How do you get into studying morbid curiosity? intrigued by what the character arc is that leads you to doing that.
A lot of people ask me, did I always want to study scary movies and the psychology of them?
And The answer is no. I didn't always know that I wanted to study that.
But I have always enjoyed them. I've always... kind of like scary things when I was a kid, you know, not because I wasn't scared of them, but because they were scared.
And that made them interesting and fun to me, especially when I could kind of have them at a distance, right?
Pause the movie or Pause the game and kind of collect yourself.
Um, but you know, growing up, I didn't really think I was into archeology.
I thought I was going to be an archeologist.
Um, And then I studied anthropology, a little bit of biology in undergrad. studied some forensic science for my master's, and then I kind of made the switch into psychology during my PhD.
And like a lot of eager young grad students, I was interested in everything under the sun that had to do with human behavior.
But that doesn't work in grad school. You have to kind of pick something and stick with it.
And so... I remember I had a couple of these sort of paradoxes in my mind that humans did.
And there's lots of paradoxes. about humans.
The strange things they do or at least things that seem strange on the surface.
And one of those was that in almost every aspect of life, we...
We think violence is bad and we try to we shun it.
We punish it. but there are certain circumstances where violence is okay.
And not only okay, but maybe even revered.
They think, you know, like the, for the Romans, for example.
A great example of where violence was... was revered in many ways and enjoyed by tens of thousands of people.
And so I was really interested in how people made sense of it.
So how did people make sense of like this violence is okay and this violence is not okay?
And that kind of got me into the... So that was sort of my first step into morbid curiosity.
And I was... like the left foot in. And then the right foot in was... I started thinking about these other... interesting related paradoxes well humans also scare themselves for fun I scare myself for fun sometimes right like kind of an interesting thing, and it seemed related in some ways, and so I... looked up, you know, who, like a quick Google search or Google Scholar search, like who is studying why people like fear, and the answer was almost nobody, psychology.
And, you know, as a grad student, that's like a goldmine.
You find something really interesting that...
Everyone kind of understands at an intuitive level, but nobody is studying.
And so I kind of got into it that way. I...
I hooked up with Matthias Claesen, who's the director of the Recreational Fear Lab at Aarhus University in Denmark when I was a young grad student and He invited me over and we started doing these haunted house studies and that really got me into kind of studying fear in the wild.
Um, and then over time, those two sort of those two interests and why humans are interested in violence and why humans scare themselves for fun kind of went into this whirlwind of, well, why are we interested in things that are threatening? broadly.
And what does that mean about us? Is it good?
Is it bad? Can we learn something from it?
How has this served us throughout our evolutionary history?
Is it still serving us today or is it something we should try to avoid that's kind of how my that was the the character arc for getting into that That paradox is so interesting that everybody...
If you get involved in a fight, it's a very, very small... cohort of people that think, oh, this is going to be fun.
Sure. And yet... true crime or the male equivalent of true crime, which are war stories.
UFC, every different modern incarnation of that. police body cam footage, rubbernecking at road crashes as we go past.
And sometimes we enjoy those things and sometimes we don't, right?
Like UFC, people will pay money to watch that.
But then there's some things that are very similar to UFC that we're still drawn to.
Like you said, body cam footage, we're kind of drawn to it.
We want to watch it if it's available, but we may not necessarily enjoy it in the same way we would enjoy the UFC fight.
Materially, they're pretty similar, right?
In a lot of ways, they can be. Very interesting.
Okay, after all of this time thinking about it, what have you come to believe about why humans are drawn to dark or morbid content.
What's the compulsion? Well, I think any animal that exists in the world should know something about potential threats around.
Humans are no different. The only way that we're different is that we can kind of create stories.
We don't have to be there, right? You know, if a zebra wants to learn about a lion or a gazelle wants to learn about a cheetah, which they often do in the wild.
There's some great studies showing that zebras under certain circumstances will kind of watch lions when they're not actively hunting them or gazelles in particular will just observe it's called predator inspection they'll observe cheetahs And in particular, adolescent gazelles, those who are healthy, who can get away if something bad happens. that maybe don't have a lot of experience with their sort of local predators.
But they have to do that in person, right?
They have to be vigilant because it's a real situation.
Humans can tell a story about something that could happen or something that did happen. or someone could tell them a story about something that happened to them.
Um, And so we can kind of gain the learning benefits of predator inspection without actually being in any danger.
And that's really like candy for our minds, right?
Like, oh, you're telling me we can... reap the benefits of this without having any of the costs.
I mean, that's a no-brainer. Okay, yeah, so you get to kind of... sandbox, scary situations.
I'm going to guess... bro science cap is coming on early today um I'm going to guess that that also explains at least part of the difference between seeing a street fight occur in front of you paying to watch the UFC?
Is it kind of the degree of control? the fact that there is we know that there's rules with it's really unlikely we're going to see someone die in the ufc so is it is it to do with control safety sort of boundaries Yeah, I think that has a lot to do with it.
You know, there's a lot of things that play into that. some people are more prone to feeling disgust than others, right?
And so obviously watching something or hearing about something, reading something, where a threat is attacking a victim, That often involves a lot of disgust elements.
It involves blood or it involves gore in many ways.
And that can be kind of a turnoff for many people.
So... Yeah, I think some of it is the amount of control.
So for example, if you're high in disgust sensitivity, you may not watch a horror movie. you might be willing to read a book about the same topic because you can kind of control how vivid that image is.
Whereas in a movie, it's just whatever that director gives to you, right?
Whatever the, whatever the movie feeds to you, um, That's your representation of what's going on.
And if you don't like it, you have to cover your eyes or pause it, turn it off, walk out of the room.
But if you're reading a book, you have a little bit more control in some ways about about how vivid that is, right?
It's more difficult to make that really vivid, like a, It's not going to look like a Christopher Nolan film in your mind's eye.
That's interesting. Are there different domains of morbid curiosity?
Are there different... categories and types.
Yeah, I mean that was one of the first things I did, right?
So if you're a psychologist, you're studying this new concept or at least new to the academics concept, one of the first things you do is, well, how can I easily measure it?
Right. Well, one way to easily measure something as a psychologist is to have a survey or a questionnaire, you know, like the big five or discuss... or psychopathy scale or any number of ways to measure these different traits.
And there really was no scale to measure morbid curiosity.
So what I did is I... collect a bunch of items from people from if forums, like online forums, from interviews, from sort of your own theoretical grounding about different scenarios that might elicit interest that have a threat involved.
And you collect all of those together and you have a bunch of people, a bunch of participants say how likely they would be to be interested. in this thing if it were to happen to them?
How likely would they be to look at this thing, learn about this thing, read about this thing?
And then what you get is you can actually see how those questions are answered in similar kinds of ways.
And they break into different domains, as you mentioned.
And so one of the first things I found was that there seems to be at least four different kinds of domains of morbid curiosity.
So the first one is kind of obvious. It's violence, right?
So kind of witnessing violence. That was sort of what...
Intrigued me initially about this is why are we so intrigued by violence?
Why are we interested in violent conflicts?
The second one is one you mentioned, which is kind of the true crime or the interest in people who could be violent.
Right. Like maybe you're not actually witnessing the violent act, but you're learning about the type of people who would commit that violence. or the way that they committed that violence.
The third one is kind of the outcome of violence.
That would be the bodily injuries or body violation. domain.
And so this is important in a lot of ways because humans, of course, try to treat and other animals try to treat injuries and it's important to know something about an injury if you're going to treat it.
It's also important if you come across uh someone who's wounded it's important to know what caused that injury right And the injury itself can kind of give you some insight into that.
If you come across someone in the forest and they have a cut on their arm, you're not really gonna be too worried about what caused that cut, right? you come across someone in the forest and their whole arm is missing, that's a different story, right?
That means there's something really large and formidable and dangerous in the environment.
And so injuries capture our attention, um, Probably for those reasons as well.
And the fourth one I kind of struggled with at first.
It was the supernatural or the paranormal.
And I thought, well, like, I personally don't believe in ghosts, right?
I find them interesting and fun, but I don't believe in them.
And so I thought, well, why would the mind... have this interest in things that you know if i'm right presumably aren't real um And it turns out there's a lot of reasons why we might have magical beliefs or supernatural beliefs or paranormal beliefs. whether or not they're... Like, for example, Ed Hagen...
He had a really great paper recently. I think Aaron Leitner was his co-author on that. suggesting that paranormal beliefs kind of help us understand They give us a starting point from which we can start to think about other minds, right?
They give us kind of a way to ratchet, a way to take the the world of a trillion possibilities and bring them down to, you know, 100,000 possibilities.
It makes it graspable so that we can actually get some traction in understanding other minds.
And so I think what the paranormal domain is really tapping into is is an interest in things that are dangerous that we don't fully understand.
So you find people's interest in the occult or witches or aliens or cryptids or whatever ghosts, like these things that, you know, with the exception of Casper, most people think ghosts are pretty malicious, like they're pretty scary.
You stay at a haunted hotel and not to like hang out with the ghosts and have fun, but because it's potentially scary, right?
If we think of Aliens, we don't think of usually friendly aliens. of like well what if they are going to harm us what what do they actually want why are they coming here And I think that goes kind of back to this... If you see someone... uh, on the street and they're wearing all black and they have their put up and they're kind of lurking around.
Why are they trying to hide themselves, right?
And I think we ask those same kinds of questions about things like ghosts and aliens and demons and all these entities that we've come up with that don't make themselves fully available to us, but do influence us usually in malicious ways.
So I think that's kind of tapping into that.
And it gets into a whole bunch of things like infectious disease, you know.
Before the germ theory of disease, we had supernatural explanations for disease.
Witches did it or gods did it. It was never like something really natural, right?
We didn't have a good explanation for that.
So our minds immediately went to oh, someone with bad intentions probably did this and they must be powerful because I didn't see them do it.
And they did it from way over there. They did it using, you know, magical ingredients.
I'm trying to work out what the common thread is between these four, between stuff that's violent, people who commit violence, The impact of violence on the human body and supernatural spooky...
Like things that probably will be violent because they're being sneaky.
It's kind of similar actually to the... That's pretty similar to the minds of dangerous people or the true crime.
There's a lot of overlap in those two in some way.
What's the thread between all of these? I think the thread is it's thread itself, right?
It's What could possibly harm me? And what do I know about it?
Or more importantly, what do I not know about So if I'm watching a violent encounter, I'm watching a UFC fight, I'm learning about mechanics of the fight.
I'm learning about in the moment mechanics of what's happening during the fight.
Same thing with the street fight. Same thing with the police body cam.
What's happening in that exact scenario?
If I'm reading a true crime book, listening to a true crime podcast, I'm kind of learning about like what leads up to that scenario.
What did the victim not see that they should have seen, right?
What did they use to escape if they escaped?
Like what trick or tool did they use to escape?
There's actually been a study showing that people find that aspect of the true crime story most interesting.
The one where like... If a victim escapes, what did they do to escape?
People find that more interesting than any other part of the story. similar idea for body violations right like what caused this injury and how can I make sure it doesn't happen to me And then for the sort of unknown or paranormal type of dangers,
Are they real? Why do people think that?
Some people fall victim to them. Why do some people get possessed and some people don't?
Why do some people get... haunted by ghosts and others don't why do some people have uh aliens probe them and others don't And how can I avoid these things happening to me?
So if I learn something about these, I might be able to identify some some similarities in them and then protect myself.
Right, so threat detection, mitigation, being able to plan for the future, Yeah, threat learning, I would say.
Yeah, threat mitigation, threat learning is really what it's about.
And of course, evolution kind of imbues this positive feeling of curiosity, this approach orientation, because otherwise we would just avoid those things.
It's natural to avoid things that are dangerous.
But if you counteract that with a bit of curiosity... in particular in situations where you're not in danger.
So if your mind senses, okay, here's a potential threat, but I'm not in danger.
That's a really valuable learning opportunity.
So you kind of do have to have this push and pull of, like, pull away so I don't get injured, but... approach and push forward so I can learn something about it and actually makes me better prepared in the future.
Watch the UFC fight, but from this side of the ring, the octagon.
There's two ways to learn about fighting, right?
You can learn about it in the ring or you can learn about it on the ring side.
And one of them is a little safer than the other.
Now, you do learn a little more if you're in the ring, right?
There is an incremental gain in kind of what you're learning, but it may not be worth the cost, right?
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I'm interested in the sort of adaptive story of Morbid Curiosity Or maybe the evolutionary examples of this, because I'm trying to think There's a big difference between being able to read a book, being able to watch a UFC fight,
Being able to watch body cam footage or a true crime podcast or a true crime documentary or a horror film.
I'm wondering what morbid curiosity would have looked like ancestrally.
Yeah. Well, we can ask what it looks like in non-humans, right?
And that gives us a sense maybe. of what it looks like.
I mentioned earlier the gazelles and cheetahs.
There's a really great study. It was like a two-year safari study where the zoologist actually went out and just observed gazelles and their natural environment and kind of how they interacted with their natural predators, which are the cheetahs.
And what she found were that They don't always run away when they see a cheetah.
What they sometimes do is they stop and actually observe the cheetah.
And there are some things that influence the likelihood of that, right?
One of those is if you're an adolescent gazelle, you're much more likely to observe the cheetah than run away or do something else.
Um, If you are in a large group, I think you were in a large group, you were more likely to observe the cheetah.
If you were further away from the cheetahs, if you had some distance from the cheetah, you would observe it.
And that makes sense, right? Because you can't always run away when you see a predator.
On the savanna, you would always be running. because you live amongst your predators.
Lions and zebras live amongst each other. because elves and cheetahs live amongst each other.
Lions and cheetahs aren't always hungry, right?
Cats do a lot of like lazing around, like 22 hours a day they lay around.
And so if you see a lion laying around, it's not good if you're a prey to actually run away every single time because then you're going to deplete all your caloric resources.
And so one of the answers to that problem is to learn something about them so that you know when they're hungry when they're hunting what they even look like, right?
What they look like when they're trying to... prey upon you versus when they're laying around um and you can see the same thing in uh in hunter-gatherer societies where they don't have They don't have written language, but they do have oral storytelling, right?
Yeah. And if you look at folklore, predators are one of the most common themes of cross-culturally in folklore.
They show up in all different kinds of stories and not always scary stories.
But predators do show up in all different kinds of stories across the world, across time, different languages.
And I think one other piece of... Evidence for this that I didn't initially come to until I started writing the book was that they show up a lot in our dreams.
And there's this really great theory that Everybody wants to know, what do my dreams mean, right?
The one question a psychologist should be able to answer is, what do my dreams mean?
At least that's what people think. And I never had really thought much about dreams.
You know, I just... they're hard to study as how do you, how do you tell what somebody is actually experiencing when they're dreaming?
Um, But as I started writing this book and I started thinking more about threats and how they show up in different aspects of our lives and the way that we remember them or talk about them, I started reading about dreams a lot.
And what I found was that one of the most influential and empirically backed theories for why dreaming, like the capability for dreaming exists is that it's really good at rehearsing threats when you're sort of offline.
So again, you can learn about something when it's not costing you energy.
It's not taking the place of foraging or mating or social status building or whatever else you might be doing during the day. then that's a really valuable thing that you can take, right?
So That's not to say that dreams only simulate threats, but dreaming itself is a pretty... high investment activity.
It takes quite a bit of work to dream something up and to hallucinate it because Your body actually responds, you know, you're paralyzed.
Ideally, you're paralyzed when you dream, right?
Otherwise, you're sleepwalking. But if you hook up electrodes to animals or people, you can actually see that a lot of the muscles involved in locomotion are being activated or are being sent signals but aren't aren't actually because you're paralyzed they're not actually moving but they're being sent signals so they're sort of your body itself is simulating some sort of event, not just your mind.
Um, and, And, you know, you can do this with, there was a study in the, I think it was 60s with cats where they, severed a particular connection that caused them to be paralyzed when they sleep.
So they got up and moved around when they were dreaming and And what they found is that cats almost always got up and moved around in these sort of either predatorial types of ways or prey types of ways where they were being hunted.
So they were hunting or being hunted when they were asleep.
At least they were acting those out. physically.
So yeah, and there's a lot of evidence that threats show up in our dreams, not just in our nightmares, right?
So, If you talk about scary dreams or threats and dreams, people tend to think about nightmares.
But nightmares are really a little... I would say, than threats showing up.
It's kind of like the difference between You know, a horror movie has a bad guy, but so does an action movie.
So does a thriller. So does a drama even many times.
So you can think about the nightmare as the horror movie, but there are many other kinds of dreams where there's a bad guy, where the threat shows up. where we learn something and we interact with them, we learn something about them, but it's not terrifying per se.
When you wake up, you're not afraid. but there was some sort of danger in your dream.
And those tends to, those tend to be the kinds of things we remember better.
Um, But without going on too much of a tangent, I mean, I talk about an example in my book where there's an anthropologist, Thomas Greger, who... he studies, I think it's Mehinaku is how you say their name, people.
And one thing that's interesting about the Mehenaku people is that they reliably recount their dreams. when they wake up to like people around them, to their friends and to their family.
And so it makes them a great case study for learning about dreams because they reliably regurgitate their dreams.
And so he did a great analysis of all the different kinds of things that they talk about in their dreams.
And one thing that consistently comes up are threats so men would talk about things they might encounter in the jungle so jaguars snakes women would often talk about like, I think it was like poisonous insects or things that they're sort of, uh, unable to defend themselves against.
Hmm. I had a Rahul Jandial on the show yesterday.
He wrote a book about dreaming and, um, I think he identified the difference between nightmares and bad dreams as nightmares are things that usually cause you to wake up.
They actually disrupt your sleep. and have a greater chance of bleeding over and ruining your next day. that's a good way to describe a nightmare.
Yeah. Yeah. Um, Okay, well, it seems so far that the main thing that we're doing is preparing for threats.
We need to get some sort of adaptive explanation for why morbid curiosities are there.
Typically, these things would be invoking of fear or disgust.
But curiosity balances the scales. so that we can learn from this experience.
It encourages us to overcome our disgust response or our fear and to lean in a little bit, but not too much. and it sort of tolerates that accelerator back and forth.
Okay, I think that's a nice... A nice explanation.
I'm particularly interested in how... Where individual differences in morbid curiosity come from?
What's a predictor? that somebody is more likely or less likely, personality differences, gender. background, upbringing, stuff like that.
What are the big contributors there? Yeah, that was one of the first studies I did, right?
So I had the scale now. What's the next thing you do?
Well... The next thing you should do is make sure that you're measuring something that is distinct from other things, right?
It should be correlated with some things, right?
There should be some predictors and some things that... shouldn't predict it at all.
But there shouldn't be a complete overlap in variance, where if I give somebody, let's say... a big five.
It doesn't explain away all the variance in morbid curiosity.
So I ran this big personality study where I gave people every kind of test I could think of that might be related the morbid curiosity so they they took the morbid curiosity test uh they took a hexaco which is like Big five with honesty, humility in it, right?
That's kind of your... your main domains of personality that explain a lot of attitudes and behaviors in daily life. they took a disgust sensitivity scale they took a psychopathy scale that had one of Lillian Feld's that has multiple subscales in it.
Um, past, you know, their age, their sex, their, I think, income, um, threw in a lot of different things that it was kind of just like a pot, where I threw in all these different... personality test to try to see, can I explain away morbid curiosity if I have enough data?
And the answer was no. The closest I got.
That's a good thing. That's a good thing.
For me, it was anyway. closest I got when I included all of the significant predictors was about 50%.
So I could explain about 50% of people's scores in Morbid Curiosity if I looked at disgust and psychopathy and big five and sex and age and all these different things.
However, there were a few things that were much more more strongly correlated with morbid curiosity than other things.
So psychopathy was one of them, which is interesting.
We can talk a little bit about, I have my own sort of thoughts on psychopathy and what it's really measuring, but um psychopathy was one of them uh And this is subclinical psychopathy, so not clinically, you know, no clinical diagnosis.
Another one was... Oh, I also used the five dimensions of curiosity from Todd Kashtan because...
I wanted to see maybe if it could be explained by other dimensions of curiosity.
I was just able to generally curious. Just generally curious, yeah.
And there were some positive correlations, but they were small.
They were 0.2 to 0.4. three or maybe four on one of them.
Right. Um, So the variance there would be, you know, 10 to 30% at the most explained away by other dimensions of curiosity.
There was, I think... And in particular, in psychopathy, it was the rebelliousness subscale.
That was the one that was... most strongly correlated.
That was like the single thing I measured that was most strongly correlated with Morbid Curiosity by itself.
There wasn't a lot of difference between men and women.
There were some differences in the subscales, Men tend to be more interested in violence.
Women tend to be more interested in the minds of dangerous people.
The other two were kind of a wash. It was at think there were any significant differences there.
Even in other studies I've done, it tends to be pretty close. age, younger people were definitely more morbidly curious than older people. which kind of makes sense because if it's about learning, Do your learning when you're young.
You're not going to do your learning when you're older, right?
You should be less interested in the things that you've already learned about.
Morbid Curiosity looks like it Decreases on average with age.
And that lines up with animal literature on the gazelles, for example, right?
The adolescents were the ones that did the most predator inspection. but there weren't a lot of other major like disgust you would think disgust would be highly correlated I thought it would I thought disgust sensitivity surely would be negatively correlated with morbid curiosity.
And it was a little bit like some of the subscales, I think, you know, maybe explain 10% of the variance, but it wasn't much.
And I was really interested in why it didn't explain away the body violations.
Because I thought that surely how easily you're disgusted by something should be strongly negatively correlated with how interested you are in learning about a bodily injury, right?
But it turns out I think what's happening is that there's two different kinds of body injuries, right?
There are infectious body injuries and there are non-infectious body injuries.
And I talk about this in the chapter on bodily violations in the book where There was a really cool study done several years ago by Tom Kupfer where he... set up these like fake, um, dressings for injuries, like bandages for injuries.
And he said, you know, this one was caused by and he would say some sort of infection, right?
And this one was caused by a fish hook or something, a knife, something that's not infectious but does cause a lot of uh blood and gore and other things and he asked people like how much how comfortable would you be touching this dressing versus this dressing you've you had if you had to pick up this bandage you know how comfortable would you be with it and how disgusting is it um And what he found is that he even asked people to like, okay, reach your hand in with some gloves on and pick it up.
And people were much more likely to pick up the ones that were not.
So if it's a bandage from a knife wound, people are way more likely to pick that up than they are a bandage from... an eye infection or something and that makes sense to us no because we know what infections are right um But I think that's important because...
Our minds are making a distinction in how dangerous something is, or at least how dangerous it is to interact. with something.
And disgust sensitivity, if it works like we think it does, should tap into affections, not... other kinds of bodily injuries, not broken bones, not knife cuts, not other kinds of injuries that wouldn't be infectious.
And so when we have enough information, we actually make that distinction.
So I think what's going on is disgust sensitivity is driving us away from things that are infectious right it is making us avoid those but there's a lot of other kind of injuries out there um And those tend to be the ones that we're morbidly curious about are the ones that are not about infection.
They're about injuries from typically violence or accidents.
Yeah. I mean- That's so interesting. People would... I'm just trying to think about examples. people would be maybe interested in documentaries about the Black Death.
But it's so long ago that they feel like they're protected.
Yeah. Whereas if we look at the amount of, uh, like discomfort and psychological distress that lots of people went through when they lived through COVID.
And they were hearing about this and it's the sort of thing that's out there and it could get you I imagine that there's lots of people who would have been both incredibly scared of COVID and also massive fans of true crime.
Yeah, probably so. Square that circle for me.
Yeah, well, I think, you know, it's not to say that we wouldn't be interested in things like a documentary, like the example you gave.
I think it's not that morbidly curious people would be more interested in a non-infectious documentary than an infectious documentary necessarily.
I think what it is is that disgust sensitivity just modifies that interest much less in the non-infectious.
Right. Yeah, so if you're watching a documentary about the Black Death and it's showing examples of what... bubonic plague looks like on someone, the person with disgust sensitivity is going to like shy away from that a little more than they would from say, uh, other kinds of bodily injury documentaries.
But yeah, you know, I wouldn't COVID was announced as a national pandemic or a world pandemic. back in March of 2020...
Like every other scientist in the world who wasn't studying viruses, I had to kind of stop what I was doing.
Our labs closed down. And I was really bummed because I had this really fun study planned where I had this cabinet of curiosities I had curated and some of them were morbid and some of them weren't.
And I was going to do this really great eye tracking study with it.
And all of that had to get shut down. So I thought, okay, how can I shift some of this? um online because that was the only way we could study continue studying things was online um And I thought, well, most people, probably everyone alive today has never lived through a global pandemic before. like this, right?
The last big thing like that would have been like Spanish flu, probably.
There were certainly other pandemics between now and then, but that was probably the last major... thing that kind of shut down the way the world operates, right?
And it didn't happen at the same scale because we weren't as connected.
We couldn't fly across the planet in six hours, right?
We had to, in 1918, it just wasn't like that.
And so I thought, well, that's probably pretty scary for a lot of people.
It was like we didn't know what was going on because there was this virus.
We don't know how dangerous it is. But on top of that, our entire way of life is changing.
We don't know... when we can continue to go outside, when things will go back to normal, if our family, our older family members will be okay.
And so I thought, well, this is a really good way to study whether or not people who are morbidly curious are actually feeling more prepared for this.
Like, is this actually working? This is kind of a natural experiment.
So that's what I did is I Are people who are more interested in true crime, are they dealing with the pandemic differently?
Are people who are horror fans, are they dealing with the pandemic better?
Are they feeling less anxious about it? And again, here I tried to control for, when I did this study, I tried to control for factors that would influence that.
Your big five personality, your income, especially during COVID, you could kind of seclude yourself a little more if you were wealthy.
You weren't a necessary worker that had to still go in to work I included age I included a bunch of other personality facets and and ask the question, are people who are morbidly curious more resilient? in these like early months.
I did this study in like April of 2020. And the answer was yes.
Even controlling for all those other factors that influence how you respond to this novel phenomenon People who are morbidly curious were reporting a greater level of psychological resilience.
They were feeling optimistic about the future, experiencing lower levels of anxiety, lower levels of depression. compared to pre-pandemic levels than non-morbidly curious people.
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We need to dig into this. Why do some women want to date serial killers?
There's no sex difference. It's only slight.
It's not that predictive, blah, blah, blah.
I'm not familiar with that many guys sending love letters to... female serial killers, angels of mercy or whatever they're called, or these nurses that get caught having killed a ton of babies.
The reverse, some chicks love a serial killer.
Yeah. What's going on there? Even, uh, even serial killers that would not be interested in them, like Dahmer.
Uh... got tons of fan mail from women, uh, that presumably he was not very interested in.
Uh, and he was not a particularly good looking guy either.
Um, Yeah, this was a question that I've been getting for a long time and finally had a study that kind of address this.
I think what's going on, and it makes a lot of sense in light of what we've been discussing... is that if you take a very dangerous man...
Ted Bundy, you know, someone who, if you're a woman would be a prime, you'd be a prime prey for him.
Right. Um, If you take someone like Ted Bundy and you put him in prison where he...
Can't hurt anyone, including you. He can't influence your life in any kind of way.
But you can still interact with him. You can write him letters.
You can go visit him in jail behind the safety of shackles That's an incredible way to learn about someone firsthand, right?
It's an incredible way to learn about... you maybe what is one of the most dangerous people on the planet as a young female um Now, I don't know if I can explain the like sexual attraction.
I mean, Ted Bundy was a decent looking guy, but I don't know if I can explain like the the affective attraction or the feelings of warmth people have towards them.
But I have done some research with some researchers here at the University of Arkansas. where we saw that women who were higher in morbid curiosity were much more interested in men who had dark personality traits, psychopathy, sadism, Machiavellianism, the bad boys, right?
Like those traits are associated with being like a bad boy.
But what was interesting is there was a distinction.
So you were morbidly curious. You were behaviorally interested. in these guys, but you didn't necessarily feel warm and cozy. around them right if you but you would say like oh yes I would love to like talk to this person or learn more about them so we've made up these like fake dating profiles where, you know, the profile depicted a man who was high in the dark triad or And the reverse depicted a man who was not high in the dark triad.
And, uh, yeah, morbidly curious women were much more likely to swipe on the man who was high in the dark triad.
Um, But when they were asked about it, there was a distinction between... why they swiped or why they would have been interested or said yes to this person.
And it was that they were really just interested in learning about them.
It's interesting that crossover... into the sexual attraction thing.
I suppose if we get real... speculative.
You could say it's the highest status, most dangerous guy in the tribe.
This is somebody who it is significantly better to be an ally of than an enemy of, and one way that women could ally a very powerful man is to use their sexuality in order to get him on side.
Yeah. You know, a dangerous person is only dangerous to you if they don't like you.
Right. A dangerous person likes you, then they become a huge asset to you.
Especially if you're not a high-formatability person, right?
Looking at some more of the sort of group differences here, Do certain cohorts prefer different types, different categories?
That is certainly no... At least I've heard that true crime, true crime podcasts lean female I'm gonna guess the UFC leans very very heavily male um I do have this theory that real world war stories are just true crime for dudes.
They are a true crime for dudes, absolutely.
So what's going on here? Have you thought about the taxonomy of different types of content and why certain people are interested in it.
Kind of, I think. Yeah. So we, I, I've, I've looked at the true crime and women thing because it's, again, something I get asked all the time. are women actually more interested in true crime than men?
The answer seems to be resoundingly yes, right?
And- whatever modality it is, podcasts, books, whatever.
Right. Um, I haven't looked at men in war stories, but I would imagine that that is true for the same reasons, right?
Um, That's historically... what kind of violence is a man likely to encounter?
Well, violence from another man. And probably in the context of a war or a battle or some sort of dispute.
What kind of violence is a woman most likely to encounter?
Probably that from a man as well, right?
But not in the context of a war, but in the context of a personal relationship.
So those are the types of stories that are most relevant to those demographics.
The type of story when it comes to threats for women that is most relevant is close personal relationships. um and like most domestic abuse cases right or kind of by definition like violence against women tends to be men they know.
Among men... It's kind of just other men, right?
And historically, it's been other men who are not part of your group.
And that translates pretty directly into a war story.
I suppose playing with war as well, that makes complete sense.
Guys are prepping for war. That's why if you get kindergartners, And you look at the games that girls play and the games that boys play.
This is before they've been socialized. social learning, social roles theory stuff.
Girls will be caring for something, keeping something alive.
They're playing nurse. They've got a bunny rabbit.
The guys... the little boys, cowboys versus aliens versus...
Monsters or whatever they come up with, right?
Yeah, one is... doing sort of nurturing and care and the other is doing war and battle yeah yeah i think uh I would love to have... I mean, I don't know that there's probably data on this somewhere, but, you know... like a cross-cultural analysis of that, I assume would show up the same thing.
Like it doesn't matter if you're in a horticulturalist tribe or a hunter-gatherer tribe or...
LA or Austin or New York or rural Maine, that's probably true, right?
Like if you're hanging out with other like a little boys hanging out with other little boys, they're going to play somewhat more violent games and girls are going to play somewhat less violent games. or different kinds of violent games, right?
Again, direct violence versus kind of learning about someone who's maybe dangerous.
I mean, I saw this when I was in my master's program I worked as a mad scientist, which is like the coolest job title.
Um, and all it meant was that I would go around and I would do science shows and camps for kids.
It was like a cheap version of Bill Nye.
And one of the camps, one of the first camps I did was a summer camp And I had, I don't know, 15 or so kids that ranged from... ages, I want to say like five to nine generally. um and i was i was a young 20 something didn't have kids didn't really know how to like i mean i mean i played with kids, but I didn't really know how to like teach a group of kids something.
Right. And what you quickly learn is that kids have very short attention spans and they require a lot of free time, which I should know as someone who's, I guess, written about that a little bit.
But of course, they need free time. They need time to play.
They need time to explore. And, uh, You know, unfortunately, when I was doing this camp, it was in the middle of summer in Oklahoma.
It was 100 and whatever degrees outside.
And so they couldn't play outside that long.
It was just like, it was too hot. And so we had to find games for them to play inside during their break time.
And I didn't really know a lot of like group games for kids.
I mean, every now and then we had access to a gym and we would play like Red Rover or capture the flag or something like that. that but many times there wasn't a gym it was like just the room that we were in we couldn't play these more like physical games And so the one game that came to mind was this game called Mafia, or Werewolf, if you've ever heard of it.
I've played Werewolf. many times. Yes. Yeah.
Yeah. Mafia is the same exact thing, but it's instead of a werewolf, it's a mafia member, but it's the same structure, same everything.
And I thought, OK, that's a pretty like simple because I need something simple that kids could learn quickly and they wouldn't get bored with rules.
Right. And I was like, okay, this is very simple, imaginative, they get to play, like, let's try this.
And You know, the basic premise is there's a narrator who first was me.
And then all the kids are part of this like fake town and they get these secret identities for these little kids. pieces of paper with a secret identity written on it.
And... I mean, the first challenge was that some of the kids couldn't read very well, so they had to help them know what their identity was.
But once we got all of that sorted, Most of them are townspeople.
Two of them were mafia members. One of them was a doctor and could heal people.
And one was a sheriff who could arrest people.
And the basic premise is the narrator tells the story about how the town goes to sleep at night and in the middle of the night, the mafia or the bad guys come out and they they attack someone.
And the doctor can wake up and try to heal them, and the sheriff has to figure out who did it, right?
But the crux of this is that when they wake up, the town has to vote.
They have to vote on like who they think did it. and who they're going to, in this case, hang for the mafia members, right?
Who are they going to hang in an Old West-style way? hanging and I tried to keep it very tame because I was like okay these are like five to nine year olds I don't want them going home to their parents and being like, I killed my friend at science camp today because he was a member of the mafia.
I kept the narration very tame. It was so-and-so. died last night at the hands of the mafia.
Eventually, once the kids started to learn how to play, I let them be the narrators, right?
So I would let one of them try narration.
And it became this awful scene out of the worst horror movie.
I mean, the descriptions of what happened to the people who were murdered by the mafia became bloody and violent and their entrails, their guts were thrown out, and Their heads were cut off.
It was like this horribly violent thing.
So without me provoking them, and in fact, I was trying to keep them from being overly violent, uh, the kids had this desire to, and in particular the little boys, to, had this desire to tell these awful stories of what happened. and how they need to get justice for it and they have to hang someone.
They were so excited about hanging someone for doing this. yeah I think I think kids are super morbidly curious um But it shows up in their pretend play a lot, where they have control over how that feels to them.
Hmm. What about when it comes to... Car crashes, gory films.
Yeah. I guess there's a growing creator economy as well for police body cam footage too.
Really? Yeah, the freedom of information requests or whatever, there's entire channels that are just built from... asking to get access to this, which, I mean, I don't know where the freedom of information thing... came in with police body cam footage.
What they probably didn't think was that, wow, in future, we're going to be fueling an entire...
YouTube ecosystem of people that just like narrate mad shit happening to police officers.
But yeah, is this just the... People are injured.
I want to see how they're injured, how to fix it, how to avoid it.
Is there more going on there? Yeah, I think with police body cams...
In particular, you know, that's like a situation you could find yourself in is interacting with a police officer, right?
And I think there's a certain... You know, when police stories make the news, it's only the bad stories.
Right. And those can be a very small fraction of what happens, but it's like the ones that are the worst, the most awful, um, Usually the most ambiguous as well.
Those are the ones that make the news. Those are the ones that people are most interested in.
Thank you. And a lot of times, especially if it's an ambiguous thing like, oh, did they have a weapon or did they not have a weapon?
Were they really being aggressive or not being aggressive?
Thank you. You can learn something really important from that.
How do you look from the police officer's point of view?
What are they doing that is making them a target or feel it, you know, making them seem like an aggressor to the police officer.
I think in particular, those really violent, ambiguous police videos are what really get people... paying attention because there's different interpretations of what could happen and different interpretations of like, how would I interpret that?
Or how would I act in that situation? Well, I wouldn't have done this.
I would have just put my hands up or I would have done this or that.
But yeah, I think the ambiguity really fuels that, the ambiguity of what's happening.
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Yeah, that makes complete sense. When it comes to... creating horror as it's sort of shown on TV.
I'm not a cinematographer or a director, but I have to assume that there's a formula for how that's put together.
Yeah. What does that look like when it's sort of deconstructed?
What is... horror? What's the difference between terror and horror?
How does all of this fit together? Well, this is something actually that I've been thinking a lot about recently is, you know, People tend to agree when they watch a film, like, oh, this is a horror film.
It's just like one of those things, you know it when you see it.
If you watch a film, you're like, oh, that's kind of a horror film.
And so as someone who's interested in why people are interested in scary things, Obviously, I'm very interested in horror movies and horror games and stories because those are the ways that we talk about these scary things and in fictional settings.
And so I became really interested in how do we define the horror genre?
Like, what is it about that movie that makes me say, aha, that's a horror movie?
And so this is something that I've been coming up with recently.
I just wrote a paper with a colleague of mine on this, I think what's going on in horror movies in particular is is that you have a really powerful bad guy.
You've got a really strong antagonist, strong villain, very formidable, and you have a very vulnerable protagonist.
And if you think about it, that doesn't really happen in any other genre of movie.
Like historically, people have tried to define the horror genre as, you know, the way that the audience feels.
Like, for example, they feel afraid. It's like if it scares you, it's a horror movie.
Well, that's not a very good definition because what scares me may not scare you or may scare someone else.
May scare me today, but not in 10 years, that doesn't change what the story is, right?
It doesn't change what that story is meant to be.
Other people have said, well, it's about the intention of the writer.
So if the writer is trying to scare you, that's a horror story.
And I didn't really sit right with me either because, um, somebody can try to do something and not do it very well, right?
Or they can try to do one thing, but actually it ends up looking like another thing.
So I thought about, I started thinking about this as kind of a biologist and thinking about the characters involved and, like, their relationship to one another.
Well, it seems like in horror movies, and empirically so... did this study on like 600 different films, horror movies feature very vulnerable protagonists, very formidable characters, antagonists.
And I think that's a really archetypal type of story where you're You're the underdog, right?
Or in this case, the person you're empathizing with, the protagonist, is the underdog.
And there's nothing they can do really to get out of this situation.
And yet they still somehow... usually make it out.
And I think that's really attractive information for people who are high in morbid curiosity.
That's interesting. What about zombie movies?
What's the appeal of those? Because that's... Yeah.
That's a weird one, right? Yeah. It's kind of horror... but by design is fantastical.
Yeah, yeah. But I think zombies are interesting because they... they tap into all four domains of morbid curiosity.
And I think they're probably one of the only, um, horror stories that reliably do that.
So if you think about what a zombie is, it's a...
It was a human, right? It still looks human, still kind of acts human in some ways. and has bad intentions, right?
It wants to eat you. of taps into the minds of dangerous people.
What's really going on? Is there anything left in the zombie's mind?
Is there still a human in there or is it just a monster?
So it taps into that domain. They're obviously very violent if they catch you.
If they catch you, they want to eat you, right?
So there's a lot of violence in zombie films that taps into the violence domain.
There's also usually warring sort of survivor groups, right?
There's a lot of like intergroup violence in zombie movies usually. they're also kind of supernatural, right?
They're alive, but not really. Or are they dead?
It's unclear what their status is. Are they alive or dead?
Can they be brought back? Are they gone forever?
Why do they keep coming when I shoot them?
They do all of these things that are sort of tapping into the paranormal danger, the uncertainty.
And of course, the last one, body violations.
I mean, they're like walking body violations, right?
They have horrible injuries all over them.
If they catch people, they tend to create horrible injuries, whether that's bites or scratches or ripping off their arms.
Um, And so I think zombie movies sort of reliably tap into all four domains of morbid curiosity.
Which makes them really appealing and those tend to be the highest grossing Like horror TV shows or movies if you think of like World War Z is like an action zombie movie I mean, that's the perfect combination Yeah, I Am Legend, Walking Dead for TV shows.
Those are the ones that, if you do them right... you can really capture a broad audience.
It's funny that you're different categories of elements of morbid curiosity that you can kind of reverse engineer that and use it to explain those.
I'd never even considered that. Are you familiar with this monster enters left?
Tactic, have you heard of this? What is it?
Monster enters left. So it's a filmmaking... trope, I suppose.
Apparently... Horror filmmakers know that the human eye has a tendency to drift slightly to the right of the screen when they're viewing a movie.
So on average, shocks and surprises come from the left side.
Really? This is this guy, Will Mushom. He's a composer and a writer.
Um, horror cinematography seems to sort of exploit negative empty space, right?
That's how it builds tension. Sure. Prime's view is for something to emerge, but it often comes from the left and where attention is weakest.
So it uses the imbalance to heighten the impact.
Jump scares... and sort of the way that it's integrated into the broader atmospheric heightened tension.
And we've got this cognitive asymmetry that favors right brain surprise.
People tend to scan screens in one way and then an appearance on the left it hits faster.
Even though our eyes drift to the right, we tend to scan from left to right, which means that a left-sided sudden appearance hits the brain more quickly and it processes more quickly.
And perhaps... That's a reason why sort of misdirection works when you're trying to work out what's going on on the screen.
Oh, that's so cool. Yeah. And I imagine, I guess the left to right thing is just a artifact of us reading left to right is that the idea like i i'm not sure i mean it scanning Perhaps.
Perhaps it's trained. Um... I would be interested to know whether this would be correct in different cultures that have different kinds of ways that they put exactly.
Yeah. Uh, the ancient Egyptians, uh, We'll put it from the bottom.
This is something that needs a little bit more, I've done a bit of research on it and I wanted to talk to you about it today, but I don't know just quite how much truth there is in it.
What would be lovely would be to do an assessment of... jump scares in movies and work out which side of the screen they come from.
Yeah, yeah, I think, man, that would be a hard one to do because I think you would have to, like in this study that I mentioned, we used, large language models to describe plots and describe characters in the plots, right?
And you can do that with like chat GPT, if you have the right kind of prompts, you can say like, you know, rate this antagonist in this movie, uh, on all these different features that we think tap into, into formidability.
Right. Um, Oh, this is interesting. I've just done a little bit of digging there.
So you've got this thing called pseudo-neglect. which is linked to right hemisphere dominance for spatial awareness.
That paradoxically results in leftward attention bias in some visual search tasks.
But during screen watching... attentional drift to the right is commonly observed, likely due to learned scanning patterns.
So yeah. Sudden movement or emergence. on the left side of the screen can be more startling because it taps into the right hemisphere, so we cross over.
Right goes to left, left goes to right. Taps into the right hemisphere, which is more reactive to emotion, novelty, and spatial alertness.
And the viewer's attention is often not focused on the left, during build-up sequences because of this drift to the right, this misdirection taxes cognitive resources, meaning that we're less able to anticipate a threat when it comes from an unexpected place.
So that's the left-hand side. It's like a one-two punch.
It's like it surprises you more and it activates a grain more that's more likely to respond.
That's so cool. Was there a name for this?
What was the name for this phenomenon? Monster Answers Left.
Okay, I'll look that up. Which is an interesting one.
Psychological and cinematic principle. uh somewhat unexplored formerly in peer-reviewed research well that stinks that's stinks of a blue ocean like it's almost like everything i study i feel like uh You know, it's nice when that something is not somebody's not looked into it because then you're like, oh, I can do that and I can kind of be the one to discover this.
Um, but the downside is you don't have the time or the money or the energy to do all the studies.
And so you kind of hope that like other people will do some of these interesting things so that...
I can actually just read about it and enjoy it and learn from it.
Yeah, I'm not surprised to hear that you know, the empirical research is lacking.
Oh. I buy it, though. I think that makes a lot of sense, especially the scanning left to right, the drift.
The surprise factor, I think that makes a lot of sense.
But I had never heard of that. We're learning everything today.
Have you looked at any correlations between the fact that people, especially at younger ages...
I'm more exposed to horrific images. Is this...
Increasing morbid curiosity? Is it desensitizing people?
Uh, lots of violent media being shown to people at a young age, sensitive developmental stages.
I'm interested in whether that's. changing people's morbid curiosity.
Yeah, I don't know. I mean, again, true developmental studies are hard because they have to be longitudinal, right?
You have to look at the same people. over time for several years.
And you can get some... like cohort data, but cohort data is hard because technology is changing so best like as you mentioned you know a five-year-old now might have a smartphone where they can see this stuff whereas when you and I were five like It's much harder to see something graphic like that, right?
Yeah. And so the cohort analysis is actually really hard to do.
You kind of have to do a longitudinal study.
I haven't done it and I don't know anyone who has.
I will say that two things one is that you know we obviously live in like I would say the least violent in the u.s like we live in like the least violent time that we can imagine for humans you know Human life has been much more awful and violent for most of its history than it is in 2025 for the average American.
Now, we can witness, on the same coin, we... and more easily witness horrific violence because we can look it up online.
So I don't know if that's kind of a wash or if it's actually worse because we're seeing it, but we can't do anything about it, if it's better because it's not actually impacting us, um, I know that one of the concerns that people have is,
As you mentioned, are we becoming desensitized to it?
So do we stop caring about it? Does it make us less empathetic?
I actually did a study on this looking at because one of the main critiques of horror films turns out I think, is unfounded.
But one of the main critiques is that they... one of two things, either one, only people with low empathy watch them or two, if you watch them, you will get low empathy, right?
Mm-hmm. you're doomed either way. and so I actually looked into this and did a couple of studies on it and found that, um, There's no relationship between empathy levels in horror fans or people who really dislike horror.
And it kind of makes sense because, you know, if you...
If horror is interesting to you, it's interesting to you mostly because you're empathizing with the protagonist who is in danger, right?
And that elicit some sort of emotional reaction in you, usually fear or disgust or dread or if you weren't empathizing with that protagonist, or if you were... not afraid of what was going on, you wouldn't really enjoy the movie.
That's like the most common criticism of a horror movie is like, It wasn't scary or I didn't, you know.
The very thing that it was supposed to deliver, it didn't manage to deliver.
Yes. And so in order for that to deliver reliably, like you kind of have to empathize with the protagonist and you have to be a little bit afraid.
So, you know, looking back on it, it's like, well, that kind of makes sense that they're not lower in empathy, but it was one of the studies I did as part of this like package of studies was to see if, people had that impression so like if i ask people i say hey here's um Chris, he's this age and his favorite movie genre is horror.
And then I... come up with a bunch of those different little bios.
I switch out the name and the sex and the age and the, um, or you can keep those the same rather and change out the favorite movie genre.
What I found was that when I asked people, well, how empathetic do you think Chris is? how compassionate he is, how, you know, all these different traits.
People rated horror fans as less empathetic, less compassionate.
They expected them to be less empathetic and compassionate.
And I always have a fill in the blank, you know, at the end of my surveys or into my studies to get people's like, real thoughts, not just their button clicking thoughts.
And some people explicitly told me like, well, I rated him as less compassionate because he said he liked horror movies.
It's like people have this intuition that you should you know have lower empathy if you can enjoy these kinds of things.
But empirically- If he's able to do it, he is distancing himself from it because-
Low empathy, yeah. If he was empathetic, he would simply not be able to do it Whereas what it appears is the whole reason that you're interested is because of your empathy.
That's the precise... that it's working on.
Now, there's one caveat to that, which is that Let's say you're like a, like a totally cold, like a Jeffrey Dahmer, just totally cold, serial killer. interested in... You can still be interested in violence because it's sort of a... a way for you to not get caught, but experience those really violent urges.
So there are those like, rare instances where yes, like a serial killer might actually enjoy a horror movie.
Um, but for different reasons than 99.9% of population.
Oh, for that much training. Yeah, exactly.
It's a different kind of training, right?
They're training with the predator, not with the prey.
Oh, so interesting. Yeah, well, I guess...
You're just rolling the dice. Someone says that their favorite genre of movies is horror.
Maybe they're a highly empathetic person.
Maybe they're a serial killer. Yeah, maybe.
You never know. I think it probably errs on one side or the other, but You can never be too careful.
Well, but that actually is a little bit like of a...
I guess a meta approach to this, which is that, well, people are concerned about people that like horror movies because some of them might be serial killers.
So your threat detection is going off on the horror movie fans because... some of them might be dangerous.
Beautiful. Colton Scrivener, ladies and gentlemen.
Colton, your stuff's great. Your sub stack is awesome.
Your book's awesome. Everyone should go and check it out.
Where should they go? I mean, for the book, you can order it from whatever bookstore you... tend to go to so you know you can get it on ping on random house or amazon or bookshop or your local bookstore, starting October 7th.
And then for my other writing that didn't make it into the book, my sub stack, morbidlycuriousthoughts.com.
I can. Colton, I appreciate you. Thank you, man.
Yeah. Thanks for the fun conversation. I get asked all the time for book suggestions.
People want to get into reading fiction or non-fiction or real life stories.
And that's why I made a list of 100 of the most interesting and impactful books that I've ever read. read.
These are the most life-changing reads that I've ever found, and there's descriptions about why I like them and links to go and buy them.
And it's completely free. And you can get it right now by going to chriswillx.com slash books.
That's Chris Will. willx.com slash books
