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

I find these pictures of World War II leaders as children kind of fascinating because it grounds you, 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.

Well, people used to not smile in photos as well. So I think looking at historical photos of children, or sometimes even kids in other cultures, it's like, 'Ooh, why are they all so serious?'

But our creepiness radars are also way off. So 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 ample 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 it's only recently that we even really defined what that vague feeling of creepiness is, and it has a lot to do with just not following social norms.

And 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 was one study where they literally had a waiting room where they also had people and chairs, and the question was how many chairs would you sit away from someone who 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 expect people to act in society.