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The architecture of creepiness

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https://aeon.co/essays/why-do-we-like-to...eep-us-out

EXCERPT: . . . Why do places such as the Winchester Mystery House creep us out and induce feelings of disorientation and dread? These places possess combinations of features that humans have evolved to regard with caution, either because they were associated with the presence of predators or natural hazards, or because they provide limited sensory information and restrict freedom of movement in a way that could impair our ability to deal with an emergent threat.

There are different types of creepiness, and the array of things that creep us out ranges from dolls that are too lifelike to clowns in places where clowns should not be. However, the kind of creepiness most applicable to places is explained by a theory I developed with one of my students, Sara Koehnke. (The philosopher David Livingstone Smith has called this the ‘threat-ambiguity theory’ of creepiness.) This theory was originally applied to people rather than places. The basic premise is that those who in some way fall outside of the norm put us on our guard because they are unpredictable, and it is unclear whether they pose a threat or not.

We tested our theory in an online survey of 1,341 individuals. We asked them to rate the likelihood that a hypothetical ‘creepy person’ exhibited 44 different behaviours, such as unusual patterns of eye contact or physical characteristics such as visible tattoos. Participants then rated the creepiness of 21 different occupations, and listed two hobbies that they thought were creepy. Finally, we asked participants to express their level of agreement with 15 statements about the nature of creepy people. The results were consistent with the idea that creepiness is a response to the ambiguity of threat. Non-normative non-verbal and emotional behaviours, unusual physical characteristics and hobbies or suspect occupations set off our ‘creepiness detectors’. Men were more likely to be perceived as creepy by males and females alike, and women were more likely to perceive sexual threat from creepy people.

So we get creeped out by people who behave in bizarre and unpredictable ways and violate the subtle social conventions that enable us to understand their intentions. In other words, they are an ambiguity: are they someone to fear? This ambivalence leaves us uneasily frozen in place, and is the psychology behind feeling ‘creeped out’. It is a reaction that might be adaptive if it helps you maintain vigilance when threat is uncertain and sharply focuses your attention on resolving the uncomfortable ambiguity at hand.

[...] Research by environmental psychologists has confirmed that the most attractive natural environments contain things such as running water and open meadows surrounded by woods – the very features that would have been beneficial for the survival of early humans. In other words, people who were drawn to the ‘right’ places did better than those who were not, and over time their genes were favoured over those of individuals who spent too much time in sparser, more barren landscapes.

But places exhibit more abstract evolutionarily relevant features as well, and it turns out that being drawn to the ‘right’ psychological features of places might have been just as important for our ancestors’ survival. Places that lack the right psychological features set off our creep detectors.

In his book The Experience of Landscape (1996), the British geographer Jay Appleton described two physical qualities that determine whether a place is attractive or frightening to humans: ‘prospect’ and ‘refuge’. Refuge means having a secure, protected place to hide where one can be sheltered from danger, while prospect refers to one’s clear, unobstructed view of the landscape. Attractive places offer a lot of prospect and a lot of refuge, or what the American landscape architect Randolph Hester in 1979 called a ‘Womb with a View’.

Our love of such spaces shows up everywhere. Universally, children enjoy playing in enclosed spaces such as cardboard boxes, tree houses and in bushes or other dense vegetation where they feel hidden. The concepts of prospect and refuge can help to explain the almost magical quality of the feelings evoked by memories of favourite childhood hiding places and the richness of detail that can often be recalled about them decades later. Similarly, people dining in restaurants usually prefer to occupy tables in corners or nooks, especially when these locations allow them to sit with their backs against a wall, and they will usually settle for tables in the centre of the room only when all of the more desirable seats have been taken. In the words of Appleton, we love the feel of these spaces because they are, evolutionarily speaking, places where ‘you can see without being seen, and eat without being eaten’. The optimal environment for human comfort is one that offers a lot of prospect and refuge for the individual; the worst combination is very little prospect or refuge.

Research has confirmed that places that offer bad combinations of prospect and refuge are perceived as unsafe and dangerous: they can offer a lot of hiding places for people or things that might intend to do us harm. Scary places also lack what environmental psychologists refer to as ‘legibility’. Legibility reflects the ease with which a place can be recognised, organised into a pattern and recalled – in other words, a place where we can wander around without getting lost.

The cinematic portrayal of haunted houses has remained remarkably consistent across time: they are like ‘real’ haunted houses on steroids. In a sense, these fictional spaces act like the ‘supernormal stimuli’ identified by ethologists who study animal behaviour. Supernormal stimuli amplify the essential features that trigger instinctive behaviours, resulting in a more intense performance of these behaviours. Current human obsessions with stimuli as different as doughnuts and pornography are often thought of as responses to ‘supernormal’ stimuli that exceed anything that occurred naturally in the ancestral environment in which humans evolved. Haunted houses are filled with such discomfiting ‘supernormal stimuli’. They 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, and so the agent-detection mechanisms discussed earlier are on full alert.

Things that activate hypervigilance for natural or supernatural malevolent forces abound in large, draughty old houses: rattling or creaking sounds in an upstairs room; the sighing and moaning of wind passing through cracks; ragged curtains fluttering in the breeze; echoes and cold spots. It is very easy to imagine that one is not really alone in such a place.... (MORE - details)
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