Serpopsychology (WHAT’S CREEPY?) with Frank McAndrew

Are you creepy? How would you know? What’s “creepy” as opposed to scary or eerie? We talk to the pioneer of this research, Serpopsychologist, Dr. Frank McAndrew, a professor emeritus at Knox College. We chat: dates that give you the willies, Weary Willie the Clown, haunted dolls, college goths, dark alleyways, evolutionary neurobiology, what NOT to get Oprah, the line between horror and comedy, the phobia of balloons, dating tips, and why you should re-evaluate your bathmat. Welcome to Spooktober 2025. We have more waiting in the wings for you this month.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Alie Ward?

  Oh, 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? Sure it is. Did it have a name? No, it didn't. It's too niche. So, listen, we very, very rarely here 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, serpo means to creep in Latin, like 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 is an aversion to creepiness unfair, and when is it warranted?

• 0:45Alie Ward?

  And where does this come from in our lineage? So, we're going to get to that in just a sec, but first, thank you to the patrons at patreon.com/ologies who contribute as little as a dollar a month to support the show, and they leave their questions, even in audio before we record. Thank you to everyone out there wearing Ologies merch from ologiesmerch.com. Also, thank you for lifting our spirits out of the muck with your sweet reviews, which I read every week, such as this just-left one from It's Rosa Reading, who wrote, "Pottery: Have I ever cared before? No. Was I riveted to your latest episode? Yes." Rosa also said in their review that "it was so nice to meet you recently in Reno, where I had given a talk and agreed it's always wonderful to hang out with Ologites before or after a keynote or show or during."

• 1:29Alie Ward?

  Also, fun surprise, if you're in New York, mark the calendar for Monday, November 17th. I'm doing my first-ever live show there, piloting it, so please save the date, Monday, November 17th, in New York. Patrons will get all the details and the ticket link first, just in case you're signed up at patreon.com/ologies. Also, thank you to sponsors of the show for making it possible for us to donate to a cause of the Ologist choosing every week. This episode is sponsored by Seed. Bloating, irregular bowel movement, gas. When your gut is off, it gets your attention. Seed's DS1 is a three-time, award-winning probiotic, clinically shown to improve regularity, reduce bloating, and relieve ...leveate gas so you can move and eat more freely.

• 2:12Alie Ward?

  Take better care of your gut with Seed. Get 25% off with code 25OLOGIES at seed.com/ologies. These statements have not been evaluated by the FDA. These products are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. We have to say that. Oh, trips are full of unexpected discoveries. Maybe you see a sea slug, or you find out that your friend still sleeps with a stuffed animal. But when it comes to your vacation rental, there should not be any surprises. When you book a Verbo vacation rental, if what you expect isn't what you get, Verbo Care has you covered. If something's broken or just not right, Verbo will work to make it right. Plus, you get 24/7 live human support with every booking. Grab your stuffy, we're going on vacay. So book today on the Verbo app.

• 2:57Alie Ward?

  If you know you Verbo. Terms apply. See verbo.com/trust for details. This podcast is brought to you by Aura. Your body has a lot going on. Sleep, stress, recovery. You would be surprised how connected it all is. Aura Ring tracks more than 50 metrics from your finger, and the Aura app brings that information together to help you see patterns across your sleep and stress, activity, and more. So you can start connecting the dots and figure out what works for you. Learn more at aura ring.com. Wear your best life with Aura. Okay, let's get into it. This guest is a professor emeritus of psychology at Knox College in Illinois, and studied

• 3:39Alie Ward?

  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 Spooktober 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, Serpocyologist, Dr. Frank McAndrew.

• 4:34Alie Ward?

  When I got the note back that you had said yes to this, I remember I was on the freeway and I was like, oh, my husband was driving. I was like, we got the creepy guy.

• 4:43Speaker 01

  Well, it is what it is, right?

• 4:46Alie Ward?

  I'm sorry to call you the creepy guy because you're exactly not that, because you study creepiness.

• 4:51Speaker 01

  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.

• 5:08Alie Ward?

  I understand that one of the first papers on creepiness from you, was this in 2016 that it came out?

• 5:15Speaker 01

  2016, right.

• 5:17Alie Ward?

  What led up to that? Were you doing me search about creepiness and could find nothing in the academic record?

• 5:23Speaker 01

  Well, I was doing research, not necessarily me search. I don't know what prompted it exactly. I started noticing how often I was hearing the term, you know, people would say, I met this guy. He just creeped 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 the 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

• 6:01Speaker 01

  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.

• 6:20Alie Ward?

  And Sarah Kenke, 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 2016 study on the nature of creepiness, which was published in New Ideas in Psychology. Then also just a reminder of why science benefits from inclusivity.

• 7:04Alie Ward?

  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 Dr. 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. I 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?

• 7:38Speaker 01

  I think of creepiness is sort of a precursor to scariness. Creepiness is all about uncertainty. There's, 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 in weird directions and you're very uncomfortable. Now, this could just be an awkward person, right?

• 8:18Speaker 01

  Who's not very socially skilled and it'd be kind of rude to like start screaming and running away from them. 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. But you're not sure.

• 9:03Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 9:03Speaker 01

  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've figured out there is something to be afraid of, and you know what it is, that's where the scary thing comes in.

• 9:20Alie Ward?

  Got it. So it's like crosses that line, and that must be evolutionarily wired to just you.

• 9:26Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 9:26Alie Ward?

  Feel someone's eyes on you, or there's a puma that snapped a twig or something, right?

• 9:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, we're programmed to think of worst case scenarios. So imagine your caveman ancestor walking through the woods, and it's getting dark.

• 9:42Speaker 01

  And they hear some things rustling in the bushes.

• 9:47Speaker 01

  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?

• 10:02Speaker 01

  If you decide, ah, it's probably just the wind or a rabbit, and it's not. Those genes get removed from the population pretty quickly.

• 10:10Alie Ward?

  Because your chill ass has died.

• 10:13Speaker 01

  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 fear 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

• 10:59Speaker 01

  are noticing 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.

• 11:34Alie Ward?

  Yeah, I was gonna say.

• 11:37Speaker 01

  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.

• 11:50Alie Ward?

  Do you like horror movies? Or do you just see through them too much?

• 11:53Speaker 01

  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.

• 12:04Alie Ward?

  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?

• 12:17Speaker 01

  No. Um, 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'll scare them. They also work with commercial haunted houses where people volunteer to, you know, have their heart rate monitored and fill out questionnaires and all that. So they're doing some really cool stuff.

• 13:01Alie Ward?

  Such as studies titled Scared Together: Heart Rate Synchrony and Social Closeness in a High-Intensity Horror Setting, Recreational Fear Across Childhood, a Cross-Sectional Study of Scary Activities That Children Enjoy, and of course, the 2024 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 endogenous opioids. So how did these scientists study it? It's a good question. By examining horror comedy movies like Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein

• 13:46Alie Ward?

  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.

• 14:02Speaker 01

  I basically ask people how creeped out they are by pictures that they're looking at or hypothetical things that they're imagining.

• 14:11Alie Ward?

  Where are you getting these pictures? Like, do you have a Pinterest board of just the creepiest people? Like, how do you select what you're going to show to people?

• 14:18Speaker 01

  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 a hundred and some of these together. And then we had a smaller group of people rate them on a variety of 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.

• 14:47Alie Ward?

  What kind of pictures were they that made the cut?

• 14:50Speaker 01

  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.

• 15:18Alie Ward?

  Oh, no.

• 15:19Speaker 01

  Where they're bleeding and all of that.

• 15:21Alie Ward?

  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 gonna 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 boysenberry coming out of the eyeballs, then like, it's no go. What is innate and what is cultural, do you think?

• 15:43Speaker 01

  Well, I think anything that is potentially dangerous or threatening to us is gonna be a universal thing. That's gonna 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 gonna lean in the direction of saying it's mostly innate. It's wired into us.

• 16:13Alie Ward?

  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 the sexual threat of just not knowing what might happen? Or is it a link to aggression? What makes certain people or certain genders creepier to us?

• 16:49Speaker 01

  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 you're 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.

• 17:32Speaker 01

  So I think this is one of the things that are on women's minds a lot more than they are on men, for, for good reason.

• 17:40Alie Ward?

  So I've been robbed 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.

• 17:51Speaker 01

  You're still young.

• 17:54Speaker 01

  Right? I mean, it's not over yet.

• 17:55Alie Ward?

  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 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?

• 18:17Speaker 01

  All right. You're, you're getting me started on clowns. Okay. Well, first of all, I had no interest in clowns. I 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 much all I had to say about it. I said, okay, here are 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.

• 18:46Alie Ward?

  Oh.

• 18:47Speaker 01

  Funeral directors and sex shop operators.

• 18:51Alie Ward?

  Really?

• 18:52Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 18:53Alie Ward?

  I wonder if that's changed in recent years or not. Again, this is Frank and Sarah's 2016 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 the 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.

• 19:32Speaker 01

  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 clown scare in 2016.

• 19:42Alie Ward?

  I do. I do. I had forgotten. I had forgotten.

• 19:46Speaker 02

  Residents 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.

• 19:57Speaker 01

  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 streetlight 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 occupations, 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 West Coast who started stalking me on social media

• 20:42Speaker 01

  and doing everything he could to destroy my reputation. He was leaving angry voicemails on my phone. He even contacted the president and the dean of my college to have me, if not fired, at least disciplined.

• 20:56Speaker 01

  Now, this was all in an attempt, by the way, to show me that clowns are not creepy, right?

• 21:01Alie Ward?

  Oh, no. Oh, no.

• 21:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, my wife and I were terrified that this little car was gonna pull up in front of our house sometime with clowns piling out. But, oh, no, I had to go in and have a meeting with the dean and 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 gonna happen, right? And it's, again, it's about unpredictability. You don't know what they're going to do.

• 21:43Alie Ward?

  Right.

• 21:44Speaker 01

  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.

• 22:29Speaker 01

  And so we're on our guard against them. 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 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, there are 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.

• 23:05Alie Ward?

  Parking garage.

• 23:06Speaker 01

  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.

• 23:20Alie Ward?

  Also, just a side note, some of the sightings in the 2016 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 cholera-logy, cool-rol-logy? Either way, I'll save. Uh, the pronunciation of that and the in-depth research, uh, 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,

• 23:58Alie Ward?

  which is named Weary Willie, with the white makeup and the saggy jowls and then kind of downturned sad mouth. That like thick gray stubble. He emerged during the depression when seeing your economic struggles reflected in entertainment was no doubt a comfort to people who are spending, you know, what little money they had on a trip to the circus. And Weary Willie was played by Emmett Kelly. And just a fun fact, Emmett Kelly was, it's not fun at all. He was performing at the 1944 Hartford Circus when this fire erupted. It killed over 165 people. It was a disaster. And Kelly, or Willie, growing, I'm sure even more weary,

• 24:41Alie Ward?

  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 like 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 downtrodden clown in tattered clothes and in need of a shave,

• 25:24Alie Ward?

  you may be creeped out, you may be wary of his Willie, but he turned out to be an actual lifesaver. Yeah, he stopped talking to his own son, Emmett Kelly Jr., for years when the younger followed in his old man's gigantic floppy footsteps and ripped off the Weary Willie 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 1980.

• 25:51Speaker 01

  And I think this all. Started with the John Wayne Gacy thing. The guy who dressed like a clown, he worked kids' birthday parties as a clown, used to paint pictures of clowns. And then they found out, you know, he had 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, Pennywise. So now it's very much in the public imagination. So that connection is there, I think, for good.

• 26:29Alie Ward?

  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. And 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?

• 27:10Speaker 01

  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.

• 27:35Alie Ward?

  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?

• 28:07Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 28:08Alie Ward?

  Yes, okay. And patrons, whos are not creepy, we will get to your questions in a moment, but first, let's donate to a cause of theologist's choosing. And this week, Frank shows the Peoria, Illinois PBS station, WTVP. Love that. So find out more about them at WTVP.org. And that donation was made possible by sponsors of the show. You know, it's fall, it's back to your routines. But just because you're not half naked next to a swimming pool doesn't mean you don't want to look your best when you leave the house. I also don't like to spend time doing these things. So I like minimalist beauty products and I like good stuff. And Merit fits the bill. I've been using them recently. Love them. So they make a bunch of great stuff. And I like to start with the Great Skin Serum.

• 28:52Alie Ward?

  It feels so good and so soft on your face. Also, I have the Flush Balm that I love. It's this little, easy to use blush. They also have something called the Minimalist, which works as a foundation and concealer, which is great for people who love a BOGO. And I also love that Merit's products are clean, they're vegan, they're cruelty free, and their skincare ingredients do leave your face looking glowy and lovely. And fall, it's a perfect time for a fresh start. You can make it your back to me season with Merit. And right now, Merit Beauty is offering our listeners their signature makeup bag, which if you've seen it, it's not just a makeup bag, but really like an accessory. Free with your first order at MeritBeauty.com. That is MeritBeauty, M-E-R-I-T, Beauty.com. MeritBeauty.com.

• 29:37Alie Ward?

  It's on my face right now. Peppa Pig is your preschooler's best friend. Give the gift of bike riding confidence this year and help Peppa learn to ride her bike. Kids can imagine learning to ride a bike with the Ready Pedal Go Peppa Bicycle Playset. Put Peppa's helmet on, attach the push stick to her bike, and push to make her pedal. Ready Pedal Go Peppa and more from Peppa Pig are now available at all major retailers this holiday season.

• 30:08Alie Ward?

  Ever notice how every new AI tool asks you to explain your business to it all over again? Google Workspace with Gemini skips that.

• 30:17Speaker 03

  You get Google's AI built right into the premium versions of Gmail, Docs, Sheets, and more. No new tools, no extra logins, just one subscription that gives you personalized AI right inside your actual workflow. Make work less work. Try Google Workspace with Gemini at go dot G L E slash Workspace with Gemini.

• 30:37Speaker 04

  I'm pretty confident talking into a mic. Hey, I'm doing it right now. But home projects? I second guess everything. Is that noise normal? Is that water damage? Who do I even call? That's where Thumbtack comes in. Just upload a photo or voice note and it uses AI-powered search to match you with the right top-rated local pro. So instead of guessing, you get clarity and can hire with confidence. For your next home project, try Thumbtack. Hire the right pro today.

• 31:05Speaker 05

  Every family has one. The person who says, "Oh, I don't want anything this year." Cool. Super helpful. Here's the fix. Coop Sleep Goods. It's the rare gift that gets used every single night instead of shoved in a closet by January. Coop's Holiday Gift Guide is now 25% off, packed with best-selling adjustable pillows, cooling sheets, and toppers. And while you're there, grab one for yourself. I mean, you've been powering through this whole year on fumes. You've earned it. Every order comes with a 100-night trial, so there's no guesswork. Give yourself a damn break. Get 25% off the Holiday Gift Guide for a

• 31:44Speaker 05

  limited time at coopsleepgoods.com/ comedy. That's C-O-O-P, sleepgoods.com/ comedy.

• 31:51Alie Ward?

  Okay, my dears, let's skulk into the Patreon mailbag to answer some questions, like this good one from SoManyQuestions, MagpieLaughs, and Michael Paul about confirmation bias. And Gordon Haas 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 Holly Jo from Bothell, Washington said, I'm a first-time question asker.

• 32:20Speaker 06

  And I'm super curious, how is creepiness connected to intuition and other psychic abilities that people might have in order to perceive danger? Thanks.

• 32:33Alie Ward?

  So intuition, creepiness, psychic abilities, what's up with that?

• 32:39Speaker 01

  Certainly, if you believe in paranormal things,

• 32:44Speaker 01

  that opens up a whole realm of things you can be afraid of. 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

• 33:11Speaker 01

  or flapping sounds, or thumping sounds,

• 33:17Speaker 01

  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 as creeped out because you just assumed it's the wind or, you know, something like that going on.

• 33:31Alie Ward?

  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 theremin.

• 33:43Speaker 01

  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 I, it could go either way, I guess. I think what we need to do is find 100 people who believe they have psychic abilities and

• 34:22Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 34:23Speaker 01

  do the experiment. Yeah.

• 34:25Alie Ward?

  Just a side note, Frank also wrote the October 2021 article, Why Some People See Ghosts and Others Don't, which referenced polls by the Pew Research Center, finding that 18% of Americans say they've been in the presence of a ghost. 18%. You're sitting at a dinner with five people, about one of them is like, yeah, I've seen a ghost.

• 34:44Speaker 01

  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?

• 34:57Alie Ward?

  This question comes from patron Kate, who wrote, okay, but the people need to know, does the ologist believe in ghosts? And then five question marks, all of them warranted. Have you ever seen a ghost?

• 35:08Speaker 01

  I have not.

• 35:09Alie Ward?

  Has anyone you know ever sworn, 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?

• 35:22Speaker 01

  All the time. 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 lost 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.

• 35:47Alie Ward?

  Has it led you at all to think maybe there is something else out there? Or has it just sort of doubled down on the, we are just wired for survival, or we just see things we want to see, like an encounter with someone that we miss?

• 36:03Speaker 01

  Uh, yeah, more the second. I'm, I'm kind of a killjoy.

• 36:07Alie Ward?

  No, you're a scientist. You've got the data.

• 36:09Speaker 01

  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 they're, 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 believe they saw should be all I need.

• 36:36Alie Ward?

  Need a little more than that.

• 36:37Speaker 01

  I do, yes.

• 36:39Alie Ward?

  Jennifer Jellytott, first time question asker, says, "Being creeped out is a really unpleasant sensation. No one wants to walk down a dark street 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 creepypasta on the internet." Have you heard of creepypasta?

• 36:58Speaker 01

  Uh, I don't think I have, no.

• 37:00Alie Ward?

  Okay, let's take a step backwards into the shadowy bushes of the internet. Skimpy Toilet Rizlers, let me six, seven you 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 Tinder mistake you should have blocked, found a stash of kratom and texted you a long paragraph with thoughts they should have kept inside their head and/or a lot of peach and squirt and winky tongue out emojis.

• 37:41Alie Ward?

  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 creepypasta 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 spelunker 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, "Ugh, the caves," we do have a Speliology episode about caves.

• 38:23Alie Ward?

  10 out of 10, would not enjoy caving, to be honest. Why do we love creeping ourselves out?

• 38:29Speaker 01

  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.

• 38:41Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 38:41Speaker 01

  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.

• 39:02Speaker 01

  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.

• 39:43Alie Ward?

  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.

• 40:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:08Alie Ward?

  So Frank cites a 2022 study 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.

• 40:25Speaker 01

  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.

• 40:37Alie Ward?

  Right.

• 40:37Speaker 01

  When you ask people to estimate how likely something is to happen, 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 a story just last week where a plane crashed, where they saw a 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, that's never going

• 41:18Speaker 01

  to happen. But in fact, that happens every day, somewhere, happens all the time. But it doesn't make national news, right? New Jersey man falls in shower and, you know, you don't, you don't hear that. So they underestimate the probability of that because they can't think of an example of it happening.

• 41:35Alie Ward?

  So one study, systematic program to reduce the incidence and severity of bathtub and shower area injuries, found that over a 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 1975. 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 2011 titled, incidence of symptoms and accidents during baths and showers among Japanese general public, found that in the 40 to 74 year old age group, over 800,000 combined shower and bathtub falls. But you're about seven times more likely to have an accident falling

• 42:18Alie Ward?

  in the bathtub than the shower. So grab bars, rubber mats, go slow, try not to have a wet floor. Also, the study noted that people bathe every day, usually. So don't freak out, because if you're hearing this, let's say you're 25, you've probably bathed like 8,000 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 44 from 1981 to 2023, which says that unintentional injuries are the leading cause of death for Americans aged one to 44 years old. So if you're not an infant and you have a job, your riskiest job is logging, followed by commercial fishing.

• 43:03Alie Ward?

  So they don't call it the deadliest catch for nothing. Although I'm sure lumberjacks now would be like, I'm catching wood 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 going to 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 suicidology episode, invite you to listen to it. Now, the study also noted that being married lowers your risk. So until death do you part, it gets delayed a bit,

• 43:48Alie Ward?

  which might actually be worth the cost of like matching tablecloths and a tower of fondant 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 grandpa, 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 70s,

• 44:32Alie Ward?

  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, Pavka34, Ree Mcfee, Amelia Dehoff, Emily McLeod, Sarah Mans, Tim Farr, Kim Grenier, Ara Victor, Ads, Adam Weaver, Archie and Sage Scarborough, plus Kate Tims, all had such similar curiosities on this. It was like uncanny, which means strange or mysterious,

• 45:16Alie Ward?

  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 lifelike dolls and robots in that uncanny valley?

• 45:33Speaker 01

  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. 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 respond to them as if they're real people, but consciously we know they're not.

• 46:15Speaker 01

  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 dips into that valley where it's almost exactly human, but it isn't.

• 46:38Alie Ward?

  I'm almost afraid of the AI images getting better and better to where it's undetectable. That's when it starts to creep me 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 2012 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.

• 47:22Alie Ward?

  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 is a little off, we're like, mm, that's a corpse, and we don't like it. So what dead stuff skeeves us out? I'm glad you asked, because the researchers ranked the rank. And in order from the least offensive to the most offensive are, you ready? Okay, least offensive, a dead insect. And the paper says, "As a matter of fact, many of us kill insects without even having the feeling of regret."

• 48:04Alie Ward?

  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.

• 48:48Alie Ward?

  And then, this paper says that the top tier creepy thing, human brains want to avoid is...

• 48:55Alie Ward?

  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 Annabelle, which legend has it, tried to strangle a pair of roommates in the 1970s. And then, Annabelle found her way into the hands of these paranormal researchers, Ed and Lorraine Warren, who deemed the doll to be possessed by demons. They kept it in a glass box to keep everyone safe. Annabelle has been kept for decades as this, like, totem of terror, like, the most haunted object.

• 49:41Alie Ward?

  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 54-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 gonna know. But that was just a few months ago. And, and I guess a testament to just how... Batshit 2025 has been, you may not have even heard about this demon possessed doll killing

• 50:22Alie Ward?

  her handler, or the fact that the doll is now in possession of the recently disgraced comedian Matt Rife, who bought Ed and Lorraine's spooky house in Connecticut and has leased 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 Conjuring's. Okay, there's simply too much going on in the world. And speaking of dolls, Kurt asked, wanted to know, is it 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

• 51:03Alie Ward?

  you found about not creeping women out, either online or in person?

• 51:09Speaker 01

  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

• 51:50Speaker 01

  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.

• 52:07Speaker 01

  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 gotta do, right? Or not do is the case, maybe.

• 52:18Alie Ward?

  Well, what if you're not really normal, but you're not harmful? We're gonna circle back to that. Erin White, Ariel Vincent, Fuzz Goddess, and Kiki Yanni wanted to know, Erin 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?

• 52:44Speaker 01

  That's a really good question. One of the things we ask people in our original study, and this is about 1,300 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 kind of run away from them.

• 53:28Speaker 01

  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.

• 53:43Alie Ward?

  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 in Possible Me search, Anna Elizabeth Kiran H., Anton Kleinschelt, Protect Trans Lives, as well as questions about cultural norms, and even racism, asked by Flora Enfons, Annalise DeYoung, Genesis, Will Clark, Felipe Jimenez, Megan Walker, Jeremy Green, and Bea Hagen. Do you ever have to account for neurodivergence on either side of the research?

• 54:14Speaker 01

  Well, now, this had never even crossed my mind when we were doing the original creepiness stuff.

• 54:19Alie Ward?

  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 Tylenol.

• 54:41Speaker 01

  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.

• 55:00Alie Ward?

  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? So it's, 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.

• 55:42Alie Ward?

  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 Dr. 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

• 56:22Alie Ward?

  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.

• 56:44Alie Ward?

  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 Callology episode, which we'll link in the show notes. And we had another listener who asked about specific creeped out-ness.

• 57:03Speaker 06

  Hi, Ally. 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 Mylar balloons floating away from her. It really, really bothers her. If they could answer that question, that would be great.

• 57:33Alie Ward?

  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 popped 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 40th birthday, my entire staff decided to surprise me," she says.

• 58:19Alie Ward?

  "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 gotta 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,

• 59:00Alie Ward?

  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 Dr. Katie Mack.

• 59:29Speaker 01

  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 of 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.

• 59:52Alie Ward?

  Yeah. Most of us. Yeah, but Mel Roswell, great question from New Zealand, where they have a lot of creepy crawlies or scary crawlies, said, 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?

• 1:00:15Speaker 01

  I think that's more likely.

• 1:00:17Alie Ward?

  Hmm, okay.

• 1:00:18Speaker 01

  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 story 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.

• 1:00:46Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:46Speaker 01

  All it takes is that one time where you see it and aha, you know.

• 1:00:53Speaker 01

  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 and you say, ah, but what about all the times there was a full moon and nothing weird happened? Or all the times something weird happened and there was no full moon?

• 1:01:19Alie Ward?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:01:20Speaker 01

  You know, all it takes is that one incident to reinforce your belief.

• 1:01:25Alie Ward?

  I think about Pennywise and the guy who plays him is very hot and it makes no sense that he's the scariest clown ever because under that makeup, he looks like a male model. His name is Peter Sarsgaard. I started typing up and then I Googled it and realized, no, it is Bill Skarsgård. Peter Sarsgaard, no relation to Stalin, Alex Gustav Villa Walter. He is Sarsgaard. They are scars gear. 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 Eng, 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

• 1:02:09Alie Ward?

  less attractive people are instantly considered creepy? And Melanie asked, will someone being good looking objectively reduce their creepiness scales even if they are a creep?

• 1:02:20Speaker 01

  Uh, yes. You can get away with a lot more if you're good looking than if you're not.

• 1:02:25Alie Ward?

  Oh, dear.

• 1:02:26Speaker 01

  There's something called a halo effect. It's the opposite. 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 or against people based on their appearance. And so now, the good looking person can 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.

• 1:03:12Alie Ward?

  A few people asked about eye contact. Miranda Buckley, Valby 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?

• 1:03:40Speaker 01

  Mm hmm. Yeah, the way eye contact, 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,

• 1:04:25Speaker 01

  and it can be threatening in terms of violence. If you look at two boxers before a boxing match, the stare down, right?

• 1:04:31Alie Ward?

  Yes.

• 1:04:32Speaker 01

  They're looking each other right in the eye, nose to nose, a baseball umpire and a manager having a fight, they're 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?

• 1:05:18Alie Ward?

  Oh, God.

• 1:05:18Speaker 01

  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 who was telling you bad things, you really hated that person more than if they didn't use so much eye contact.

• 1:05:35Alie Ward?

  See the 2018 Frontiers in Psychology paper, Effective Eye Contact: An Integrative Review for a very deep, soulful gaze into that research.

• 1:05:45Speaker 01

  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?

• 1:06:08Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:06:18Alie Ward?

  And that is an assumption, of course, based on the name Gina. And also, fun fact, gender is not binary. So my cis, queer, trans, and NB babies, we discussed that in the wonderful neuroendocrinology episode, which we'll link in the show notes.

• 1:06:30Speaker 01

  We were already talking about males being more threatening and creepier. Women really have to work at it to come across as creepy.

• 1:06:38Alie Ward?

  Hmm.

• 1:06:39Speaker 01

  Because they're not threatening, usually.

• 1:06:43Alie Ward?

  What about goths? I used to be goth for a long time, all black.

• 1:06:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:06:48Alie Ward?

  A lot of fishnets, still wear fishnets, 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 frogs have bright colors? Is this to say, like, don't come near this?

• 1:07:04Speaker 01

  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?

• 1:07:17Alie Ward?

  Yep, exactly.

• 1:07:20Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:07:45Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:45Speaker 01

  And that's within the norm.

• 1:07:47Alie Ward?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:07:48Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:07:57Alie Ward?

  Right. But it takes much more innovation and work to creep people out with your fashion than simply go on a Hot Topic.

• 1:08:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, I would say so.

• 1:08:09Alie Ward?

  I am gagged and so red 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.

• 1:08:21Speaker 05

  Hi, Ally. This is Justice Lorenzo Hall. My question is about the specific creepiness that happens right before you realize you're being scammed online. Scammers try to seem trustworthy, but then something feels off. An unusual turn of phrase and request that's out of character.

• 1:08:38Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:08:46Alie Ward?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:08:47Speaker 01

  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 a ways, 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.

• 1:09:20Alie Ward?

  Yeah, it is. 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 screen 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, um, squickiness, you know, this where suddenly you just want to retract into yourself like an armadillo or a pill bug and just say, don't you dare, you know? I think they call that conglubate in the, you know, natural world. I do have another episode coming up on animal defenses, like spikes and scales and stinks with Dr. Ted Stankovich, and it's a good one.

• 1:10:03Alie Ward?

  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?

• 1:10:13Speaker 01

  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 situations 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.

• 1:10:56Alie Ward?

  What about your favorite thing in terms of researching creepiness? Any moments that have just been like, ah, love?

• 1:11:04Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:11:15Alie Ward?

  I mean, I, you've changed the way we all make eye contact with clowns in bars. That's for sure.

• 1:11:22Speaker 01

  And that's a good thing.

• 1:11:23Alie Ward?

  It's a good thing.

• 1:11:26Alie Ward?

  So ask lovely people creepy questions because why not involve your head when you're watching your back? Thank you to Dr. Frank McAndrew for letting me barrage him with so many spooktober 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 spooktabular 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 and Blue Sky. I'm Ally Ward with one L on both. You can find a whole catalog of about 400, almost 500 episodes by hitting ologies.com. We have kid-friendly, classroom-safe episodes too. In their own feed, they're called Smologies,

• 1:12:11Alie Ward?

  S-M-O-L-O-G-I-E-S. They're linked in the show notes. Ologies merch is available at ologiesmerch.com. You can join Patreon at patreon.com/ologies to support the show and leave questions for the ologists, including audio ones before we record. Erin Talbert admin Zologies Podcast Facebook group. Aveline Malik makes our professional transcripts. Kelly R. Dwyer does the website. The comforting Noelle Dilworth is our scheduling producer. Overseeing the dark corners as managing director is Susan Hale. Jake Chaffee 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

• 1:12:56Alie Ward?

  wonderful song by your podmother, as well as many other bangers and poems, at Jared Sleeper on TikTok. And he also makes shirts that I love at jbstink.com, j-b-stink.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, chair was out of town, and I had had way too much coffee on top of dealing with a too abrupt cessation of Effexor. And everything was terrifying. And in the bedroom, it was like 10:30 at night, I heard someone- Like banging around in my bedroom closet.

• 1:13:40Alie Ward?

  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 Spooktober fun. Cool? Bye bye. Pachydermatology, homeology, cryptozoology, litology, nanotechnology, meteorology, neuropepology, nephology, seriology, cellology.

• 1:14:30Speaker 05

  Well, some people love clouds. Some say Odoo business management software is like fertilizer because of the way it promotes growth. Some say Odoo is like a magic beanstalk, scaling with you while being magically affordable. And some say Odoo's programs for manufacturing, accounting, and more are like building blocks for creating a custom software suite. But I say Odoo is all of it. Fertilizer, magic beanstalk, building blocks for business. Yeah. Odoo, exactly what every business needs. Sign up at Odoo.com. That's O-D-O-O dot com.

• 1:15:01Alie Ward?

  Father Ward, you say, there's no way you would need a career coach. You have it all together. That's a lie, and you know it. I actually hired a career coach, and without them, I wouldn't have started Ologies. It was one of the best investments I've ever made. And if you're like, I don't know where to find a career coach, I can help you. You need an experienced pro who asks the right questions, sets you down a path where you're most likely to succeed. And that's what you can expect from a coach at today's sponsor, strawberry.me. This is so cool. They match you with a certified coach who's been vetted to work closely with company founders. And yeah, sometimes I'm like, oh, wait, that's right. I am one. And if you're founding a business, even if you're along the way and you're maybe stuck in a rut or you have to make a decision about expansion

• 1:15:45Alie Ward?

  or what direction you want to take your company. That's what I did. I went to strawberry.me and I was like, "Okay, can you help me pare down some stuff? I think I have too much on my plate. I'm not sure what to say yes to and what to say no to." And they were super helpful in helping me streamline. And now I get to sleep more and I enjoy that. So get the help every entrepreneur needs. Go to strawberry.me/ologies. That's strawberry.me/ologies. You're the boss.