it takes is that
Speaker 4: one time where you see it and aha, you know,
Speaker 4: it really reinforces it. We believe in a lot of
Speaker 4: stuff like okay, the full moon and its effects on behavior,
Speaker 4: A lot of people really believe that it's not true,
Speaker 4: the full moon doesn't do anything. But what happens is
Speaker 4: if something weird happens and there happens to be a
Speaker 4: full moon. You notice that, You say, ahaha, But what
Speaker 4: about all the time, is there was a full moon
Speaker 4: and nothing weird happened, or all the time something weird
Speaker 4: happen and there was no full moon. You know, all
Speaker 4: it takes is that one incident to reinforce your belief.
Speaker 1: I think about penny Wise and the guy who plays
Speaker 1: him is very hot, and it makes no sense that
Speaker 1: he's scariest clown ever because under that makeup he looks
Speaker 1: like a male model. His name is Peter Sarsgard. I
Speaker 1: started typing up and then I googled it and realized, no,
Speaker 1: it is Bill Scarsgard.
Speaker 8: Peter Sarscar no relation to Stellin, Alex Gusta philu Volto.
Speaker 8: He is sar'scar. They are scars New and I.
Speaker 1: Should have known that. Because if you need a musical
Speaker 1: and visual disambiguation, I will link that song by Jared
Speaker 1: Sleeper in the show notes. A few people Melanie Aang,
Speaker 1: Rachel Robinson, and Fiona wanted to know. Fiona asked, what's
Speaker 1: up with attractive people doing saying creepy shit and getting
Speaker 1: away with it, while less attractive people are instantly considered creepy.
Speaker 1: And Melanie asked, will someone be good looking objectively reduce
Speaker 1: their creepiness scales even if they are a creep.
Speaker 4: Yes, you can get away with a lot more if
Speaker 4: you're good looking than if you're not.
Speaker 1: Dear.
Speaker 4: There's something called a halo effect that's all the opposite
Speaker 4: of It's called the horns effect, you know, like devils
Speaker 4: and angels. If a person is good looking, we know
Speaker 4: they have one desirable good quality, and that leads us
Speaker 4: to jump to the conclusion that they must have other
Speaker 4: ones as well. Whereas if a person isn't advertising any
Speaker 4: good quality that's visible, we're inclined to think, well, they
Speaker 4: got one bad thing going on. I wouldn't be surprised
Speaker 4: if they've got more going on as well. So we're
Speaker 4: already biased in favor of We're against people based on
Speaker 4: their appearance, and so now the good looking person can't
Speaker 4: eventually convince you that they're creepy, but it's going to
Speaker 4: take more work, whereas the other person, you're gonna say, okay,
Speaker 4: a lot quicker.
Speaker 1: A few people asked about eye contact, Marina Buckley, They'll
Speaker 1: be listening. Timbo and Gina H asked. Miranda said, why
Speaker 1: is eye contact from strangers so unnerving? Gina H says,
Speaker 1: I'm flirty and I can make infinite eye contact. Am
Speaker 1: I creepy? Timbo mentions that intense eye contact can seem
Speaker 1: so close to erotic intimacy and serial killer vibes at
Speaker 1: the same time. Is there a certain amount of contact
Speaker 1: with someone that's too much?
Speaker 4: Yeah, the way icon And this is something that's very
Speaker 4: culture specific. There are some cultures that are much more
Speaker 4: intimate in the way people interact with each other, a
Speaker 4: lot more eye contact, closer interaction distances, more touching, and
Speaker 4: then there are others that are much more standoffish. The
Speaker 4: thing about eye contact, and this is true for primates
Speaker 4: as well, baboons and chimps and so on. Direct eye contact,
Speaker 4: first of all, is very arousing. Your heart rate increases,
Speaker 4: adrenaline starts moving through your system because eye contact from
Speaker 4: another person is a strong social signal of intention. Now,
Speaker 4: the intention can be positive as in romantic attraction and
Speaker 4: I love you, and it can be threatening in terms
Speaker 4: of violence. If you look at two boxers before boxing match,
Speaker 4: the stare down right. Yeah, they're looking at each other
Speaker 4: right in the eye. And to knows, a baseball umpire
Speaker 4: and a manager having a fight there right in each
Speaker 4: other's faces. Think of eye contact as turning up the
Speaker 4: volume on whatever's going on in the interaction. If it's
Speaker 4: a pleasant interaction, eye contact makes it more pleasant. If
Speaker 4: it's a threatening or aggressive or unpleasant interaction, more eye
Speaker 4: contact makes it more unpleasant. There was a study done
Speaker 4: a bazillion years ago where they had people who were
Speaker 4: in an interview getting positive or negative feedback about themselves.
Speaker 4: They'd taken a personality test and the interviewer was either
Speaker 4: telling them good things about themselves or bad things about themselves,
Speaker 4: And what they manipulated was how much eye contact did
Speaker 4: the interviewer use? Oh God, And it turned out that
Speaker 4: if the interviewer was using a lot of eye contact
Speaker 4: and telling you good things about yourself, you really liked
Speaker 4: the interviewer. If the eye contact was coming from the
Speaker 4: interviewer or who was telling you bad things, you really
Speaker 4: hated that person more than if they didn't use so
Speaker 4: much eye contact.
Speaker 1: See the twenty eighteen Frontiers and Psychology paper Effective Eye
Speaker 1: Contact and Integrative Review for a very deep, soulful gaze
Speaker 1: into that research.
Speaker 4: So your listener is right in saying that eye contact
Speaker 4: automatically makes you feel something, and too much of it
Speaker 4: or too little of it can be disturbing. Now, the
Speaker 4: other person you mentioned who said she's a flirt and
Speaker 4: she can maintain eye contact, does that make her creepy?
Speaker 4: The fact that she can do it doesn't make her creepy,
Speaker 4: but whether she does it or not and when she
Speaker 4: does it. But the fact that she's female, I think
Speaker 4: helps a lot.
Speaker 1: And that is an assumption, of course, based on the
Speaker 1: name Gina and also fun fact, gender is not binary,
Speaker 1: so my sis queer, trans and babies. We discussed that
Speaker 1: in the wonderful Neuroendocrinology episode, which we'll link in the
Speaker 1: show notes.
Speaker 4: We were already talking about males being more threatening and creepier.
Speaker 4: Women really have to work at it to come across
Speaker 4: as creepy because they're not threatening usually.
Speaker 1: What about goths. I used to be goth for a
Speaker 1: long time, all black. Yeah, a lot of fish nets,
Speaker 1: still wear fish nets, but you know, I used to
Speaker 1: hang out with people with a lot of face makeup
Speaker 1: and stuff. Do you think that some people self select
Speaker 1: to be creepy, to be like almost like how poisonous
Speaker 1: sprogs have bright colors? Is this to say like, don't
Speaker 1: come near this?
Speaker 4: Yeah, I think there's some posing that goes on. You know,
Speaker 4: what you're trying to do is show that you're you know,
Speaker 4: you're not tied down by convention and you're not a conformist.
Speaker 4: You want to look like all the other goths, right, yeah, yeah, exactly,
Speaker 4: And I don't think that style is creepy if you're
Speaker 4: in a society. Okay, I'm a college professor. The goth
Speaker 4: thing comes and goes, and I've had lots of goth
Speaker 4: students knowing that that's a fashion and a style that
Speaker 4: people of a certain age like to adopt. I don't
Speaker 4: think of that person as creepy because I understand they're
Speaker 4: just trying to kind of fit in. They're trying to
Speaker 4: say something about themselves. Yeah, and that's within the norm.
Speaker 4: But if you were to be goth and go to
Speaker 4: a place where people have never seen this before, then yeah,
Speaker 4: you'll creep them out.
Speaker 1: Right, But it takes much more innovation and work to
Speaker 1: creep people out with your fashion than simply going a
Speaker 1: hot topic.
Speaker 4: Yeah, essentially, I would say.
Speaker 1: I am gagged and so read that it hurts. Joe
Speaker 1: Hall I had a great question last listener question that
Speaker 1: I think is such a good one, and it was
Speaker 1: echoed also by Deborah Brunner. But Joe asked, Hi.
Speaker 11: Ali, this is Justine Lorenzo Hall. My question is about
Speaker 11: the specific creepiness that happens right before you realize you're
Speaker 11: being scammed. On on that scammers try to seem trustworthy,
Speaker 11: but the Celtics heals off an unusual turn of phrase
Speaker 11: and request that's out of character.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 4: I think that's a great example. I hadn't thought about
Speaker 4: that one before, but I think that's exactly analogous to,
Speaker 4: you know, the predator in the woods waiting to get you.
Speaker 1: Mm hmm.
Speaker 4: Okay, you may not be physically at risk, but you're
Speaker 4: financially at risk. You're about to possibly have all kinds
Speaker 4: of hassles and problems, but you're not sure, and it's
Speaker 4: this uncertainty that is creating. I think that's exactly the
Speaker 4: same thing. And if you've already sort of gone down
Speaker 4: the road aways, you've already agreed to certain things given
Speaker 4: certain information, it's really hard to reverse that. So I
Speaker 4: think that's an excellent example. I'm glad he shared that
Speaker 4: because I'm going to use that.
Speaker 1: Yes, that happened to my husband recently where he was
Speaker 1: called by his bank to say that there was someone
Speaker 1: scamming him. And he had this moment where he was
Speaker 1: like on FaceTime with them and they wanted him to
Speaker 1: green record, and I suddenly saw him go wait a second,
Speaker 1: and he realized like, oh, this is not the bank
Speaker 1: at all warning me, Like there's this little like a squikiness,
Speaker 1: you know this where suddenly you just want to retract
Speaker 1: into yourself like an armadillo or a pillbug and just say,
Speaker 1: don't you dare you know? I think they call that
Speaker 1: conglobate in the you know, natural world. I do have
Speaker 1: another episode coming up on animal defenses like spikes and
Speaker 1: scales and stinks with doctor Ted Stankowitch and it's a
Speaker 1: good one. Last questions I always ask are the hardest
Speaker 1: thing about doing your research? Like, what is something that's
Speaker 1: difficult in the process of doing this well?
Speaker 4: With the creepiness research, I think the big difficulty is
Speaker 4: making it as realistic as you would like. You can
Speaker 4: show people pictures of faces and ask them to make judgments.
Speaker 4: About the creepiness of the person. You can ask them
Speaker 4: to imagine situation and have them rate how they feel,
Speaker 4: but to actually create a real life situation where the
Speaker 4: person is getting creeped out is something. First of all,
Speaker 4: it's practically hard to do, but even if you could
Speaker 4: do it ethically, you probably shouldn't, and so not being
Speaker 4: able to make the research as realistic as you would
Speaker 4: like is probably the big difficulty.
Speaker 1: What about your favorite thing in terms of research and creepiness,
Speaker 1: any moments that have just been like, oh love.
Speaker 4: A lot of the stories that I've gotten to tell,
Speaker 4: like about the clowns and the experiences I've been able
Speaker 4: to have because I've done creepiness research has been kind
Speaker 4: of rewarding. Absolutely.
Speaker 1: I mean, you've changed the way we all make eye
Speaker 1: contact with clowns and bars, that's for sure, and.
Speaker 4: That's a good things.
Speaker 1: So ask lovely people creepy questions, because why not involve
Speaker 1: your head when you're watching your back. Thank you to
Speaker 1: doctor Frank mccandrew for letting me barrage him with so
Speaker 1: many spooptober topics at once, and stick around for the
Speaker 1: month of learning to love your least favorite bugs? What's
Speaker 1: in Haunted Lakes with GEO, the history of poison control
Speaker 1: and the weight of the word evil. It will be
Speaker 1: a spook tabular month. Also, we will link more studies
Speaker 1: and social media handles on our website, which is linked
Speaker 1: right in the show notes, and we are at ologies
Speaker 1: on Instagram a blue Sky. I'm Ali Ward with one L.
Speaker 1: On both you can find a whole catalog of about
Speaker 1: four hundred almost five hundred episodes by hitting ologies dot com.
Speaker 1: We have kid friendly, Classroom Safe episodes two in their
Speaker 1: own feed. They're called Smologies SMO l O g I
Speaker 1: E S. They're linked in the show notes. Ologies Merch
Speaker 1: is available at ologiesmerch dot com. You can join Patreon
Speaker 1: at patreon dot com slash Ologies to support the show
Speaker 1: and leave questions for theologists, including audio ones before we record.
Speaker 1: Aaron Talbert adminsiologies podcast Facebook group. Aveline Malick makes our
Speaker 1: professional transcripts. Kelly R. Dwyer does the website. The Comforting
Speaker 1: Noel Dilworth is our scheduling producer overseeing the dark Corners
Speaker 1: as managing director is Susan Hale. Jake Chafy edits with
Speaker 1: Sharp Eyes and Ears and lead editor. The bodyguard of
Speaker 1: audio is Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio and Happy, Happy, Happy,
Speaker 1: big big Birthday this week to my flashlight in the
Speaker 1: inky black the lumens in the dead of night Jared Sleeper.
Speaker 1: You can find that wonderful song by your pod mother,
Speaker 1: as well as many other bangers and poems at Jared
Speaker 1: Sleeper on TikTok. And he also makes shirts that I
Speaker 1: love at jbstink dot com jbstink dot com, including He's
Speaker 1: got some coyote and bug ones. I love whatever he makes,
Speaker 1: it's so good. Nick Thorburn made the theme music. And
Speaker 1: if you stick around until the end, I tell you
Speaker 1: a secret, and I will tell you the most scared
Speaker 1: I have ever been in my life. I was home alone,
Speaker 1: Jar was out of town, and I had had way
Speaker 1: too much coffee on top of dealing with a too
Speaker 1: abrupt cessation of effects or and everything was terrifying. And
Speaker 1: in the bedroom it was like ten thirty at night.
Speaker 1: I heard someone banging around in my bedroom closet. Freaked out,
Speaker 1: rushed out, called some friends and then they urged me
Speaker 1: to call the non emergency line of the LAPD, who
Speaker 1: came in with guns drawn to clear the house and
Speaker 1: it turns out that my full rack of clothes in
Speaker 1: the closet had detached itself from the wall, and the
Speaker 1: noise I heard was boxes on the shelf slowly sliding
Speaker 1: into the door like an elbow, and readers. It is
Speaker 1: the scariest The ambiguity got me. Okay, the world is scary, though,
Speaker 1: and we are going to try to make spootober fun cool.
Speaker 1: Bye bye pachadermatology, hobiology or doo zoology, lithology, zechnology, meteorology, oology, apology, seriology, elinology.
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