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On the Nature of Creepiness
... This combination of threat with uncertainty about the source of the threat seems to elicit a relatively specific experience of "creepiness" or uncanniness (Jentsch, 1997). For example, creepy individuals are described as being both unpredictable and potentially harmful (using statements such as "I cannot predict how he or she will behave", "I believe that he or she is intentionally hiding something from me") (McAndrew & Koehnke, 2016). A similar pattern emerges in response to environments, where the potential of threat from uncertain sources can make spaces themselves feel creepy (McAndrew, 2020). ...
... To develop this virtual world, we used environmental features that have been associated with ambiguous threat in psychological research, using dark spaces (Grillon et al., 1997;Mühlberger et al., 2008) with areas where an assailant might be hiding (Nasar & Jones, 1997;Rigoli et al., 2016), limiting escape routes (Blöbaum & Hunecke, 2005;Löw et al., 2015;Nasar et al., 1993), and providing clues to the presence of a hostile agent of unknown origin (McAndrew & Koehnke, 2016). ...
... To amplify ambiguous threat by providing areas where an assailant might hide (Nasar & Jones, 1997;Rigoli et al., 2016), the subsequent rooms include dark corners, shelves, boxes, and clouds of steam (e.g., dark office, storage room, flares and steam, shadow). Some rooms further provide clues that an unknown and potentially hostile agent might be present or nearby (McAndrew & Koehnke, 2016) via the sound of footsteps (footsteps), scattered bones and blood stains (blood and bones), a shadow of a moving figure (shadow). The world also includes startling events (Baird, 2000), one in which a door slams abruptly (door slams) and one in which an underground train rides past (train). ...
Threatening environments can be unpredictable in many different ways. The nature of threats, their timing, and their locations in a scene can all be uncertain, even when one is acutely aware of being at risk. Prior research demonstrates that both temporal unpredictability and spatial uncertainty of threats elicit a distinctly anxious psychological response. In the paradigm presented here, we further explore other facets of ambiguous threat via an environment in which there are no concrete threats, predictable or otherwise, but which nevertheless elicits a building sense of danger. By incorporating both psychological research and principles of emotional game design, we constructed this world and then tested its effects in three studies. In line with our goals, participants experienced the environment as creepy and unpredictable. Their subjective and physiological response to the world rose and fell in line with the presentation of ambiguously threatening ambient cues. Exploratory analyses further suggest that this ambiguously threatening experience influenced memory for the virtual world and its underlying narrative. Together the data demonstrate that naturalistic virtual worlds can effectively elicit a multifaceted experience of ambiguous threat with subjective and cognitive consequences.
... McAndrew (2020) argued that certain physical places can be perceived as creepy if they trigger agent detection mechanisms sensitive to indicators of the presence of harmful entities. Similarly, McAndrew and Koehnke (2016) proposed that creepiness is generally elicited by threat ambiguity: indicators of potential danger, independent of the stimulus' category. Furthermore, absence of light may contribute to agent detection mechanisms as darkness increases the intensity of startle responses (Grillon, Pellewoski, Merikangas, & Davies, 1997;Mühlberger, Wieser, & Pauli, 2008) and enhances detection of potential threat of ethnic outgroups (Schaller, Park, & Faulkner, 2003). ...
... Fourth and fifth, if threat ambiguity underlies the uncanniness of places, threat should predict uncanniness of physical places (McAndrew & Koehnke, 2016;threat hypothesis). On the other hand, abnormality should predict uncanniness ratings according to the hypothesis that deviation from familiarity underlies the effect (Diel & Lewis, 2022;deviation hypothesis A). ...
... Lack of light has been associated with perceived lack of safety in past research (Boomsma & Steg, 2014). These results align with McAndrew and Koehnke's (2016) theory of threat ambiguity and with Stamps (2007) observations that lighting and occlusion increase a place's sense of mystery or lack of information. ...
Certain built environments can decrease aesthetic appeal. For humans and objects, deviation from typical appearances leads to nonlinear appraisal characterised as the uncanny valley. The first time, it was explored whether an uncanny valley can be found for built environments. In Experiment 1, a cubic N-shaped function of uncanniness plotted against realism of built environments was found, indicating an uncanny valley. Quantitative and qualitative data indicate an association between uncanniness and structural anomalies. Experiment 2 explored distortions leading to uncanniness of indoor places. In Experiment 3, human presence decreased uncanniness of distorted indoor public places but increased uncanniness of private rooms. Taken together, the evidence indicates that deviations from familiar configural patterns drive uncanniness of built physical places. Thus, strong deviations from a built environment's predictable pattern decreases its aesthetic appeal.
... Creepiness" is a commonly reported but little understood or empirically studied phenomenon. The present research sought to extend seminal work conducted by McAndrew and Koehnke (2016) and Watt et al. (2017) by examining the role of the ambiguity of threat, and attendance to eyes (vs. other facial regions) in perceptions of creepiness. ...
... Creepiness is a commonly reported but little understood or empirically examined social phenomena; however, interest seems to be gaining traction. Recent studies have examined creepiness in situations (Langer & König, 2018), physical surroundings (McAndrews, 2020), and objects (e.g., dolls and masks) and occupations (McAndrew & Koehnke, 2016). Most relevant to the present investigation are two studies that have examined creepiness as it presents in individuals and is educed in social interactions. ...
... Most participants reported making judgments of creepiness instantly (72%) and most (72%) indicated that they would avoid or ignore a creepy individual. This avoidance suggests some ambiguity as to whether the creepy person is perceived as threatening or just undesirable; as McAndrew and Koehnke (2016) suggested, "we do not necessarily assume ill intentions from people who are creepy, although we may still worry that they are dangerous" (p. 16). ...
“Creepiness” is a commonly reported but little understood or empirically studied phenomenon. The present
research sought to extend seminal work conducted by McAndrew and Koehnke (2016) and Watt et al.
(2017) by examining the role of the ambiguity of threat, and attendance to eyes (vs. other facial regions) in
perceptions of creepiness. In Study 1 (N = 254; 79% female) participants completed measures of
discomfort with ambiguity, intolerance of uncertainty, and fear of the unknown; then rated 30 facial
images for creepiness, trustworthiness, and attractiveness. High discomfort with ambiguity (vs. intolerance
of uncertainty and fear of unknown) best predicted creepiness ratings. Study 2 (N = 32; 67% female)
utilized eye-tracking to evaluate how observers attended to the eye and noneye regions of two creepy and
two neutral male facial images derived from Study 1. Results showed participants fixated significantly
longer on the eyes (vs. noneyes) for all facial images. Results are discussed in terms of implications for how
we assess risk in daily life, and for those deemed to be creepy.
... While their study is not directly relevant to the creepiness of inanimate objects, their fndings echoed some of the qualitative evidence in HCI where creepiness is linked to violation of norms and the perceived possibility of harm. McAndrew and Koehnke [43] used an online survey to establish that unpredictability was a key factor in creepiness. This fnding is a relevant aspect for our work as the potentially creepy technologies in HCI research also contained a certain je ne sais quoi element. ...
... In such cases, the moderators explored the topic further. The adjectives were adapted from related work [35,43,52,79,81] with the help of the Oxford Thesaurus of English [78]. ...
... The term 'undesirability' highlights the feeling of unease inherent to the artefact, which can be due to a variety of factors such as social context or aesthetic appearance. This dimension is based on McAndrew and Koehnke's [43] research, adapted to the creepiness of inanimate objects. Focus group participants refected on negative social consequences of using the technologies with which they were interacting: P1: But I fnd it a bit creepy. ...
Interactive technologies are getting closer to our bodies and permeate the infrastructure of our homes. While such technologies offer many benefits, they can also cause an initial feeling of unease in users. It is important for Human-Computer Interaction to manage first impressions and avoid designing technologies that appear creepy. To that end, we developed the Perceived Creepiness of Technology Scale (PCTS), which measures how creepy a technology appears to a user in an initial encounter with a new artefact. The scale was developed based on past work on creepiness and a set of ten focus groups conducted with users from diverse backgrounds. We followed a structured process of analytically developing and validating the scale. The PCTS is designed to enable designers and researchers to quickly compare interactive technologies and ensure that they do not design technologies that produce initial feelings of creepiness in users.
... The role of facial ambiguity in social perception is congruent with recent research on creepiness and the uncanny valley. With regard to the former, some authors argue that creepiness is an unpleasant emotional response that arises from some ambiguity in a potential threat and may rely on information gathered from certain facial cues of a target person (McAndrew & Koehnke, 2016;Watt, Maitland, & Gallagher, 2017). Creepiness may be better understood in the context of social interactions, being associated with violation of social norms and appraisals of untrustworthiness, which suggest that creepiness may be an adaptive response directed to increase vigilance during periods of social uncertainty (McAndrew & Koehnke, 2016). ...
... With regard to the former, some authors argue that creepiness is an unpleasant emotional response that arises from some ambiguity in a potential threat and may rely on information gathered from certain facial cues of a target person (McAndrew & Koehnke, 2016;Watt, Maitland, & Gallagher, 2017). Creepiness may be better understood in the context of social interactions, being associated with violation of social norms and appraisals of untrustworthiness, which suggest that creepiness may be an adaptive response directed to increase vigilance during periods of social uncertainty (McAndrew & Koehnke, 2016). Indeed, the link between ambiguity and social danger is supported by evolutionary theory (Becker et al., 2011;Oosterhof & Todorov, 2008) and neuroimaging evidence, which has shown a link between social anxiety and greater activation of the amygdala in response to ambiguous stimuli (Griffin & Langlois, 2006;Thomas et al., 2001). ...
... Therefore, we wanted to ensure that our face stimuli would be perceived as uncanny in the real world. On this basis, we decided to focus on male faces given their greater propensity to elicit the creepiness response (McAndrew & Koehnke, 2016;Watt et al., 2017). ...
We used implicit and explicit measures to study whether “real” uncanny faces (by faces of Botox users and very ugly people) will be associated with perceptions of bad moral character and social avoidance. Implicit measures showed that uncanny faces were more strongly associated with negative aesthetic evaluations (“ugliness”) than with negative moral evaluation (“moral disgust”). At the explicit level, participants preferred greater social distance from uncanny faces than from neutral faces and inferred that they shared fewer moral values with uncanny faces than with neutral faces. Contrary to our hypotheses, only Ugly faces (but not Botox faces) were perceived as more likely to commit behaviors that indicate bad moral character. However, when this analysis was restricted to “sick” immoral actions, Botox faces were perceived as more likely to be engage in these kind of behaviors than neutral faces. Although exploratory in nature, this investigation suggest that ugliness (more than creepiness) may be the crucial evaluative dimension underlying rapid moral inferences from faces.
... The role of facial ambiguity in social perception is congruent with recent research on creepiness and the uncanny valley. With regard to the former, some authors argue that creepiness is an unpleasant emotional response that arises from some ambiguity in a potential threat and may rely on information gathered from certain facial cues of a target person (McAndrew & Koehnke, 2016;Watt, Maitland, & Gallagher, 2017). Creepiness may be better understood in the context of social interactions, being associated with violation of social norms and appraisals of untrustworthiness, which suggest that creepiness may be an adaptive response directed to increase vigilance during periods of social uncertainty (McAndrew & Koehnke, 2016). ...
... With regard to the former, some authors argue that creepiness is an unpleasant emotional response that arises from some ambiguity in a potential threat and may rely on information gathered from certain facial cues of a target person (McAndrew & Koehnke, 2016;Watt, Maitland, & Gallagher, 2017). Creepiness may be better understood in the context of social interactions, being associated with violation of social norms and appraisals of untrustworthiness, which suggest that creepiness may be an adaptive response directed to increase vigilance during periods of social uncertainty (McAndrew & Koehnke, 2016). Indeed, the link between ambiguity and social danger is supported by evolutionary theory (Becker et al., 2011;Oosterhof & Todorov, 2008) and neuroimaging evidence, which has shown a link between social anxiety and greater activation of the amygdala in response to ambiguous stimuli (Griffin & Langlois, 2006;Thomas et al., 2001). ...
... Therefore, we wanted to ensure that our face stimuli would be perceived as uncanny in the real world. On this basis, we decided to focus on male faces given their greater propensity to elicit the creepiness response (McAndrew & Koehnke, 2016;Watt et al., 2017). ...
We used implicit and explicit measures to study whether “real” uncanny faces (by faces of
Botox users and very ugly people) will be associated with perceptions of bad moral
character and social avoidance. Implicit measures showed that uncanny faces were more
strongly associated with negative aesthetic evaluations (“ugliness”) than with negative
moral evaluation (“moral disgust”). At the explicit level, participants preferred greater
social distance from uncanny faces than from neutral faces and inferred that they shared
fewer moral values with uncanny faces than with neutral faces. Contrary to our hypotheses,
only Ugly faces (but not Botox faces) were perceived as more likely to commit behaviors
that indicate bad moral character. However, when this analysis was restricted to “sick”
immoral actions, Botox faces were perceived as more likely to be engage in these kind of
behaviors than neutral faces. Although exploratory in nature, this investigation suggest that
ugliness (more than creepiness) may be the crucial evaluative dimension underlying rapid
moral inferences from faces.
... While their study is not directly relevant to the creepiness of inanimate objects, their findings echoed some of the qualitative evidence in HCI where creepiness is linked to violation of norms and the perceived possibility of harm. McAndrew and Koehnke [43] used an online survey to establish that unpredictability was a key factor in creepiness. This finding is a relevant aspect for our work as the potentially creepy technologies in HCI research also contained a certain je ne sais quoi element. ...
... In such cases, the moderators explored the topic further. The adjectives were adapted from related work [35,43,52,79,81] with the help of the Oxford Thesaurus of English [78]. ...
... The term 'undesirability' highlights the feeling of unease inherent to the artefact, which can be due to a variety of factors such as social context or aesthetic appearance. This dimension is based on McAndrew and Koehnke's [43] research, adapted to the creepiness of inanimate objects. Focus group participants reflected on negative social consequences of using the technologies with which they were interacting: P1: But I find it a bit creepy. ...
Interactive technologies are getting closer to our bodies and permeate the infrastructure of our homes. While such technologies offer many benefits, they can also cause an initial feeling of unease in users. It is important for Human-Computer Interaction to manage first impressions and avoid designing technologies that appear creepy. To that end, we developed the Perceived Creepiness of Technology Scale (PCTS), which measures how creepy a technology appears to a user in an initial encounter with a new artefact. The scale was developed based on past work on creepiness and a set of ten focus groups conducted with users from diverse backgrounds. We followed a structured process of analytically developing and validating the scale. The PCTS is designed to enable designers and researchers to quickly compare interactive technologies and ensure that they do not design technologies that produce initial feelings of creepiness in users.
... However, this view of creepiness does not seem as relevant to our understanding of the creepiness of places. Instead, a theory proposed by McAndrew and Koehnke (2016) that Smith has called the "Threat Ambiguity Theory" of creepiness seems more applicable to this issue. ...
... It could be perilous to ignore your intuition and remain in a place that is dangerous, but it would also be a bit embarrassing to run screaming out of the house if there is actually nothing to fear. This is the psychology behind feeling "creeped out," and it is a reaction that may be useful if it helps you maintain vigilance when threat is uncertain (McAndrew & Koehnke, 2016). ...
... In summary, recent scientific work confirms that the plots and props of contemporary horror fiction and film are securely anchored in the parts of our Geography & Architecture of Horror 30 unconscious that we have inherited from our prehistoric ancestors. McAndrew and Koehnke (2016) proposed that our reactions to "creepy people" are based upon ambiguity and our lack of confidence about being able to read their intentions. It appears that this theoretical framework might work equally well in helping us understand our reactions to creepy places. ...
It is the goal of this paper to apply what psychologists and other social scientists have learned about human emotional responses to physical surroundings to an understanding of why some types of settings and some combinations of sensory information can induce a sense of dread in humans. The hoped-for contribution is to bring empirical evidence from psychological research to bear on the experience of horror, and to explain why the tried-and-true horror devices intuitively employed by writers and filmmakers work so well. Research has demonstrated that human beings have been programmed by evolution to respond emotionally to their physical surroundings, and natural selection has favored individuals who gravitated toward environments containing the “right” physical and psychological features. Places that contain a bad mix of these features induce unpleasant feelings of dread and fear, and therefore have become important ingredients of the settings for horror fiction and films. This article applies McAndrew and Koehnke’s (2016) theory of creepiness to the study of classic horror settings and explores the role played by architecture, isolation, association with death, and other environmental qualities in the experience of creepiness and dread.
... We examine children's perceptions of fear through the colloquial term of "creepy. " We chose to examine children's perceptions of creepiness because it is an all-encompassing everyday word that covers topics of threat, fear, strangeness, weirdness, unpredictability, and the unknown [63,88]. In our research on child-computer interaction, children in our studies and design sessions often used the word "creepy" as a way to convey negative feelings about design and technology. ...
... In our research on child-computer interaction, children in our studies and design sessions often used the word "creepy" as a way to convey negative feelings about design and technology. Surprisingly, creepy as a term has just recently been defned and studied [63,88]. We aimed to answer two research questions: ...
... To better understand children's fears of technologies, we chose to use the colloquial word "creepy" as a way for children to both examine and express their fears. Prior work defnes creepiness as the anxiety aroused specifcally by ambiguity surrounding a potential, but uncertain, threat [63]. In contrast, scariness is more closely linked to direct and certain threat [43]. ...
In HCI, adult concerns about technologies for children have been studied extensively. However, less is known about what children themselves find concerning in everyday technologies. We examine children's technology-related fears by probing their use of the colloquial term "creepy." To understand children's perceptions of "creepy technologies," we conducted four participatory design sessions with children (ages 7 - 11) to design and evaluate creepy technologies, followed by interviews with the same children. We found that children's fear reactions emphasized physical harm and threats to their relationships (particularly with attachment figures). The creepy signals from technology the children described include: deception, lack of control, mimicry, ominous physical appearance, and unpredictability. Children acknowledged trusted adults will mediate the relationship between creepy technology signals and fear responses. Our work contributes a close examination of what children mean when they say a technology is "creepy." By treating these concerns as principal design considerations, developers can build systems that are more transparent about the risks they produce and more sensitive to the fears they may unintentionally raise.
... For lack of a better description, people tend to refer to ambiguous situations, or ones they have difficulty judging, or that evoke uneasy feelings as "creepy." Feelings of creepiness can also arise in interpersonal situations, for example when meeting strangers (McAndrew and Koehnke, 2016). However, research on creepiness is still in its infancy as it is not yet clear what constitutes creepiness and what are the antecedents and consequences. ...
... Creepiness is a rather new concept in research. In their study, "On the nature of creepiness, " McAndrew and Koehnke (2016) analyzed creepy situations and why they were classified as such -for instance, why does being approached by a stranger in the night lead to feelings of creepiness (McAndrew and Koehnke, 2016). McAndrew and Koehnke (2016) argued that unpredictability evokes creepiness. ...
... Creepiness is a rather new concept in research. In their study, "On the nature of creepiness, " McAndrew and Koehnke (2016) analyzed creepy situations and why they were classified as such -for instance, why does being approached by a stranger in the night lead to feelings of creepiness (McAndrew and Koehnke, 2016). McAndrew and Koehnke (2016) argued that unpredictability evokes creepiness. ...
When people interact with novel technologies (e.g., robots, novel technological tools), the word "creepy" regularly pops up. We define creepy situations as eliciting uneasy feelings and involving ambiguity (e.g., on how the behave or how to judge the situation). A common metric for creepiness would help evaluating creepiness of situations and developing adequate interventions against creepiness. Following psychometrical guidelines, we developed the Creepiness of Situation Scale (CRoSS) across four studies with a total of N = 882 American and German participants. In Studies 1-3, participants watched a video of a creepy situation involving technology. Study 1 used exploratory factor analysis in an American sample and showed that creepiness consists of emotional creepiness and creepy ambiguity. In a German sample, Study 2 confirmed these subdimensions. Study 3 supported validity of the CRoSS as creepiness correlated positively with privacy concerns and computer anxiety, but negatively with controllability and transparency. Study 4 used the scale in a 2 (male vs. female experimenter) × 2 (male vs. female participant) × 2 (day vs. night) field study to demonstrate its usefulness for non-technological settings and its sensitivity to theory-based predictions. Results indicate that participants contacted by an experimenter at night-time reported higher feelings of creepiness. Overall, these studies suggest that the CRoSS is a psychometrically sound measure for research and practice.
... Some scholars recently proposed that continued opposition to GMF is affectively based (e.g., Blancke et al., 2015), with several studies documenting a robust link be- McAndrew & Koehnke (2016) found that contra-normative behavior (disregard for social rules) and appearance, e.g., shabby dress and poor hygiene, were common triggers of "creepiness", with "creepy" individuals' behaviors being associated with higher-than-neutral ratings of unpredictability or uncertainty.1 This has important theoretical implications: to the extent that the fear of unknown or opaque risks has been said to lie "at the heart of public opposition" to GMO (Hossein et al., 2002, p. 8; see also Nelson, 2001) -just as it appears to lie at the heart of public opposition to other forms of new technology -individual variation in propensity to feel creeped out would appear to be a logical candidate for the affective disposition underlying the public's opposition to GMF. ...
... One week later, a randomly selected subset of subjects (N = 42) received a supplementary "word meaning check" survey (see Appendix A for details) designed to ascertain that the subjects' understanding of the term "creeped out" matched the relevant understanding of the authors' (fear associated with uncertainty of threat) (per McAndrew & Koehnke [2016]). The data indicated that it did. ...
... The data indicated that it did. In line with McAndrew and Koehnke (2016), subjects tended to associate "feeling creeped out" with "nervousness/unease" regarding a potential threat, but not with certain danger or disgust, thus clearly conceptualizing "creeped out" as a special member of the fear family. ...
In line with earlier research, a multi-phase study found a significant positive association between a widely used measure of trait disgust and people’s tendency to favor absolutist (non-consequentialist) restrictions on genetically modified food (GMF). However, a more nuanced high-granularity approach showed that it was individual sensitivity to fear (specifically, a tendency to feel creeped out by strange and subtly deviant events) rather than a tendency to be disgusted (orally inhibited) by these events that was a unique predictor of absolutist opposition to GMF and other types of new technology. This finding is consistent with prior theorizing and research demonstrating fear to be “the major determiner of public perception and acceptance of risk for a wide range of hazards” related to new technology (e.g., nuclear power) (Slovic & Peters, 2006, p. 322). The present study calls attention to the importance of conducting future assessments of disgust (and other affective constructs) in a manner that, among other things, recognizes the substantial disconnect between theoretical and lay meanings of the term and illustrates how a policy-guiding result may arise from a sheer miscommunication between a researcher and a subject. © 2017, Society for Judgment and Decision making. All rights reserved.
... Since affective technologies challenge existing cognitive schemes and elicit a feeling of uncertainty (Freude et al. 2019), they evoke emotional creepiness among users. This is in line with psychological research which suggests that unpredictability activates a sense of creepiness (McAndrew and Koehnke 2016). ...
... Particularly, I supplement the personalization-privacy trade-off by including the factors perceived emotional support and emotional creepiness. So far, those factors have been investigated mostly in the context of human-human interaction (House 1981;McAndrew and Koehnke 2016). However, since affective technologies possess emotional intelligence, they can fulfill emotional requirements by capturing and analyzing human emotions (Huang and Rust 2018). ...
By leveraging recent advancements in affective computing, emotion-based personalization systems provide media offerings tailored to users' emotions. Although emotionally intelligent systems increasingly attract attention both in research and in practice, research on users' perceptions of emotion-based personalization is sparse. Building on the personalization-privacy trade-off, I propose a comprehensive framework to investigate how the use of affective technologies for personalization impacts users' trust mediated by their perceived benefits and threats. To test the research model, I conduct an experiment with a fictitious music personalization system and analyze the results using partial least squares structural equation modeling. The results show that emotion-based personalization positively impacts users' trust via perceived emotional support but simultaneously hampers trust via privacy concerns and emotional creepiness.
... A sense of creepiness, then, may be an adaptive response that increases vigilance towards a socially dangerous target (McAndrew & Koehnke, 2016;Watt et al., 2017). Similarly, research on the "uncanny valley" suggests that deviant facial expressions signal social ambiguity and psychopathic traits (Olivera-La Rosa, 2018;Tinwell et al., 2013). ...
... Secondly, based on previous studies suggesting that the emotional response of creepiness (the "uncanny feeling") is triggered by deviant facial expressions signaling social uncertainty and appraisals of psychopathic traits (McAndrew & Koehnke, 2016;Tinwell et al., 2013), we predicted (H2) that affective deviants would be rated as "creepier" than normative targets. Our results supported this hypothesis. ...
We assessed negative bias in Colombian young offenders towards affective deviants (those who violate emotional norms). Postulating that affective deviants elicit an “uncanny/creepy” feeling resembling that produced by psychopaths, we explored social judgments of affective deviants in individuals with callous-unemotional (CU) traits. 188 young offenders evaluated a target displaying congruent or incongruent affective displays in response to pictures eliciting positive/negative affect, depending on the condition. Affective deviants were rated as creepier and less trustworthy, and more likely to have bad moral character, than targets who displayed normative affect. Further, affective deviants who displayed positive affect in response to negative stimuli were rated as having worse moral character than those who displayed negative affect in response to positive stimuli. CU traits predicted lower trustworthiness judgments of targets in congruent conditions, but higher trustworthiness judgments of targets in incongruent conditions. CU traits also predicted higher desired social distance and creepiness judgments in congruent conditions. Creepiness ratings correlated with judgments of bad moral character, suggesting that this emotional response may be involved in moral evaluations of strangers. These findings indicate that deviant affective displays produce a variety of negative social judgments, with CU traits playing a role in these social cognitive heuristics.
... Objects, situations, and events that do not fit our everyday understanding of the world are often described as eerie, creepy, or uncanny. These ascriptions can be made regarding new technologies (Langer & König, 2018), unusual human behavior (McAndrew & Koehnke, 2016), or peculiar coincidences (Freud, 1919(Freud, /2003. Negative evaluations can hinder the adoption of supportive products like healthcare robots (Olaronke, Ojerinde, & Ikono, 2017) or service chatbots (Ciechanowski, Przegalińska, Magnuski, & Gloor, 2019). ...
... Moosa & Ud-Dean, 2010;Palomäki et al.,2018;Rosenthal et al., 2014). The entities could also appear threatening because of their ambiguity(McAndrew & Koehnke, 2016). ...
The uncanny valley (UV) effect is a negative affective reaction to human-looking artificial entities. It hinders comfortable, trust-based interactions with android robots and virtual characters. Despite extensive research, a consensus has not formed on its theoretical basis or methodologies. We conducted a meta-analysis to assess operationalizations of human likeness (independent variable) and the UV effect (dependent variable). Of 468 studies, 72 met the inclusion criteria. The studies employed 10 different stimulus creation techniques, 39 affect measures, and 14 indirect measures. Based on 247 effect sizes, a three-level meta-analysis model revealed the UV effect had a large effect size, Hedges' g = 1.01 [0.80, 1.22]. A mixed-effects meta-regression model with creation technique as the moderator variable revealed face distortion produced the largest effect size, g = 1.46 [0.69, 2.24], followed by distinct entities, g = 1.20 [1.02, 1.38], realism render, g = 0.99 [0.62, 1.36], and morphing, g = 0.94 [0.64, 1.24]. Affective indices producing the largest effects were threatening, likable, aesthetics, familiarity, and eeriness, and indirect measures were dislike frequency, categorization reaction time, like frequency, avoidance, and viewing duration. This meta-analysis-the first on the UV effect-provides a methodological foundation and design principles for future research.
... Tene and Polonetsky [102] note that creepiness is "highly subjective and difcult to generalize," but specify that it may be a response to behavior that "leans in" against traditional social norms. Research in social psychology investigating creepiness in human encounters [53] suggests that feeling "creeped out" is "an emotional response to ambiguity about the presence of threat" [60]. In HCI, creepiness has been defned as "an emotional response to a sense of wrongness that is difcult to clearly articulate" [91]. ...
... [91]); (ii) ambiguity of the threat (e.g. [51,60]) resulting from boundary violation; and (iii) user control over privacy (e.g. [110,114]). ...
... There is agreement that creepiness is an unpleasant emotional response that arises from some ambiguity in a potential threat. Consistent with this view, McAndrew and Koehnke (2016) found that males (who are more physically threatening than females) were more likely to be perceived as creepy by both males and females, and that females were more likely to associate sexual threat with creepiness. Watt et al. (2017) extended these findings by showing that creepiness largely resided in the eyes, that perceptions of creepiness were associated with violation of social norms, and that creepiness correlated positively with untrustworthiness. ...
... 63). Therefore, the possibility that creepiness is an adaptive response directed to increase vigilance during periods of social uncertainty (e.g., interactions with novel targets) has been proposed by some authors (McAndrew and Koehnke, 2016). This claim fits well with an evolutionary account of unfamiliar social interactions: from an evolutionary perspective, it is crucial to detect diagnostic signals that reveal whether an unfamiliar target is an enemy or a friend (Becker et al., 2011). ...
With an estimated 50 million or more users worldwide, Tinder has become one of the most popular mobile dating applications. Although judgments of physical attractiveness are assumed to drive the “swiping” decisions that lead to matches, we propose that there is an additional evaluative dimension driving behind these decisions: judgments of moral character. With the aim of adding empirical support for this proposition, we critically review the most striking findings about first impressions extracted from faces, moral character in person perception, creepiness, and the uncanny valley, as they apply to Tinder behavior. Drawing on this research and the evolutionary theory of biological markets, we formulate several hypotheses that offer directions for future studies of Tinder and other dating apps. We conclude that research on face perception of novel targets supports the plausibility of moral character as a potential factor affecting the swiping decisions and subsequent behavior of Tinder users.
... An empirical study on creepiness by McAndrew [10] revealed several factors that make us feel uneasy. The study starts with the observation that it is a non-pleasant sensation as a response to a social mismatch that puts us on our guard against a potentially threatening person or situation. ...
... They were considered subtle and invasive at the same time. As long as the sponsored recommendations are in line with the user context, they might sufficiently blend in, but as soon as the users sense a mismatch [10], and the sponsored content is not labelled as such, users start to feel uneasy and might start to distrust the user context as a whole, particularly if the user context is considered private, such as a chat window. ...
Personalized advertisements are the price we have to pay for free social media platforms. Various studies have been carried out on user acceptance of such advertisements in general and most countries have adopted laws and regulations with respect to privacy and data protection. However, not all advertisements evoke the same responses: some ads are considered more annoying, intrusive or creepy than others. In this paper, we present the results of an observational study on user responses to actual Facebook advertisements. The results show that mismatches in terms of context, unexpected data collection or inference, overly generic explanations and repetition are common causes of anxiety and distrust.
... Other studies have explored the emotional feeling of "creepiness" outside the context of the uncanny valley. McAndrew and Koehnke (2016) found evidence supporting the hypothesis that the "creepy" psychological reaction is related to anxiety caused by the presence of an ambiguous threat. These results were extended by Watt, Maitland, and Gallagher (2017), whose findings suggested that creepiness was associated with a sense of social ambiguity and that creepiness evaluations were most easily caused by facial features. ...
... Specifically, it may be that the use of female faces as uncanny stimuli may have weakened the strength of the UF. Indeed, some evidence suggests that men are more likely to be perceived as "creepy" than women (McAndrew & Koehnke, 2016;Watt, Maitland, & Gallagher, 2017), which is congruent with males being more physically threatening. Nevertheless, we found no sex differences in participants' implicit responses to the stimuli. ...
Contradictory findings with regard to the nonlinear relation between human likeness and affective reactions have characterized psychological research on the uncanny valley hypothesis (Mori 1970/2005). In the present study we explored the phenomenology of the uncanny feeling (UF) by assessing implicit associations between uncanny stimuli (by android faces) and two emotional responses previously associated with the uncanny: fear and disgust. Further, we tested whether perception of uncanny stimuli would facilitate cognitions of deviant ("sick") morality and mental illness, as suggested by previous literature. Across five Single-Target Implicit Association Tests we found support only for a slight association of the UF with moral disgust (relative to fear). We found no evidence of an implicit link between the UF and fear or general disgust, nor did the UF implicitly facilitate cognitions of psychopathy.
... 80 of these were organized into 8-item clusters detailed in Table 2 (Appendix). Due to its precise classification being the present point of contention, "creeped out" was retained as a "free-standing" term, though, in our view, the evidence from prior research (Royzman et al., 2017;McAndrew & Koehnke, 2016), clearly substantiates its inclusion in a Fear (Afraid + Worry + Suspicion) super-cluster. ...
... 80 of these were organized into 8 item-clusters detailed in Table 2.11 (No affective cluster was formed around "bothered" due the extremely low granularity of the term.) Due to its precise classification being the present point of contention, "creeped out" was retained as a "free-standing" term, though, in our view, the evidence from prior research (Royzman et al., 2017;McAndrew & Koehnke, 2016), clearly substantiates its inclusion in the Fear (Afraid + Worry + Suspicion) super-cluster. ...
Scott, Inbar and Rozin (2016) presented evidence that trait disgust predicts opposition to genetically modified food (GMF). Royzman, Cusimano, and Leeman (2017) argued that these authors did not appropriately measure trait disgust (disgust qua oral inhibition or OI) and that, once appropriately measured, the hypothesized association between disgust and GMF attitudes was not present. In their commentary, Inbar and Scott (2018) challenge our conclusions in several ways. In this response, we defend our conclusions by showing (a) that OI is psychometrically distinct from other affective categories, (b) that OI is widely held to be the criterial feature of disgust and (c) that we were well-justified to pair OI with the pathogen-linked vignettes that we used. Furthermore, we extend our critique to the new findings presented by Inbar and Scott (2018); we show that worry and suspicion (not disgust) are the dominant affective states one is likely to experience while thinking about GMF and that the true prevalence of disgust is about zero. We conclude by underscoring that the present argument and findings are a part of a larger body of evidence challenging any causal effect of disgust on morality.
... The present study was impelled by the following hypotheses: (1) People would report making relatively rapid (vs. more deliberative) judgments of "creepiness" based on facial features, particularly the eyes (Cheetham et al., 2013;Kahneman, 2013); (2) "creepiness" would relate positively to untrustworthiness, which would relate negatively to physical attractiveness (Porter et al., 2009); and (3) women would report identifying "creepy" people faster, and perceive them as more threatening, than men (see McAndrew & Koehnke, 2016;Stillman et al., 2010). ...
... Instead, we see high levels of avoidance (flight), indicating that the person is perceived to be undesirable but not necessarily physically threatening to the observer. This aligns with McAndrew and Koehnke's (2016) suggestion that "we do not necessarily assume ill intentions from people who are creepy, although we may still worry that they are dangerous" (p. 16). ...
The present research examined “creepiness,” a commonly referenced but little understood construct. In Study 1, 185 undergraduates (74% women) provided qualitative data on the defining characteristics of “creepiness.” “Creepiness” was found to reside in the eyes, and was associated with men with ectomorphic-like bodies, with a dishevelled appearance, between 31 and 50 years of age. In Study 2, 48 students (71% women) rated black-and-white photographs of Caucasian male faces on a 7-point Likert-type scale for “creepiness,” trustworthiness, and attractiveness. Pictures included 15 neutral images from the Sterling University Psychological Image Collection, 15 images from America’s Most Wanted website, and 15 images rated most “creepy” in a pilot study. “Creepy” faces were perceived to be significantly less trustworthy, less attractive, and more “creepy” than the other 2 groups. There was a significant correlation between trustworthiness and attractiveness across all 3 groups, with between 25% and 58% of the variance in trustworthiness ratings explained by attractiveness. Results are discussed in terms of how judgments of “creepiness” are made, how “creepiness” may be less about physical peril and more about ambiguity of threat and violations of social norms, and implications for stigmatized populations such as the mentally ill.
... The frst HCI work on the phenomenon of creepy user experiences is now ten years old [73]. Following the publication of this work, a subset of computing researchers interested in creepiness began to coalesce [61], with the subsequent expansion of creepiness research into the felds of psychology and legal studies (e.g., [15,30,35,38,77]). In recent years, several major studies about creepiness have been published by the HCI community (e.g., [58,82,84]). ...
... Applied to the present context, "Houses that send signals of being haunted give us the creeps not because they pose a clear threat to us, but rather because it is unclear whether or not they represent a threat (McAndrew, 2020, para 39, emphasis original). It is this ambivalence which leaves one "frozen in place, wallowing in unease" (McAndrew & Koehnke, 2016;p. 11). ...
Fieldwork studies of "haunted houses" can offer ecologically valid insights for model-building or theory-formation in consciousness studies from parapsychological and conventional perspectives. The interactionist hypothesis asserts that these anomalous episodes are a phenomenon rooted in environment-person bidirectional influences. Although prior research has examined the role of various physical factors in some haunt cases, relatively recent findings in environmental psychology suggest the potential involvement of six "Gestalt influences" that transcend discrete variables as conscious-or unconscious-stimulants of witness experiences. These meta-patterns in the psychology of spaces or settings involve: (i) affordance, (ii) atmosphere, (iii) ambiguity and threat anticipatory processes, (iv) immersion and presence, (v) legibility, and (vi) percipient memory and associations. Thus, haunted houses might be variants of "enchanted spaces or extraordinary architectural experiences." New research designs are thus recommended to scrutinise the presence and impact of Gestalt influences and enactive processes in parapsychological contexts.
... Specifically, we draw upon the nature of uncanniness to explain how moral appraisals are associated with trust in artificial agent. Uncanniness is a common psychological experience as a defense mechanism against some sort of threat (McAndrew and Koehnke 2016). Although the experience of uncanny valley is not new in the study of artificial agents, our study is the first study that investigates the uncanny feeling from a moral perspective. ...
As artificial intelligence (AI) becomes more pervasive, the concern over how users can trust artificial agents is more important than ever before.
In this research, we seek to understand the trust formation between humans and artificial agents from the morality and uncanny theory perspective.
We conducted three studies to carefully examine the effect of two moral foundations: perceptions of harm and perceptions of injustice, as well as reported wrongdoing on uncanniness and examine the effect of uncanniness on trust in artificial agents. In Study 1, we found perceived injustice was the primary determinant of uncanniness and uncanniness had a negative effect on trust. Studies 2 and 3 extended these findings using two different scenarios of wrongful acts involving an artificial agent. In addition to explaining the contribution of moral appraisals to the feeling of uncanny, the latter studies also uncover substantial contributions of both perceived harm and perceived injustice. The results provide a foundation for establishing trust in artificial agents and designing an AI system by instilling moral values in it.
... This situation is unfortunate, because empirical study in this domain transcends parapsychology to be potentially instructive for exploring or refining important issues across the social and biomedical sciences. These include sensory processing sensitivity and perceptual biases (van Elk, 2015;Partos et al., 2016;Greven et al., 2019), sick building syndrome (Shoemaker and House, 2006), mass (contagious) psychogenic illness (Chen et al., 2003), embodied-cognition (Goldhagen, 2017), the neurobiology and physiology of emotion (Jawer and Micozzi, 2009), place identity and attachment (Donohoe, 2014;Seamon, 2014), the nature of creepiness (McAndrew and Koehnke, 2016;McAndrew, 2020), extraordinary architectural experiences (Bermudez, 2009;Bermudez and Ro, 2018), and the psychology of sacred or enchanted spaces (Lidov, 2006;Holloway, 2010). ...
This paper contains a narrative overview of the past 20-years of environmental research on anomalous experiences attributed to "haunted house." This exercise served as a much-needed update to an anthology of noteworthy overviews on ghosts, haunts, and poltergeists (Houran and Lange, 2001b). We also considered whether new studies had incorporated certain recommendations made in this anthology. Our search revealed a relative paucity of studies (n = 66) on environmental factors that ostensibly stimulate haunt-type experiences. This literature was diverse and often lacked methodological consistency and adherence to the prior suggestions. However, critical consideration of the content revealed a recurring focus on six ambient variables: embedded (static) cues, lighting levels, air quality, temperature, infrasound, and electromagnetic fields. Their relation to the onset or structure of witness reports showed mostly null, though sometimes inconsistent or weak outcomes. However, such research as related to haunts is arguably in its infancy and new designs are needed to account better for environmental and architectural phenomenology. Future studies should therefore address four areas: (i) more consistent and precise measurements of discrete ambient variables; (ii) the potential role of "Gestalt influences" that involve holistic environment-person interactions; (iii) individual differences in attentional or perceptual sensitivities of percipients to environmental variables; and (iv) the role of attitudinal and normative influences in the interpretation of environmental stimuli. Focused scrutiny on these issues should clarify the explanatory power of evolutionary-environmental models for these and related anomalous experiences.
... Aversion to creeps is rarely focused on a specific danger, unlike fear of a vicious neighborhood dog. You often cannot tell exactly how, if at all, a creep plans to or is likely to mistreat you: the options are myriad (McAndrew & Koehnke 2016;Watt, Maitland, & Gallagher 2017). 8 Due to the nebulous quality of creepiness, we may never be able to explain why an encounter with a creep elicited the creeps. ...
... Thus, there is an underlying assumption and preaccepted realization in paranormal tourism that participant outcomes can be neither predicted nor controlled by a business entity. A situation grounded in unknowns and uncertainties can bolster the "creepiness" factor (McAndrew & Koehnke, 2016), but more to the point, consumers nevertheless proceed with the purchase of the attraction, meal, hotel, and so on., apparently because the appeal of the purchase shifts from an objectively tactical experience to a subjective feeling and experience of anticipation and potential enchantment. In other words, a ghost tour is not a walk through a historic building or a meal at a remote restaurant but instead the equivalent of a lottery or raffle, that is, an investment in the increased odds of experiencing something that cannot be duplicated elsewhere. ...
We review the premise, popularity, and profitability of paranormal tourism, which involves visits to any setting or locale for the explicit purpose of encountering apparent supernatural phenomena for leisure, investigation, services, products, or conventions. This niche sector can offer an inherently engaging conceptual framework for seasonal or year-round space activation and monetization by businesses situated in specific settings or cities. On a broader level, the niche also illustrates how tourism–hospitality brands and operations can navigate and even capitalize on three paradigm shifts that have disrupted contemporary markets, that is, the mobilities, performative, and creative turns. This assertion is underscored with a case analysis of a historic site that successfully leveraged paranormal themes as part of its space reactivation and rebranding. Finally, our market study suggests that the success factors of paranormal tourism might indicate a fourth paradigm shift across the wider tourism–hospitality industry, whereby the experience economy is transforming to an enchantment economy.
... Depriving us of that information, through masking of the white sclera, which possibly evolved (partly) as a social signaling device (Kobayashi & Kohshima, 1997), is unsettling. It moreover works to make the human whose eyes are unreadable and perhaps unpredictable creepy, in the parlance of the horror genre (McAndrew & Koehnke, 2016). In short, Supernatural exploits evolved dualism in its use of demonic possessing forces to unsettle viewers. ...
... It takes the form of a rotting, ambulatory corpse, for example, powerfully evoking pathogen disgust. Its clown embodiment elicits feelings of creepiness -an adaptive response to a situation characterized by ambiguity of threat ( McAndrew and Koehnke 2016). The clown is unpredictable and obscures its facial features with paint, obstructing people's attempts to read its mental state. ...
Why are people attracted to scary entertainment, to stories and leisure activities designed to evoke negative emotion? How does such entertainment work, and why does it work? Why do we respond with genuine fear to flickering light on a screen? Why do our stories brim with danger and horror and monsters, sometimes far-fetched and utterly implausible monsters? The culmination of that research, so far, is my 2017 monograph Why Horror Seduces. In this article, I will introduce that work, which is the first book-length study of horror from an evolutionary perspective. After a brief introduction to the subject matter, I explain the main theoretical assumptions of the book. I then give a few examples of evolutionary horror theory in analytical and interpretative practice and offer some considerations on the adaptive function of horror. Finally, I reflect on the challenges and benefits of interdisciplinary work and point the way toward future studies.
... The practice of blending sponsored recommendations or advertisements within the actual content -be it a news feed, search results or a list of 'genuine' recommendations provides additional challenges. As long as the sponsored recommendations are in line with the user context and actual user goals, they might sufficiently blend in, but as soon as the users sense a mismatch [10], and the sponsored content is not sufficiently labelled as such, users start to feel uneasy and might start to distrust the user context as a whole, particularly if the user context is considered private, such as a chat window. Note that for users it is hard to recognize the reason why an item has been recommended: 'odd' items might just as well have been introduced by diversification techniques [16]. ...
Research on user modeling and personalization typically only serves the needs of end-users. However, when applied in real-world, commercial contexts, recommendations should also serve the (often monetary) interests of other parties, such as platform providers, sellers and advertisers. This paper provides a brief historical perspective on the research field, contrasts this with the commercial context, and investigates the topics currently addressed at the UMAP and RecSys conferences. The paper concludes with a discussion on the need for the research community to take multi-stakeholder interests into account in the design and evaluation of adaptive systems. This would allow us to foresee unwanted effects, such as online filter bubbles, and to pro-actively find strategies to prevent them.
... Zoomorphic, or animal-like, robots provide us with another useful design form (Fong, Nourbakhsh and Dautenhahn, 2003;Klamer and Ben Allouch, 2010;Bae and Kim, 2011) having the benefits of an appealing animate appearance but without the problems associated with the 'Uncanny Valley' -the well known term used to describe feelings of revulsion or 'creepiness' (McAndrew and Koehnke, 2016) in the presence of robots that are almost, but not perfectly human-like (Valley, Mori and Minato, 1970;Gee, Browne and Kawamura, 2005). Avoiding the uncanny valley may be easier with a zoomorphic design because human-creature relationships (for example owner-pet) are often simpler than human-human relationships. ...
The human cognitive biases that result in anthropomorphism, the moral confusion surrounding the status of robots, and wider societal concerns related to the deployment of artificial intelligence at scale all motivate the study of robot transparency --- the design of robots such that they may be fully understood by humans. Based on the hypothesis that robot transparency leads to better (in the sense of more accurate) mental models of robots, I investigate how humans perceive and understand a robot when they encounter it, both in online video and direct physical encounter. I also use Amazon Mechanical Turk as a platform to facilitate online experiments with larger population samples. To improve transparency I use a visual real-time transparency tool providing a graphical representation of the internal processing and state of a robot. I also describe and deploy a vocalisation algorithm for transparency. Finally, I modify the form of the robot with a simple bee-like cover, to investigate the effect of appearance on transparency. I find that the addition of a visual or vocalised representation of the internal processing and state of a robot significantly improves the ability of a naive observer to form an accurate model of a robot's capabilities, intentions and purpose. This is a significant result across a diverse, international population sample and provides a robust result about humans in general, rather than one geographic, ethnic or socio-economic group in particular. However, all the experiments were unable to achieve a Mental Model Accuracy (MMA) of more than 59%, indicating that despite improved transparency of the internal state and processing, naive observers' models remain inaccurate, and there is scope for further work. A vocalising, or 'talking', robot greatly increases the confidence of naive observers to report that they understand a robot's behaviour when observed on video. Perhaps we might be more easily deceived by talking robots than silent ones. A zoomorphic robot is perceived as more intelligent and more likeable than a very similar mechanomorphic robot, even when the robots exhibit almost identical behaviour. A zoomorphic form may attract closer visual attention, and whilst this results in an improved MMA, it also diverts attention away from transparency measures, reducing their efficacy to further increase MMA. The trivial embellishment of a robot to alter its form has significant effects on our understanding and attitude towards it. Based on the concerns that motivate this work, together with the results of the robot transparency experiments, I argue that we have a moral responsibility to make robots transparent, so as to reveal their true machine nature. I recommend the inclusion of transparency as a fundamental design consideration for intelligent systems, particularly for autonomous robots. This research also includes the design and development of the 'Instinct' reactive planner, developed as a controller for a mobile robot of my own design. Instinct provides facilities to generate a real-time 'transparency feed'--- a real-time trace of internal processing and state. Instinct also controls agents within a simulation environment, the 'Instinct Robot World'. Finally, I show how two instances of Instinct can be used to achieve a second order control architecture.
... Although the term "creepy" is certainly popular, it is surprising that the psychological nature of this construct remains largely unexplored. Some authors suggest that "creepiness" is related with a sense of ambiguity of threat and violations of social norms (Watt, Maitland, & Gallagher, 2017), and also unpredictability (McAndrew & Koehnke, 2016). In this vein, Watt et al.'s (2017) data revealed that creepiness resides in the face (i.e., creepiness evaluations were most associated with facial features), which suggests that ambiguity in face scrutiny may play a central role in some specific fears (e.g., masks or clowns). ...
The “uncanny valley” hypothesis (Mori 1970/2005) states that a near-human looking entity can engender negative feelings in an observer. I analyze the phenomenology of the uncanny feeling, which is largely understudied despite being the dependent variable in empirical studies. Next, I introduce a social functionalist account to the uncanny valley research. I propose that the uncanny feeling is a social response triggered by the perception that something is ambiguously wrong with the “humanness” of the human-like stimuli, and therefore needs to be avoided. By doing so, the uncanny feeling functions as a “wrong outside, wrong inside” heuristic with central moral connotations. I conclude that rethinking the uncanny feeling as a social response helps to integrate controversial findings within the field.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0732118X18300096
... Despite the pleasure consumers derive from these activities, there is evidently some level of discomfort in knowing that one is strongly attached to something that does not tangibly exist. This reminds us of research documenting the "uncanny valley," in which robots are better accepted when they do not closely resemble humans (Mori, MacDorman, & Kageki, 2012), as well as other "creepy" feelings (McAndrew & Koehnke, 2016). Thus, we encourage future research on the "weirdness" consumers may 22 experience when extending their identities, ownership, and interactions into the realm of digital technologies. ...
In this chapter, we present evidence that despite the intangible nature of digital technologies, consumers often come to feel psychological ownership of these technologies. Further, we find that digital technologies often facilitate the emergence of psychological ownership of non-digital targets. Digital affordances appear to play a key role in these processes. Digital affordances are characteristics of a digital technology object that facilitate users’ abilities to appropriate or engage with the technology (e.g., interactive design elements and interfaces) and can constrain or expand users’ opportunities for developing feelings of ownership for a digital target. Additionally, consumers’ motivational orientations and individual differences impact the extent to which they choose to leverage digital affordances and thus the extent to which affordances translate into feelings of ownership. We review research conducted in diverse digital contexts (e.g., websites, remixed content, virtual worlds, gaming, social media, virtual communities) and identify current implications for managers as well as future opportunities for researchers.
... In these situations we often hear both quite strong positive and negative emotional reactions. Some find the robot scary or creepy [24], whilst others remark that it is cute, particularly when it is operational. We hypothesise that the remote nature of the video, or the small size of the robot on screen, reduce the chance of significant emotional response. ...
... It is equally important to capture affective reactions toward the selection procedure. Accordingly, we apply the concept of creepiness McAndrew & Koehnke, 2016;Mori, 1970;Mori, MacDorman, & Kageki, 2012;Tene & Polonetsky, 2015) to a technologically advanced selection process. Creepiness can be defined as potentially negative emotional impressions paired with feelings of ambiguity towards a person or a situation . ...
Technologically advanced selection procedures are entering the market at exponential rates. The current study tested two previously held assumptions: (a) providing applicants with procedural information (i.e., making the procedure more transparent and justifying the use of this procedure) on novel technologies for personnel selection would positively impact applicant reactions, and (b) technologically advanced procedures might differentially affect applicants with different levels of computer experience. In a 2 (computer science students, other students) × 2 (low information, high information) design, 120 participants watched a video showing a technologically advanced selection procedure (i.e., an interview with a virtual character responding and adapting to applicants’ nonverbal behavior). Results showed that computer experience did not affect applicant reactions. Information had a positive indirect effect on overall organizational attractiveness via open treatment and information known. This positive indirect effect was counterbalanced by a direct negative effect of information on overall organizational attractiveness. This study suggests that computer experience does not affect applicant reactions to novel technologies for personnel selection, and that organizations should be cautious about providing applicants with information when using technologically advanced procedures as information can be a double-edged sword.
Update: While not specifically mentioned in the paper it has implications for explainability and XAI research: providing people with more transparency can have simultaneous positive and negative effects on acceptance.
... Other work supports this conclusion, with a range of design features such as height, bulk, and bipedal form adding to or subtracting from humanlikeness and contributing to the perceived threat or likeability of robots (Rosenthal-von der Pütten & Krämer 2014). A study of what makes people appear creepy also found that multiple factors of appearance and behavior contributed to feelings of threat, including unkempt hair, odd dress, and unpredictable behavior (McAndrew & Koehnke 2016). Certain occupations were rated as creepier than others, including clowns, who have distorted human appearance, and taxidermists and funeral directors, who are associated with death. ...
In movies, robots are often extremely humanlike. Although these robots are not yet reality, robots are currently being used in health care, education, and business. Robots provide benefits such as relieving loneliness and enabling communication. Engineers are trying to build robots that look and behave like humans and thus need comprehensive knowledge not only of technology but also of human cognition, emotion, and behavior. This need is driving engineers to study human behavior toward other humans and toward robots, leading to greater understanding of how humans think, feel, and behave in these contexts, including our tendencies for mindless social behaviors, anthropomorphism, uncanny feelings toward robots, and the formation of emotional attachments. However, in considering the increased use of robots, many people have concerns about deception, privacy, job loss, safety, and the loss of human relationships. Human-robot interaction is a fascinating field and one in which psychologists have much to contribute, both to the development of robots and to the study of human behavior. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Psychology Volume 68 is January 03, 2017. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.
... This may lead to ostracism and negative consequences for these people. Indeed, people who hold death-associated occupations (taxidermists, funeral directors) are viewed as creepy (McAndrew & Koehnke, 2016). This converges with our hypothesis that the heebie jeebies motivates avoidance of organisms that may vector parasites or transmit diseases via the skin. ...
Skin-transmitted pathogens have threatened humans since ancient times. We investigated whether skin-transmitted pathogens were a subclass of disgust stimuli that evoked an emotional response that was related to, but distinct from, disgust and fear. We labelled this response "the heebie jeebies". In Study 1, coding of 76 participants' experiences of disgust, fear, and the heebie jeebies showed that the heebie jeebies was elicited by unique stimuli which produced skin-crawling sensations and an urge to protect the skin. In Experiment 2,350 participants' responses to skin-transmitted pathogen, fear-inducing, and disgust-inducing vignettes showed that the vignettes elicited sensations and urges which loaded onto heebie jeebies, fear, and disgust factors, respectively. Experiment 3 largely replicated findings from Experiment 2 using video stimuli (178 participants). Results are consistent with the notion that skin-transmitted pathogens are a subclass of disgust stimuli which motivate behaviours that are functionally consistent with disgust yet qualitatively distinct.
Introduction:
Fear of clowns or coulrophobia is a little understood phenomenon despite studies indicating that it has a high prevalence in the general population. There have been no previous investigations into the aetiology of this fear, although several plausible hypotheses from the wider literature can be generated; the fear stems from media portrayals of scary clowns, from the unusual physical appearance or the unpredictable behaviour displayed, or it derives from an unpleasant personal experience.
Methods:
The current study reviews the literature in this area and also pilots a new questionnaire (Origin of Fear of Clowns Questionnaire; OFCQ) to explore the causes of the fear of clowns in a sample of 528 participants who reported such a fear.
Results:
Our findings suggest that uncertainty of harmful intent, media influences and unpredictability of behaviour play an important role in the origins of coulrophobia. There are also multiple features of clown appearance which produce a negative experiential state and a sense of a direct threat.
Discussion:
We conclude that the origins of clown fear are multi-factorial and primarily relate to aspects of their facial appearance, their behaviour, and how they have been portrayed in the media. Surprisingly, fear derived from personal experience was not one of our main findings. Further research is focused on looking at associations between the level of fear and each aetiological category.
Fear is a universal concept; people crave it in urban legends, scary movies, and modern stories. Open questions remain, however, about why these stories are scary and more generally what scares people. In this study, we explore these questions by analyzing tens of thousands of scary stories on forums (known as subreddits) in a social media website, Reddit. We first explore how writing styles have evolved to keep these stories fresh before we analyze the stable core techniques writers use to make stories scary. We find that writers have changed the themes of their stories over years from haunted houses to school-related themes, body horror, and diseases. Yet some features remain stable; words associated with pseudo-human nouns, such as clown or devil are more common in scary stories than baselines. In addition, we collect a range of datasets that annotate sentences containing fear. We use these data to develop a high-accuracy fear detection neural network model, which is used to quantify where people express fear in scary stories. We find that sentences describing fear, and words most often seen in scary stories, spike at particular points in a story, possibly as a way to keep the readers on the edge of their seats until the story's conclusion. These results provide a new understanding of how authors cater to their readers, and how fear may manifest in stories.
This chapter proposes a Husserlian phenomenological approach to the uncanny, to make some first steps toward a taxonomy of uncanny objects. Making use of the insights of Husserl, Steinbock and Tymieniecka, it proceeds according to the principle that description ought to precede theory. Thus, against a premature theoretical explanation of uncanniness, it concentrates on some objective characteristics of objects that contribute to the experience of the uncanny, arguing that the notions of home-world, alien-world, internal and external noematic horizons of objects are useful in explicating what makes an uncanny object “uncanny”. Broader in scope than some other treatments, this chapter includes discussion not only of phenomena that may be classified as negatively uncanny but also phenomena that are positively and neutrally uncanny. The result is a nine-part taxonomy which is applied in the interpretation of representative (but variegated) examples of complex uncanny objects.KeywordsThe uncannyThe creepy
Mysterium tremendum et fascinans
Husserlian phenomenologyHome-worldAlien-worldTypificationTaxonomySteinbockTymieniecka
In this article we examine the construction and circulation of images of a purportedly haunted house in Singapore’s folklore, Istana Woodneuk, through Instagram. Analyzing a corpus of 960 Instagram images, we first identify 14 tropes and then two overarching themes – haunted-place making and subversive imaging. We make three main points in this article. Firstly, we argue that the creation of Istana Woodneuk Instagram posts can be understood only against the backdrop of national anxieties about the constraint and control of land and history. Secondly, and relatedly, we posit that the bottom-up creation and collective sharing of these posts is an assertion of young Singaporean identity against a larger state narrative. Istana Woodneuk, in its ambiguity and hauntedness, along with Instagram’s affordances, gives young Singaporeans a unique unregulated space for escape from “reality” and control. Thirdly, we argue that these Instagram posts blend frivolity and thoughtlessness with resistance and self-expression, where personal stories weave into a larger communal narrative that offers bottom-up alternatives to the state sponsored “Singapore Story.” This intersection between Istana Woodneuk as a space, in contrast to other state-defined delineated places of death, and the infrastructural properties of Instagram are crucial to the construction of this larger narrative.
Smart devices are increasingly being designed for, and adopted in, the home environment. Prior scholarship has investigated the challenges that users face as they take up these devices in their homes. However, little is known about when and how users or potential users would prefer future domestic Internet of Things (IoT) to support their activities in home settings. To fill this gap, we conducted two co-design workshops, an in-home activity between the two sessions, and pre- and post-study interviews with 18 adult participants, who had diverse levels of prior experience of IoT use. Our findings contribute new insights into how smart home devices could adapt their behavior based on social contexts; how to re-imagine agency and support useful intelligibility; and how to resolve user-driven conflict by providing appropriate information about those with whom devices are shared. Finally, based on these findings, we discuss the implications of our work and provide a set of design considerations from which designers of future smart home technologies can benefit.
Dieser Beitrag betrachtet den Einsatz KI-basierte Berater-Tools in der Dienstleistungserstellung. Diese Anwendungen werden umfassend beleuchtet und klassifiziert sowie anhand von konkreten Einsatzbeispielen illustriert. Darauf aufbauend werden zentrale Herausforderungen für deren erfolgreiche Implementierung diskutiert. In Summe schafft dieser konzeptionelle Beitrag somit ein besseres Verständnis für KI-basierte Berater-Tools und bietet konkrete Hinweise für Praktiker, um diese langfristig erfolgreich zu etablieren. Abschließend werden zudem mögliche Stoßrichtungen für künftige Forschung skizziert.
Disgust may play an important role in several mental disorders, in part because disgust seems impervious to corrective information, a feature noted long before it was studied by clinical psychologists. A deeper understanding of disgust could improve not only the treatment of mental disorders, but also other societal problems involving this peculiar emotion. In this paper, we review the measurement of disgust and identify issues that hold back progress in understanding how to treat this emotion. First, self-report measures of disgust, although optimized in terms of reliability, are compromised in terms of validity due to the “lexical fallacy,” that is, the assumption that vernacular usage of emotion terms reveals natural kinds. Improved self-report measures that parse disgust from neighboring states of discomfort and disapproval can address this limitation, but these approaches are absent in clinical psychology. Second, “objective” measures of disgust, although free of vernacular limitations, require greater psychometric scrutiny. In a critical review, we find that most instrument-based measures fail to demonstrate adequate reliability, rendering them unsuitable for the individual differences research crucial to clinical psychology. In light of this assessment, we provide several recommendations for improving the reliability and validity of disgust measurement, including renewed attention to theory.
In recent decades, there has been a change in tourists’ tastes; they want to experience something novel. To satisfy this demand, a new type of tourism, known as “dark tourism”, has arisen; it has various modalities, among which cemetery tourism and ghost tourism stand out, in addition to very different motivations from those of the cultural tourist. In this type of tourism, cemeteries are not visited to appreciate their architecture or heritage but to explore a morbid curiosity about the people buried there; ghost tourism or paranormal tourism seizes on the desire to know the events that occurred there and tends to have macabre content. This study analyzes dark tourism in the province of Córdoba in southern Spain with the aim of knowing the profile of the tourist and his motivation. This study additionally will forecast the demand for this type of tourism, using autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) models, which allow us to know this market’s evolution and whether any promotional action should be carried out to promote it.
Darryl Jones, Sleeping with the Lights On: The Unsettling Story of Horror (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), xii + 181 pp. £10.99/$16.95. ISBN 978-0-19882-648-4.
Psychological ownership, or the feeling that something is mine, has garnered growing attention in marketing. While previous work focuses on the positive aspects of psychological ownership, this research draws attention to the darker side of psychological ownership—territorial behavior. Results of five experimental studies demonstrate that when consumers feel psychological ownership of a target, they are prone to perceptions of infringement and subsequent territorial responses when they infer that another individual feels ownership of the same target. Potential infringers are held less accountable when they acknowledge ownership prior to engaging in otherwise threatening behaviors, and when they could not be expected to know that a target is owned, as it was not clearly marked. In addition, high narcissists are subject to a psychological ownership metaperception bias, and are thus more apt than low narcissists to perceive infringement. A multitude of territorial responses are documented for both tangible (coffee, sweater, chair, pizza) and intangible (a design) targets of ownership. Further, consumers infer the psychological ownership of others from signals of the antecedents of psychological ownership: control, investment of self, and intimate knowledge. Theoretical implications for territoriality and psychological ownership are discussed, along with managerial implications and areas for future research.
Why do some types of settings and some combinations of sensory information induce a sense of dread in humans? This article brings empirical evidence from psychological research to bear on the experience of horror, and explains why the tried-and-true horror devices intuitively employed by writers and filmmakers work so well. Natural selection has favored individuals who gravitated toward environments containing the “right” physical and psychological features and avoided those which posed a threat. Places that contain a bad mix of these features induce unpleasant feelings of dread and fear, and therefore have become important ingredients of the settings for horror fiction and films. This article applies McAndrew and Koehnke’s (2016) theory of creepiness to the study of classic horror settings and explores the role played by architecture, isolation, association with death, and other environmental qualities in the experience of creepiness and dread.
Psychological ownership, or the feeling that something is mine, has garnered growing attention in marketing. While previous works focuses on the positive aspects of psychological ownership, this research draws attention to the darker side of psychological ownership, territorial behavior. Results of five experimental studies demonstrate that when consumers feel psychological ownership of a target, they are prone to perceptions of infringement and subsequent territorial responses when they infer that another individual feels ownership of the same target. Potential infringers are held less accountable when they acknowledge ownership prior to engaging in otherwise threatening behaviors, and when they could not be expected to know that a target is owned, as it was not clearly marked. In addition, narcissists are subject to a psychological ownership metaperception bias, and are thus more apt than low narcissists to perceive infringement. A multitude of territorial responses are documented for both tangible (coffee, sweater, chair, pizza) and intangible (a design) targets of ownership. Further, consumers infer the psychological ownership of others from signals of the antecedents of psychological ownership: control, investment of self, and intimate knowledge. Theoretical implications for territoriality and psychological ownership are discussed, along with managerial implications and areas for future research.
This article examines fear of crime in relation to exterior site features on a college campus. The authors propose and test a theoretical model that posits that places that afford offenders refuge, and victims limited prospect and escape, will be seen as unsafe. In three studies, the authors observed behavior, obtained responses to site plans and on-site responses to perceptions of safety in relation to exterior campus areas that varied in prospect, refuge, and escape. The findings confirmed that fear of crime was highest in areas with refuge for potential offenders and low prospect and escape for potential victims. In places such as campuses, which have pronounced fear of crime, designs that manipulate prospect, refuge, and escape could reduce the fear of crime, as well as opportunities for crime.
In the research reported here, we investigated how suspicious nonverbal cues from other people can trigger feelings of physical coldness. There exist implicit standards for how much nonverbal behavioral mimicry is appropriate in various types of social interactions, and individuals may react negatively when interaction partners violate these standards. One such reaction may be feelings of physical coldness. Participants in three studies either were or were not mimicked by an experimenter in various social contexts. In Study 1, participants who interacted with an affiliative experimenter reported feeling colder if they were not mimicked than if they were, and participants who interacted with a task-oriented experimenter reported feeling colder if they were mimicked than if they were not. Studies 2 and 3 demonstrated that it was not the amount of mimicry per se that moderated felt coldness; rather, felt coldness was moderated by the inappropriateness of the mimicry given implicit standards set by individual differences (Study 2) and racial differences (Study 3). Implications for everyday subjective experience are discussed.
This paper reviews the literature on sex and cultural differences in physical aggression and argues that only through understanding the interactions among evolutionary predispositions, hormonal influences, and social/situational factors can we possibly make sense of the patterns of human aggression that we see around us. Specifically, it is proposed that the process of natural selection has shaped hormonal responses in males that are sensitive to situations involving challenges to status and/or competition with other males, and that these hormonal changes are essential ingredients of the aggressiveness that occurs in these situations. Models of aggression that focus only on situational and cognitive/emotional triggers of aggressive behavior and attempt to understand human aggression without any reference to biology are destined to be incomplete at best.
Participants searched for discrepant fear-relevant pictures (snakes or spiders) in grid-pattern arrays of fear-irrelevant pictures belonging to the same category (flowers or mushrooms) and vice versa. Fear-relevant pictures were found more quickly than fear-irrelevant ones. Fear-relevant, but not fear-irrelevant, search was unaffected by the location of the target in the display and by the number of distractors, which suggests parallel search for fear-relevant targets and serial search for fear-irrelevant targets. Participants specifically fearful of snakes but not spiders (or vice versa) showed facilitated search for the feared objects but did not differ from controls in search for nonfeared fear-relevant or fear-irrelevant, targets. Thus, evolutionary relevant threatening stimuli were effective in capturing attention, and this effect was further facilitated if the stimulus was emotionally provocative.
This book seeks to explain the origins of religion using our knowledge of the evolution of cognition. Written by a cognitive anthropologist and psychologist, the book argues that religion is a by-product of human evolution just as the cognitive intervention, cultural selection, and historical survival of religion is an accommodation of certain existential and moral elements that have evolved in the human condition.
What happens when affective displays deviate from normative expectations? In this study, participants evaluated target individuals displaying flat, incongruent, or congruent expressions seemingly in response to pictures eliciting positive, neutral, or negative affect. Relative to targets who displayed normative reactions, those who violated affective norms (affective deviants) were rated more negatively on various dimensions of social judgment. Participants also preferred greater social distance from affective deviants, reported more moral outrage in response to them, and inferred that these targets did not share their moral values. Incongruent affect resulted in more negative social judgment than did flat affect, and this relationship was moderated by stimulus valence. Finally, the relationship between targets' affective expressions and participants' avoidant intentions was mediated by the extent to which participants thought the targets shared their moral values. These findings demonstrate the interpersonal costs of affective deviance, revealing the pervasiveness and force of affective norms.
Previous studies with adult humans and non-human animals revealed more rapid fear learning for spiders and snakes than for mushrooms and flowers. The current experiments tested whether 11-month-olds show a similar effect in learning associative pairings between facial emotions and fear-relevant and fear-irrelevant stimuli. Consistent with the greater incidence of snake and spider phobias in women, results show that female but not male infants learn rapidly to associate negative facial emotions with fear-relevant stimuli. No difference was found between the sexes for fear-irrelevant stimuli. The results are discussed in relation to fear learning, phobias, and a specialized evolved fear mechanism in humans.
Metaphors such as icy stare depict social exclusion using cold-related concepts; they are not to be taken literally and certainly do not imply reduced temperature. Two experiments, however, revealed that social exclusion literally feels cold. Experiment 1 found that participants who recalled a social exclusion experience gave lower estimates of room temperature than did participants who recalled an inclusion experience. In Experiment 2, social exclusion was directly induced through an on-line virtual interaction, and participants who were excluded reported greater desire for warm food and drink than did participants who were included. These findings are consistent with the embodied view of cognition and support the notion that social perception involves physical and perceptual content. The psychological experience of coldness not only aids understanding of social interaction, but also is an integral part of the experience of social exclusion.
The physical threat anticipation paradigm was modified for the study of anticipatory social anxiety responses. It was found that heart rate (HR) and skin conductance (SC) responses during anticipation of a socially threatening event (i.e., public speaking) were similar to those occurring prior to physical threat, with the largest changes taking place during the final portion of anticipation. Likewise, self-reports of cognitively experienced nervousness displayed a positively accelerating pattern of increase as the time of performance approached. The present findings suggest a psychological time-division process, such that the anticipation interval consists of an initial waiting period, followed by a briefer period of active preparatron.
During the anticipation interval high and low socially-anxious subjects displayed similar HR and SC responses, but differed significantly in patterns of finger pulse volume (FPV) and self-reported nervousness. As performance became imminent, high socially-anxious subjects evidenced increased vasoconstriction and reported greater nervousness than low socially-anxious subjects.
Taken together, these results indicate that, irrespective of psychometrically assessed anxiety, and/or type of threatening stimulus, the autonomic patterns during anticipation of threat are characterized by accelerating responsiveness. Thus, the temporal parameter of the anticipation situation (i.e., remaining time) is the primary determinant of reactions while awaiting threat.
Nonverbal communication
- L A Malandro
- L Barker
- D A Barker
Malandro, L. A., Barker, L., & Barker, D. A. (1989). Nonverbal communication (2nd ed.).
New York: Random House.