On the Nature of Creepiness [pdf]

My definition is related to yours, but is closer to the articles. FTA:

> It is our belief that creepiness is anxiety aroused by the ambiguity of whether there is something to fear or not

You mentioned:

> you're too focused on something you want, my ass and cleavage for instance

You can be focused on ass and cleavage, but not be creepy: eg, if you're honest and open that that's what you're looking for, and not trying to hide or be something you're not.

Creepiness occurs where that ambiguity exists: there's a discrepancy between someones evident intent and actions.

- If someone's trying to get you away from your friends, with a 'cool thing you need to see', but they clearly want to make out, it's creepy.

- If they say 'I think we should go somewhere and make out' it's less so.

A lot of creepiness comes from shy men who are afraid of rejection, other comes from shy men that understand, eg, that isolation makes people more likely to make out, but try and use subterfuge to make that happen.

I think it's interesting that you phrase things the way you do in your first paragraph. When I moved to California for college from a cold place, I was young and female. (Still female, less young now). Sometimes in southern California it gets very hot. A logical response to heat if you want to be outside is to wear a tank top. So sometimes I would wear a tank top. This would be interpreted as being "locked in competition with other young women to attract some cute guys" -- which was creepy to me, because it's putting a whole layer of sexual intent on wearing a tank top when it's 100 degrees that was not present in the clothing choice. This sexualized interpretation by random guys did increase the likelihood of encounters with high creepiness factors as described in the article.

It is really hard to find a tank top that doesn't show cleavage if you are a certain shape. Tank tops are not always about a struggle for cute young men: these boobs are stuck to the front of me no matter what I'm thinking or doing, and their presence is not a sign of interest.

To assume otherwise causes creepiness.

What's unfair about that reaction?

edit: I'm legitimately asking. One of the things which stuck with me after reading "The Gift of Fear" is that people rarely get 'weird feelings' for no reason. If you're not interacting with somebody and they're still creeping you out, that's a sign that something is wrong. Pay attention to that feeling and get out of that situation, even if it means being rude.

Once you're out of that situation, you can certainly take time to think about "wait, why did that guy creep me out so much?". Maybe once you reflect on it, you'll say "He was way too fixated on that one woman struggling to put her groceries in the trunk of her car" or "He came up behind me on the stairs, but I never heard the door of the apartment building open after I came in, and that means he was probably waiting inside for me to pass him". Maybe you'll realize "oh, I was just being silly and there wasn't anything weird going on at all".

But think about it. What's the worst case scenario of paying attention to that feeling? You rudely brushed off somebody you don't know, didn't interact with, and will never see again. It's a bummer for them, and maybe they'll go home and tell their significant other a story about this one jerk they bumped into in the stairway today.

What's the worst case of ignoring that feeling because you don't want to be rude, or you think you're being unfair? The worst case is that you will get killed. The calculus on that is pretty easy for me.

That's just persistence though. Creepiness takes it to another level: it implies discomfort and fear/anxiety for one's safety/wellbeing. Stalkers are creepy. Overeager salespeople aren't.

Or, maybe, it's the suitor's ability to recognize rejection.

It's not just that. It's continuing despite the other party not being interested. Flirting is a two-way street.

Though not quite the same topic, I do think the NSA could be considered creepy, and the definition of creepy should reflect that. A creep's interest doesn't necessarily have to be sexual.

This is really interesting in light of the studies suggesting that tall people are more successful.

Those results almost always claim that it's an externally mediated result (i.e. that we respect tall people more because they're tall). This would suggest that it might be an internally mediated result (i.e. that tall people are more confident). That would make a lot of sense to me, since we tend to be more acutely aware of our own height than other's heigh.

> But height at age 16 makes all the difference in the world.

I was done growing at age 16. So if you accept that current height can affect wages, then this statement seems trivial (at least to me, with my growth pattern...)

Yes, women realistically do experience a lot more sexual violence than men, so it is not an unfounded worry; but as ordinary and normal and safe reproductive courtship entails a lot more approaches to women, the physically smaller nurturing gender, by men, the larger more aggressive hunting gender, such examples of deviant and opportunistic sexual violence can be seen to "come with the territory" of our evolutionary history. It's nice to imagine that we as a social species could have evolved past this, but in studying our history on the scale of hundreds of years rather than evolutionary scales of thousands of years, and in studying works of scholarship such as the Selfish Gene by Dawkins, one may not be at all surprised that we are where we are, but perhaps by continuing to educate one another we can takes steps to make all people feel, and more importantly be, safer.

The reason I felt it necessary to add the "context" to your statement is that our world consists of many many interacting postitive and negative stochastic processes, and when we look at a simple "violence" statistic it might seem "oh, this is terrible, we must stop this" when in fact things are much more complex than that.

Of course, and they should be wary and protect themselves at all times. I know, because as a man, I'm likely to experience a lot more (non-sexual) violence than women!

However, the problem is that it's not behaviour that's branded "creepy", it's the person; the same behaviour done by another, more attractive male wouldn't be branded as "creepy", so clearly their worries are unfairly biased.

Idk, my dogs seem to like java and lisp on their bigger projects. Then again they are known to be the worst at creating memory leaks whenever they hack C.

Almost certainly.

Garbage collection doesn't seem especially alarming to most of us because it's institutionalized, but "rag men" and "garbage pickers" are still seen as quite creepy because they're individuals taking possessions we identify with. The decision to throw something away doesn't sever it from our identity, especially with old clothes and personal effects.

Of course, the dog effect may be more about theft than identity, because they have no real way to differentiate "taking unwanted objects" from "taking valued objects" - after all, that garbage smelled delicious to them!

Reference counting pauses can actually be worse. Reference counting and tracing are duals, and only collectors that exploit properties of both avoid the worst case complexity of each. Alone they each have just as bad worst cases, just in dual scenarios.

Arguably this is more on-topic than the rest of the thread.

Is that not the same as what GP said? Your modifier is wealth or status. Without those, you move from eccentric to creepy on the sliding scale.

I could be misunderstanding the data due to my pre-work skimming of the article, but looking at a variety of the variables they expose, it seems like many of the highly weighted creepiness factors _do_ align with appearance in absence of action. Greasy hair? Overly thin/pale?

I can understand that some people may consider your parent's comment as looking for excuses/being overly snide/something or other, but it's certainly worth consideration, especially for me in that my anecdotal bayesian prior certainly echoes the sentiment of "appearance buys you breathing room". (As I got older and started caring about my appearance more, I observed my equally nerdy (behaviorally) friends get treated diametrically differently than I was when I KNEW we acted nearly identically after decades together)

Perhaps related to the "Uncanny Valley".

Something categorised as one thing, but with traits of another, in this case "high-status"/"low-status" vs "human"/"non-human".

Problem is, while Human-like is a bit more universal, status is very subjective and cultural. Maybe it's better to focus on the feeling of creepiness, as a possible reflection of your/ones own cognitive dissonance, than the objective "creepiness" of an object.

> There are behaviors that are definitely creepy and should be avoided. People are willing to overlook them if they find the person attractive. That doesn't change the fact that it's best to avoid those behaviors

That isn't what people are talking about. Girls welcome being hit on by guys they find attractive. They hate it from guys they don't find attractive. It's not that the attractive person is doing something they'd be better off not doing but their attractiveness overcomes it, it's that the same behavior is good when an attractive person does it and bad when an unattractive person does it.

Just look at your sibling comment -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11706332

just as a counterargument to the "unfairness of unattractiveness"... that attractiveness is desirable isn't "unfair", it's just the definition of attractiveness. If physical attractiveness didn't matter, "overall losers" (by whatever definition) would complain that wealth, intelligence, charm, IQ, education, social class, or whatever else shouldn't matter either.

It just seem like people are demanding a world where we'd all just screw whoever we bumped into, or nobody or... what, decide it by the roll of a 20 sided die?

That we have attractiveness might be seen as an interesting thing, like we have delicious foods and beautiful art. Of course, nobody wants to lose on any score, but people do like winning, and winning by its nature creates losers.

That's really not a great counterpoint. If you're 5'2" and you try to play basketball the same way Dwight Howard or Shaq does, you're going to have a bad time.

The difference, of course, is that being good at basketball is not necessary to live a happy and fulfilling life.

In contrast, being perceived as creepy and unattractive is a great way to be socially isolated and depressed your whole life.

A1: Yes, both of those behaviors are creepy.

A2: No, attractiveness would not make either interaction feel normal. In the first scenario a complete stranger in a business interaction is hitting on someone. Not just light flirting but implicitly inviting the person over to their house. Creepy even if the creep is attractive. In the second scenario the student is exhibiting deviant behavior by making a sexual advance on a married person. After that he tries to maximize forced contact with the TA, again, creepy no matter what you look like.

Since you mentioned witnessing creepiness: When you watched these scenarios play out, did you get creeped out yourself? I ask because I'm a man and the most I've ever felt creeped out would be when I was witness to an interaction a classmate of mine, a woman, had. Vicarious discomfort, if you will.

Every good rule has an exception. Also it can definitely be about looks or the person, as opposed to behaviour. Really comes down to how shallow the alleged-victim is.