The Creep Factor

Yesterday I had lunch at the counter of a local diner. I’ve mentioned in the past how guys at the counter are oddly invisible to patrons in booths. Few folks in booths bother to lower their voices even if only four feet from someone on a counter stool. On that stool, one can’t help but unintentionally overhear booth conversations that are often anything but sotto voce. Yesterday one young lady at the booth in back of me said to another at her table, “What a creepy guy!” I of course hoped I was not the creepy guy (one never knows), and fortunately on this occasion I wasn’t. They were referring to a fellow who had just exited the diner. I barely caught a glimpse of him from the back. I don’t know if he interacted at all (such as eye contact) with the ladies. So, I don’t know why he qualified as creepy. How, for that matter, I wondered, does anyone qualify as creepy? The question stuck with me long enough to investigate a bit when I returned home.
 
Francis McAndrew and Sara Koehnke of Knox College were intrigued by the same question. In 2016 they published their empirical study on the subject. One of their key findings was that creepiness involved an ambiguous threat: not a definitive threat but a possible one. An angry man with a knife is not creepy: he is just flat out scary. But someone making furtive glances while keeping one hand in a pocket on what might or might not be a weapon is creepy. We feel uneasy about him but not quite enough to trigger a fight or flight response. The situation is ambiguous. He might mean no harm at all (and have a harmonica in his pocket) or he might be truly dangerous.
 
Women were more likely than men to identify a man as creepy simply for being unattractive. This is not unreasonable since women are in fact more likely than men to be approached sexually by men of any age, demeanor, and appearance – especially in bars and concert halls and the like – so there is always the possibility of having to deal with the approach of some decidedly unappealing character. The “creepy” fellow might in fact have no intention of approaching anyone, but the situation is inherently ambiguous. Men do not have a monopoly on creepiness. Creepy women are not rare. Nevertheless men are a solid majority of the creeps identified by males and females alike.
 
What were some of the manifestations of creepiness offered by respondents in the study? Among them were:
standing too close
greasy hair
a peculiar smile
long fingers (really?)
unkempt hair (me most of the time)
very pale skin (vampires need not apply)
licking lips frequently
dirty clothes
inappropriate emotion
staring or (alternatively) avoiding eye contact altogether
being extremely thin (?)
and having a weird job or hobby such as clown, taxidermist, or undertaker.

Taxidermist Norman Bates managed
to be creepy even in his Norman persona

Atypical appearance and behavior of any kind can arouse wariness: “While they may not be overtly threatening, individuals who display unusual patterns of nonverbal behavior, odd emotional responses, or highly distinctive physical characteristics are outside of the norm, and by definition unpredictable. This may activate our ‘creepiness detector’ and increase our vigilance as we try to discern if there is in fact something to fear or not from the person in question.” Once again, ambiguity is at the core of it.

 
One can see how such judgments can be hard on harmless people who unwittingly check some of the creepiness boxes. They can be socially isolated as a result, which is likely only to increase their social awkwardness. On the other hand, the ‘creepiness detector’ evolved for a reason. Some of the creeps may well be dangerous – or at least troublesome. Standard advice from police is to “trust your gut”: choose safety over avoiding seeming rude. All we can do is to try to keep an open mind about long-fingered lip-licking taxidermists (among others) without entirely ignoring our internal alarms. Besides, each and every one of us is likely to be on the other side of that judgment at some point in life. Anyone who hasn’t creeped out someone sometime just isn’t trying.

Radiohead – Creep