Are you creepy? - The psychology of creepiness explained | Julia Shaw and Lex Fridman

Creepiness and unreliable intuitions

00:03- I find these pictures of World War II leaders as children kind of fascinating, because it grounds you. It makes you realize that there is a whole story there of environment, of development through their childhood, through their teenage years. You just remember they're all kids. Except Stalin. He was looking evil already when young. - Well, people used to not smile in photos as well. So looking at historical photos of children, or sometimes even kids in other cultures, it's like, "Oh, why are they all so serious?" But our creepiness radars are also way off. This is something that I've been interested in for a long time as well, is that we have this intuitive perception of whether or not somebody is trustworthy. And that intuitive perception, according to

00:44ample studies at this point, is not to be trusted. And one thing in particular is whether or not we think someone is creepy, including children, but usually the research is done, of course, on adult faces and with adults. And only recently did we even really define what that vague feeling of creepiness is. It has a lot to do with not following social norms. This is something we see that transfers to other contexts, like why people are afraid of people with severe mental illness and psychosis. If you're on the bus or the Tube in London, and someone's talking to themselves and they're acting in an erratic way, we know that people are more likely to keep a distance. There There was one study where they literally had a waiting room where they also had

01:26people with chairs, and the question was, "How many chairs would you sit away from someone you know has a severe mental illness?" And the answer is you sit more chairs away, and there's a physical and psychological distancing that's happening there. And it's not because people with severe mental illness are inherently more violent or more dangerous. That is not actually what the research finds. It's that we perceive them as such because we perceive them as weird basically. We go, "This isn't how you're supposed to be behaving, and so I'm worried about this and so I'm going to keep my distance." And so creepiness is much the same, and that's where you can totally misfire whom you perceive as creepy just because they're not acting in the way that you

Deviation from the norm and attractiveness

02:08expect people to act in society. - Well, what are the sort of concrete features that contribute to our creepiness metric? Is that meme accurate that when the person's attractive, you're less likely to label them as creepy? - It depends. If they're too attractive, it can be. So there's- There's, there's effects that interact there. - That's hilarious. - And we also don't trust people potentially who are too attractive. But again, deviation from the norm. And so if you're deviating in any way, that can lead to well, your assessment being more wrong, but also you assessing people as more negative. And so with creepiness, the main thing that bothers me as a criminal psychologist is that tangential to creepiness is this general idea of trustworthiness

Lie detection and overconfidence

02:58and that you can tell whether somebody is lying. And I've done research on this, as have lots of other people, like Aldert Vrij is one of the leading researchers on deception detection. And he has found in so many studies that it's really hard to detect whether someone is lying reliably, and that people, especially police officers, people who do investigative interviewing, they have this high confidence level that they, because of their vast experience, can in fact tell whether the person across from them is lying to them, this witness, the suspect. And the answer is that, even that, if you take them into experimental settings, they are no better than chance at detecting lies, and yet they think they are. And so again, you get into this path

03:41where you're going to miss people who are actually lying to you potentially, and you're going to potentially point at innocent people and say, "I think you're guilty of this crime," and you go hard on that person in a way that might even lead to a wrongful conviction. - So it's the fact that it's very difficult to detect lies and overconfidence in policing creates a huge problem. - Not just policing, in relationships and in lots of other contexts as well. I mean, a lot of jealousy is born out of uncertainty. Jealousy isn't, "I know for sure that you have done something that is threatening our relationship." A lot of jealousy is, "What's in my head because I am assuming that you might be thinking or doing

Jealousy as failed lie detection

04:19X." And that is also basically an exercise in lie detection. And there as well, we are very bad at it. - Is there a combination of the dark tetrad and how good you are at lying? Like, are people with certain traits, maybe psychopathy, are better at lying than others? - There's definitely some research to support the idea that people with psychopathy are better at lying. There's also some research specifically on sort of faking good in, for example, parole decisions. So when it comes up to someone who is... There's a legal decision to be made as to whether this person can be released from prison or released from just detention in general. And then the person will act in a particular way, sort of mimic a good prisoner, mimic someone who's safe to be released into

Psychopathy, lying and tailored treatment

05:06society. And then the committee goes, "Oh, well, you know, this, this person's doing great," and so they're ready to be released. And then they make the wrong decision because that person has been faking it. So I think with psychopathy, it's a bit complicated. There has been some sort of, historically as well, some concern that certain treatment for psychopathy, especially empathy-focused treatment, makes people with psychopathy more likely to fake empathy and to weaponize it. But then there's other research which finds that if you use other kinds of interventions, so like Jennifer Skeem in California who does research on people with psychopathy who have committed severe crimes. And she specifically creates these treatment programs that aren't

05:48just around empathy, but they're more around almost learning the rules of society and convincing people that actually being pro-social is a better way to get what you want in life. And so there's a real need for tailored treatments to deal with especially certain kinds of personality traits, dark personality traits, to try and convince people basically, actually being pro-social is the better path, rather than just going hard on, you know, empathy and things that they don't maybe also see as faults with themselves. - Is there a psychological cost to empathizing with... - so-called monsters? You referenced Nietzsche in the book, you know, "Gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes into you." If you study, quote unquote,

Studying evil without becoming it

06:32"evil" or study monsters that you may become that. Is there a danger of that? I don't think so. I think that's what people fear. So, a lot of the Nietzsche quotes I use as well are... Some of them I like because they speak to the chapters I write about, but... and the issues I write about. But some of them I also like because they are how people think about evil and people who are labeled evil. And I do think with gazing into the abyss and the abyss gazing back, it's more of a... You're trying to find it. And that's why in some ways that doesn't work actually, because it isn't a total blank. It isn't the abyss. There are in fact things that you can see, even, even if it's just superficially, and patterns you can recognize to help

07:14you and key decision-makers, especially in legal settings, make better decisions around people like this. So, when they see these patterns, they act a better way. So yeah, I get asked a lot as a criminal psychologist, "Do you carry the cases that you deal around with you?" So, some of the cases involve, you know, huge amounts of witnesses, huge amounts of potential victims, and so in these cases there are very visceral victims, and so in these cases there are very visceral descriptions sometimes of heinous crimes. And I think that as someone who does this work, you can't be someone who sees it as anything other than a puzzle. So, you have to look at it and go, "Here's the different pieces of information. What I am

07:58doing is pattern recognition. I'm not here to emotionally invest in each of these victims or potential victims. That's not my role. There's therapists for that. There's other people who do that work. I am here working with the police. I'm here working with lawyers. I'm here looking at it more objectively to see how this all fits together." And so, I think that's how I engage with it. I see it as this puzzle that I'm trying to figure out. I worry for my own brain that when I confront people and see them as a puzzle, which I do. I see the beauty in the puzzle. All the puzzles look beautiful to me. I'm sometimes like a Prince Myshkin character from The Idiot by Dostoevsky, where you just see... It's not the good in

08:40people, but the beauty in the puzzle. And I think you can lose your footing on the moral landscape if you see the beauty in everything a bit too much. Because, everyone is interesting. Everyone is complicated. It's the classic scientist response as well to what other people in society go, "Ooh." They go, you know, "This is horrible," or, "This atrocious thing has happened," or, "This shocking, existential crisis inducing thing I've just found is, you know, giving me existential crisis." And scientists instead go, "Oh, wow!" And you can sort of see the delight in discovery as well. And I think sometimes scientists read as callous because we enjoy this discovery of knowledge and the discovery of insights.

The puzzle mindset and moral footing

09:26And it just feels like this little light bulb has gone off and you go, "Oh, I understand a tiny bit more about the human experience or about the world around us." And I think it must be similar. I don't know that I feel or worry that I sort of become more, quote unquote, "evil." I think it's more that you add this nuance, which I guess sometimes can be estranging to other people. So, there's that. When you speak with others, sometimes, like even when I say, "We shouldn't use the word evil," people go, "No, but you have to. Does that mean you're trivializing things?" The answer is no, I'm not trivializing. I'm just trying to understand. Also, sympathizing or being empathetic towards people whom others have written off is always going to

Nuance, sympathy and platforming

10:05get that response from some people. I mean, there are real questions around whom we're platforming and what that has and what role we have as content creators, both of us, of the people we talk about, how we cover them. I often come across this in true crime work that I do, because I get asked to do TV shows. I host TV shows, and I host BBC podcasts. And there's always the question of sometimes people commit murder to become famous. And should it be a blanket ban that we don't cover those cases, or should we cover those cases but in a different way, or should we anonymize the… So, it doesn't mean that you should never cover that case. It just means that you need to think about it.