Julia Shaw

And so I'm worried about this.

And so I'm going to keep my distance.

And so creepiness is much the same.

And that's where you can totally misfire whom you perceive as creepy just because they're not acting in the way that you expect people to act in society.

It depends.

If they're too attractive, it can be.

So there's effects that interact there.

And we also don't trust people potentially who are too attractive.

But again, deviation from the norm.

And so if you're deviating in any way, that can lead to, well, your assessment being more wrong, but also you assessing people as more negative.

And so with, yeah, with creepiness, the main thing that bothers me as a criminal psychologist is that tangential to creepiness is this general idea of trustworthiness and that you can tell whether somebody is lying.

And I've done research on this, as have lots of other people, like Aldert Fry is one of the leading researchers on deception detection.

And he has found in so many studies that it's really hard to detect whether someone is lying reliably.

And that people, especially police officers, people who do investigative interviewing, they have this high confidence level.

that they, because of their vast experience, can in fact tell whether the person across from them is lying to them, this witness, this suspect.

And the answer to that, even that, if you take them into experimental settings, they are no better than chance at detecting lies.

And yet they think they are.

And so again, you get into this path where you're going to miss people who are actually lying to you potentially, and you're going to potentially point at innocent people and say, I think you're guilty of this crime.

And you go hard on that person in a way that might even lead to a wrongful conviction.

Not just policing, in relationships and in lots of other contexts as well.