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An essay titled “A theory of creepiness” by David Livingstone Smith, Ph.D., professor of philosophy, was recently published by Aeon, a digital magazine of ideas and culture, which features works by leading thinkers in philosophy, science, society and the arts.

The essay seeks to explain what it is about creepy things that makes them creepy. Smith gives a synopsis of several theories on creepiness, or unheimlichkeit, as it was called by Sigmund Freud. For example, he describes the Threat Ambiguity Theory (TAT) of creepiness, the theory that something is creepy if it is abnormal, and its abnormality renders it possibly dangerous. He describes the Categorical Ambiguity Theory (CAT), which says that creepiness is born from something seeming to belong to two or more mutually exclusive categories, violating our conceptual norms and leaving us uncomfortably suspended between two options. He also discusses a more specific take on the CAT—that the categorical ambiguity must arise from uncertainty about whether something is animate or inanimate.

Smith goes one step further in his quest to define creepiness. He describes psychological essentialism as the notion that “human beings are inclined to think of every member of an animal species as sharing a deep feature or ‘essence’ that only members of that species possess.” It is our belief in this notion, he argues, that makes something appear creepy when its animalistic qualities blur the lines of our perceived natural order of things. That is, creepiness comes from experiencing something that is categorically ambiguous when one of the categories beween which we are suspended is some form of animal—human or otherwise. According to this theory, things with a creep factor include the combination of the human and non-human (a crawling hand), the animal and non-animal (vines that writhe like worms), and combinations of animals (a dog with the head of a lizard).

Smith asserts that this theory goes a long way in explaining why people with certain disabilities or disfigurements can elicit creepiness, why transgendered people, who don’t neatly fit into society’s conception of man and woman/boy and girl, give some people the creeps, and why those who transgress entrenched racial divisions are sometimes judged as creepy.  The study of creepiness, therefore, he argues, is an important exploration, as it “is likely to have far-reaching implications… in preventing and combatting bullying and securing social justice and human rights around the world.”

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