I know everyone says this is dumb, but I'm going to do it anyway.
I'm Angela Duckworth.
I'm Steven Dubner.
And you're listening to No Stupid Questions.
Today on the show, why do some people love horror movies?
It is so gory, it has caused audience members to pass out and vomit.
Angela, we have a listener email from Skyo who writes to say, why are people into horror
movies?
I couldn't, for the life of me, bring myself to watch one from start to finish.
By the way, Skyo, I'm so on your side.
Anyway, Skyo wants to know, what is the psychology behind fear seeking when there exist many
other ways to experience stimulation?
Angela, this is a good question.
It's such a good question.
I want your answer.
I can tell you about horror movies I've seen.
You've seen at least one, right?
Can I just give you a blanket no?
What?
I actually looked up on Rotten Tomatoes, the 10 scariest horror movies ever.
Okay, tell them to me.
I want to hear.
All right, we'll see how many you've seen.
And then each one, I guess each one, you're going to say you haven't seen any of these?
It's a waste of breath because I have not seen any of them.
Okay, you're zero for 10.
I'm going to do my score.
All right, here we go.
Number one, The Exorcist.
Check.
Hereditary.
No.
That's from 2018.
The Conjuring 2013.
No.
The Shining.
Yes.
Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
No.
The Ring.
I did not see that.
Halloween.
Yes.
Insidious.
No.
And let's see, this is capital IT.
I can't tell if that's supposed to be it or if it's actually IT.
It's it.
Stephen King.
I mean, I think IT can be pretty scary.
No, this is not your system crashing.
That I would watch, Angela.
Okay, so you've seen about what, four or so?
Was that the list?
Was that all?
Yeah, that's the list.
That's 10.
I was also going to say like Poltergeist, Carrie, Silence of the Lambs.
Okay, so with a different list, you would have had a higher hit rate.
But Skyo and I are on team, do not watch horror films.
Okay, it's complicated, Stephen.
I just want to tell you, I'm now on your team.
What do you mean?
I realize, listening to that list, that any of the more recent horror movies, really there's
almost zero chance that I've seen them because I'm in my 50s now and I do not watch horror
movies now.
I don't think I watched them in my 40s and I don't think I watched them in my 30s either.
So it was really like a teenager, young 20s thing.
So I have to say, you fit the data really, really nicely.
Horror film numbers are up lately over the past five or six years, but they're still
relatively low.
So as a share of all ticket sales, I guess this is assuming that people actually go to
theaters to watch movies.
So we may actually be dealing with a different population too, because it may be that there
are people who watch a lot of horror films at home and not in theaters, but it looks
as though horror films represent 10% of all tickets sold.
Now, it could also be that only 10% of films made are horror films that may be fairly
representative. But if you look at age, it's definitely a younger person's game.
So it's probably not so surprising that neither you or I are seeing any lately.
I think it's also not surprising because the feature of behavior called sensation
seeking like, hey, let me try that.
I've never done that before.
I know everyone says this is dumb, but I'm going to do it anyway.
That tends to peak during adolescence, late adolescence, early adulthood, you know, late
teens, early twenties.
So that makes sense. Horror films are one example, let's say, of sensation seeking.
But what else might there be?
There might be eating spicy foods or might be jumping out of a parachute.
What do you count as that?
Well, this is all what Paul Rosen, who is one of my favorite psychologists.
He also is at my university, University of Pennsylvania.
He calls all of these things benign masochism.
Good phrase.
Isn't that so good?
Can I just say, as a non-academic who's read a lot of academic work, I am so appreciative
when someone, whether it's a psychologist, an economist, anthropologist, whatever, has
come up with a phrase to describe something that makes the lay brain really get it.
But I feel that there are so many brilliant people out there doing research and they want
to communicate their findings to the public and their peers, of course, but they don't
have the ability or maybe the desire or maybe they don't want to seem as though they're
trying to dress it up or dumb it down or something.
But I find that it's incredibly useful when there is a name.
OK, I have to digress for a minute here.
You're going to digress on my digression?
I am just for a second.
We'll come back to horror movies.
But growth mindset is a pretty sexy phrase, right?
Absolutely.
And now if you ask a CEO or a head of a PTA committee at your kids' school, they probably
know what a growth mindset is.
But Carol Dweck only recently, relatively, started using that phrase.
She used to call it implicit theories of incremental.
I know, right?
I can't remember if I was like, incremental intelligence theory.
There was some multi-syllabic, multi-word phrase.
And I believe she had to come up with some terminology when she was writing her first
last, only at least for now, popular book for a lay audience and, you know, implicit
theories of intelligence and, you know, incremental versus whatever.
These were not going to fly.
And so growth mindset ended up being the terminology we all know and love today.
So I agree with you.
And can I just say I don't mean to disparage any academics who don't come up with a phrase
to describe an idea or a theory or their work overall.
And I realize that for the most part, people like you, Angela, academic researchers are
writing primarily for each other in journals.
Now, we've talked about how journal writing typically is, what's the word, horrible,
maybe?
Yeah, I think we use the word horrible.
Yes.
It's not writing that the average person would forget about, enjoy, but even
comprehend.
So I just do want to say to all of our academic listeners out there that I, as a medium
informed layperson, really do appreciate when you take time to essentially label your
idea in a descriptive way, because I think it leads to a lot more interest and therefore
understanding and therefore theoretically application of that idea into fruitful policy
and so on.
Well, not only have you just sent Paul Rosen and his collaborators, a little
Stephen Dubner thank you note, you're going to want to keep that stationery out
because this is the title of their paper.
I love this title, Glad to be Sad and Other Examples of Benign Masochism.
That is good.
Which was published in the Not So Sexily Named Judgment and Decision Making Journal.
But, you know, isn't that great?
Glad to be sad.
So what Paul Rosen wants to argue is that he can explain not only going to watch, you
know, The Exorcist, but also why you would get on a roller coaster, why you would
listen to like sad music, why you would eat really spicy hot sauce.
The list goes on.
In fact, he had people rate on a scale from I think zero to 100 how much they would want
to do these things that are, you know, on the face of them, things that you shouldn't
want to do because all of these emotions that you know, these activities produce are
negative emotions.
So I want to tell you what the subscales are on this.
Let's start with fear.
That's one subscale.
Sadness is another sad movies, sad novels, sad music, etc.
The sensation of burning, particularly food.
So, you know, spicy food and then all the things that it makes you do, like cry and
sweat and so forth.
There's a disgust subscale.
You know, of course, Paul Rosen is beloved for his king of disgust, the pioneer of the
psychology of disgust.
But, you know, like pinching pimples or like looking at like disgusting images.
You're like, oh, my God, come here to check this out.
And then you keep scrolling through like more.
You keep scrolling through.
I don't keep scrolling through.
Oh, come on. You've never done that.
I don't.
You've never gone on YouTube and watched people like pop these like huge zits.
Believe it or not, I haven't.
Just me.
I'm getting a whole different image of what you do in your spare time.
I thought you were just reading a bunch of academic journals, maybe seeing your family
once in a while. But this is all about the zip popping.
I contain multitudes.
You know, separately, we got another listener email asking a very similar question about
horror movies, but this one was more specific.
So this is from a listener named Stephanie who wrote to say, recently, a few friends of
mine heard about a horror movie being shown in theaters.
It is so gory.
It has caused audience members to pass out and vomit.
Although I know movies often make these claims to generate buzz, this still repulsed me
enough to never want to see the film.
My friends, however, upon hearing these claims, immediately decided they had to see it.
When they went, someone sitting a few seats away from them did throw up about 15 minutes
in, followed by at least one other person later in the movie.
So my question, Stephanie writes, is why are many people drawn to consume media that they
are pretty certain will horrified, disgusting, possibly traumatize them on a deep level?
I was so intrigued by this email that I wrote back to Stephanie to ask her, what was the
movie? The movie is called Terrifier 2, she says.
And then she added, please don't watch it.
I feel guilty for putting you onto it.
And whatever you do, don't show it to Angela.
She must be protected.
Wait, I want to say Terrifier 1 and 2.
Talking about.
Of course you do.
Gory movies, by the way, on the Paul Rosen scale, for whatever reason, did not, quote
unquote, load with the horror movies.
And what I mean by that is, you know, I told you that he was asking people like, on a scale
from zero to 100, like, how much do you like these activities, even though the emotion that
they produce is negative?
What loading means is like, does that item, in this case, gory movies, does that correlate
with the other items on the fear scale?
And you're saying gory and fear don't correlate.
Or they don't correlate enough.
They probably correlate, but they don't hang together as much as you think.
So I interrupted you.
You gave us four categories.
There was fear, sadness, burning hot food and disgust.
What else?
Yeah. And I have four more.
OK, so there's pain.
So do you enjoy, say, getting a really hard massage or, you know, the flash of pain when you
experience your hand in ice water?
There's the alcohol subscale.
And this is, in particular, beer and scotch.
I think I can get on board with this subscale.
An attraction to those represents what?
I think in this case, the argument is that these are bitter or burning, right?
I think scotch has, like, unless you think they're just delicious.
Well, you know, one way you can think about these things is that in many cases, babies would
not like these things, right?
Like, babies don't like pain.
They don't like fear.
I tried so hard to get my babies to drink scotch and they were just terrible at it.
Yeah. Well, so there you you figured it out.
You didn't need a random assignment study for that one.
OK, just two more.
One is the feeling of physical exhaustion.
And then the last subscale was bitterness.
I guess, like, coffee is on this scale.
So maybe when I was talking about whiskey just then, which is on the alcohol subscale, maybe
there's like a different feeling.
But all of these things, they're all what Paul Rosen calls benign masochism.
I have to say, I'm also really interested to know what our listeners are thinking about
this. Here's what I would love listeners to tell us.
Since nobody, including Paul Rosen, thinks they have a complete explanation for benign
masochism, it's an open question.
Why do you think people watch horror movies, eat spicy foods, go on roller coasters,
listen to Whitney Houston saying, I will always love you?
Why do we do these things?
I put in the Whitney Houston plug because it's sad.
Not just because you don't like Whitney Houston.
No, I love Whitney Houston, but sad.
I see.
So anyway, I'd love to hear theories of benign masochism.
You can send us a voice memo.
Just use your phone, the voice memo app, make a nice, quiet recording.
Send it to us at NSQ at Freakonomics.com.
And maybe we will play your voice memo in a future episode.
Still to come on No Stupid Questions, would Aristotle have been a fan of horror movies?
Such productions, the great philosopher argued, serve to purge viewers of their pent up emotions.
Kind of like a pimple being squeezed.
Now back to Stephen and Angela's conversation about horror movies and benign masochism.
So glad to be sad and other examples of benign masochism.
The title alone suggests to me that many, many, many people are attracted to these
difficult or weird or bitter things because it must trigger some positive response.
Is that what we're being told?
I actually asked Paul about this relatively recently.
You know, the paper is almost a decade old.
And he now believes that the reason why we like to do things that are suffering experiences,
the reason why we put ourselves through pain is because we have this kind of mind over body
sense of control when we're able to withstand it.
So he thinks that it's like this sense of I've got this.
I'm in a state of fear, but I'm making myself do this.
And so it's kind of a sense of control.
So you challenge yourself and you meet this challenge and feel better for that.
That's right.
You don't really think that you're in danger when you're in a horror movie.
Right.
You don't really think you're going to have a heart attack when you're eating like a spicy taco.
So this kind of sense that you're subjecting yourself to something which is
aversive, which is negative, but they're all safe threats.
Also, you know, for example, when people go and exercise really hard,
the body produces endorphins, that then creates a kind of analgesic and even euphoric effect in
large amounts.
So you could also argue that, like, there's another mechanism at play,
in addition to the sense of control that we get when we engage in these safe threats.
There could be these oppositional defenses that the body has against these threats,
and then we get to enjoy them.
Right.
Or even just the cessation, like, when you get out of a horror movie, you're like,
oh, God, thank God that's over.
And so the relief, the absence of pain.
Those all make a lot of sense to me, and I appreciate the explanation.
But let me just say, I don't have that desire.
None.
Well, you did use the phrase suffering experience to describe all of these.
I would say Scotch is not a suffering experience.
Oh, yeah, you would have had a little blip for the Scotch and whiskey.
And then bitterness, too.
Unsweetened coffee, which is you.
And even hot food.
Do you eat spicy food?
You know, I didn't used to.
And then I read two things that changed my idea about this.
One was Robert Sapolsky writing about how many people get so fixed in their appetites and habits
of everything.
Food, music, places they go, the people they see, by the time they're roughly 35,
that they just sort of calcify.
When I read that, I thought, oh, crap.
Not I, said Steven Dubner.
Yeah.
And so I'm a person who I think is relatively eager to try out new things.
But that sort of gave me even more motivation to do so.
Additionally, then I read something about how as you get older, your taste buds sort of dull.
And so I read that many older people therefore start eating spicy food,
even when they didn't like it before.
And I thought, oh, that's interesting.
I'm going to try.
And in the last like five, 10 years, I've been eating a lot more of it.
And it turns out that I just like it.
And I don't think that has anything to do with taste buds being duller.
I think I just was scared of it for some reason.
I grew up eating a kind of, you know, meat and potatoes ish rural farmer bland diet.
And spicy things seemed a little bit strange and foreign.
And now I eat a lot and I like it.
I want to double click on this.
Believe it or not, Paul Rosen has done a spicy food study with pigs.
And so I'm going to tell you about it.
But before I do, what spicy foods do you eat?
So the primary spicy food I eat is from one restaurant in New York,
which is just a really good Szechuan Chinese restaurant called Han Dynasty.
Wait, is it the same one in Philly?
It is.
Oh my gosh, Philadelphia gave New York Han Dynasty.
I go there all the time.
It's very good, very spicy.
I love, love, love, love it.
And every dish at Han Dynasty has a spice scale on it.
Zero to ten.
So what do you get there?
I mean, my parents, well, my mother is from Szechuan province.
That's like famously, you know, like the province in China with the hottest food.
My grandmother used to make food for my father who was not from that part of China.
And he would weep.
It was so spicy.
And my grandma, like whatever, she was like 75 and like cooking this incredibly hot food.
Anyway, my point is that at Han Dynasty, I am not a 10 person.
I am more of a three or four person.
I recommend the garlic chicken, which I think is a three.
Yeah, the garlic sauce is for wimps.
I know.
It's like the equivalent of chicken breast.
But I'm venturing up.
And just today, I put some, you know, that sauce that comes out of the rooster container,
like hot sauce that everybody uses on every, what's it called?
It's like a clear bottle and a green top.
Anyway, I put it on my food just today.
Congratulations.
So what have we established?
Spicy food is not unpopular among the two of us.
That took us a while to do this.
But I know I wanted to tell you about this Paul Rosen study.
Oh, about pigs.
Yes, about pigs.
But here's what Paul Rosen did.
And I think it underscores this idea that benign masochism, like so many other things,
has to be multiply determined.
It can't just be the pleasure of escaping a safe threat or relief from pain.
So Paul wondered how it is that we end up eating spicy food.
Because around the world, even in the province of Sichuan or the country of Mexico,
where there's this long, proud tradition of adults eating spicy food,
babies and very young children don't, and they don't like it.
No baby likes Sichuan peppercorns.
Or scotch, as we've established.
Or scotch, as Stephen has established with his own children.
So what Paul was inspired to do, because I think at the time he was in Mexico,
but I'm not 100% sure, and he was living in this rural village.
And he noticed that the families would feed their pigs
by just throwing out the slop of what was left.
