Why We’re Drawn to Death, Crime, & Danger - Coltan Scrivner

1. 0:00 – 7:20

   Why are We Drawn to Dark Content?

   1. CWChris Williamson0:00

      How do you get into studying morbid curiosity? I'm intrigued by what the character arc is that leads you to doing that.

   2. CSColtan Scrivner0:07

      (laughs) Uh, you know, a lot of people ask me, did I always want to study, uh, 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 liked scary things when I was a kid, you know. Not because I wasn't scared of them, but because they, they were scary, um, and that made them, you know, interesting and fun to me, especially when I could kind of have them at a distance, right? You could pause the movie or pause the game, uh, 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, uh, you know, anthropology, a little bit of biology in undergrad. Studied some forensic science, uh, for my master's, and then I kind of made the switch into psychology during my PhD. And, you know, like a lot of eager young grad students, I was interested in everything under the sun that had to do with human behavior. Uh, but that doesn't work in grad school. You have to kind of pick something and, and stick with it. And so, I remember, you know, 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, uh, we think violence is bad, and we try to... we shun it, we, we punish it. Uh, but there are certain circumstances where violence is okay, and not only okay, but maybe even revered. So you think, you know, like, the Colosseum for the Romans, for example, a great example of where violence was, um, was revered in many ways and en- and enjoyed by tens of thousands of people. And so I was really interested in how people made sense of this. 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, uh... That, so that was sort of my first step into morbid curiosity, and that was, like, the left foot in. And then the right foot in was, uh, I started thinking about these other interesting related paradoxes. Like, 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 in psychology. And, uh, you know, as a grad student, that's, like, a gold mine. You find something really interesting that everyone kind of understands at an intuitive level, but nobody is studying. Um, and so I kind of got into it that way. I, uh, I hooked up with Mathias Clasen, 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 in, in 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? Uh, and what, what, what does that mean about us? Um, is it good? Is it bad? Can we learn something from it? How has it 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.

   3. CWChris Williamson3:21

      That paradox is so interesting, that everybody... Uh, if you get involved in a fight, it's a very, very small, uh, cohort of people that think, "Oh, this is gonna be fun."

   4. CSColtan Scrivner3:33

      Sure. Yeah.

   5. CWChris Williamson3:34

      And yet, true crime, uh, or the male equivalent of true crime, uh, which are war stories, um, UFC-

   6. CSColtan Scrivner3:44

      Yep.

   7. CWChris Williamson3:44

      ... e- every different modern incarnation of that, uh, police body cam footage-

   8. CSColtan Scrivner3:49

      Yeah.

   9. CWChris Williamson3:49

      ... uh, rubbernecking at, at, uh, road crashes as we go past. Um-

   10. CSColtan Scrivner3:53

       Yeah. 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, you know, like, uh, 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 a UFC fight.

   11. CWChris Williamson4:13

       Mm.

   12. CSColtan Scrivner4:13

       But materially, they're pretty similar, right? In a lot of ways, they can be.

   13. CWChris Williamson4:18

       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, what's the compulsion?

   14. CSColtan Scrivner4:28

       Well, I think, you know, any animal that exists in the world should know something about potential threats around, right? Humans are no different. The only w- 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, 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, um, just observe. It's called predator inspection. They'll observe cheetahs, um, and in particular, adolescent gazelles, those who are healthy, who can get away if something a- bad happens, that maybe don't have a lot of experience with their sort of local predators. Um, but they have to do that in person, right? They have to, 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, that's like candy for our minds, right? Like, "Are you telling me we can reap the benefits of this without having any of the costs?" I mean, that's a, that's a no-brainer.

   15. CWChris Williamson5:43

       Mm. Okay, yeah. So you get to kind of sandbox scary st- scary situations. I'm gonna guess h- bro science cap is coming on early today. Um, I'm gonna guess that that also explains at least part of the difference between seeing a street fight occur in front of you and paying to watch the UFC. Is it kind of the degree of control, the fact that there is... we know that there's rules wh- it's really unlikely go- we're gonna see someone die in the UFC. So is it, is it to do with control, safety, sort of boundaries?

   16. CSColtan Scrivner6:17

       Yeah, I think, I think that has a lot to do with it. Um, 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, uh, where a threat is attacking a victim, uh, 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- um, 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, um, that image is. Whereas in a movie, it's just whatever that director gives to you, right? It's whatever the, whatever the movie feeds to you, um, you kind of... that's- 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, um, you know, you have a little bit more control in some ways, uh, about how vivid that is, right? It's- it's more difficult to make that really vivid, like a... it's not gonna look like a Christopher Nolan film, you know, in your mind's eye.

2. 7:20 – 15:25

   The 4 Domains of Morbid Curiosity

   1. CWChris Williamson7:20

      That's interesting. Are there different domains of morbid curiosity? Are there diff- different categories or types?

   2. CSColtan Scrivner7:27

      Yeah. Yeah, I mean, that was one of the first things I did, right? So if you're a psychologist, you're studying this, uh, new concept, or at least new to the- to academics concept. One of the first things you do is, well, how can I easily measure it, right? Well, one way to- one way to easily measure something as a psychologist is to have a survey or a questionnaire, you know, like the Big Five or disgust sensitivity scale or psychopathy scale, or any number of ways to measure these different traits. And, uh, there really was no scale to measure morbid curiosity, so what I did is I collected a bunch of items from people from, um, different forums, like online forums, from interviews, from sort of your own theoretical grounding about, uh, different scenarios that might, uh, elicit interest, that are- 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- 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- is kind of obvious. It's violence, right? So kind of witnessing violence. That was sort of what, um, intrigued me initially about this is, why are we so intrigued by violence? Why are we interested in violent conflicts? Uh, the second one is one you mentioned, which is kind of the true crime or the interest in- 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- or the way that they committed that violence. Um, the third one is kind of the outcome of violence, so that would be the- uh, 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, uh, an injury if you're going to treat it. 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. You know, if you come across someone in a- 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? If 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- for those reasons as well. Um, and the fourth one I kind of struggled with at first. It was the- uh, the supernatural or the paranormal. And, um, I thought, well, like, you know, personally don't believe in ghosts, right? Uh, 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. Uh, whether or not they're... like, for example, uh, Ed Hagen, he had a really great paper recently, and I think Aaron Lightner was his co-author on that, suggesting that, uh, paranormal beliefs kind of help us, um... they give us a starting point from which we can, uh, start to think about other minds, right? Um, they give us kind of a- a way to ratchet, a way, a way to take the- the world of a trillion possibilities and bring them down to, you know, 100,000 possibilities. It makes- it makes it graspable so that we can actually get some traction in understanding other minds. Um, and so I think what the paranormal domain is really tapping into is an interest in things that are dangerous that we don't fully understand. So you find, you know, people's interest in the occult or witches or aliens or cryptids or ghosts, like these things that... You know, with the- with the exception of Casper, most people think ghosts are pretty malicious, like they're pretty scary. It's a... you stay at a haunted hotel 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. We think 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, uh, you know, if you see someone, uh, on the street and they're wearing all black and they have their hood 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.

   3. CWChris Williamson11:54

      Mm.

   4. CSColtan Scrivner11:54

      So I think that's kind of tapping into that, and then 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. There's 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 or they did it, uh, using, you know, magical ingredients."

   5. CWChris Williamson12:24

      I'm trying to work out what the common thread is between these four, between stuff that's violent, people who commit violence-

   6. CSColtan Scrivner12:31

      Mm-hmm.

   7. CWChris Williamson12:31

      ... the impact of violence on the human body, and supernatural, spooky idea, yeah.

   8. CSColtan Scrivner12:36

      Like things that, things that probably will be violent because they're being sneaky, right?

   9. CWChris Williamson12:40

      Right, uh-

   10. CSColtan Scrivner12:40

       It's kind of similar actually to the, uh, that's pretty similar to the, uh, Minds of Dangerous People or the true crime one. I think there's a lot of overlap in those two in some ways.

   11. CWChris Williamson12:48

       What's the th- what's the thread between all of these?

   12. CSColtan Scrivner12:50

       I think the thread is, is, uh, it's thread itself, right? It's, it's what could possibly harm me, uh, and what do I know about it, or more importantly, what do I not know about it? So if I'm watching a, a violent encounter, I'm watching a UFC fight, I'm learning about the mechanics of the fighting, right?

   13. CWChris Williamson13:06

       Yeah.

   14. CSColtan Scrivner13:06

       I'm learning about in-the-moment mechanics of what's happening during the fight. Same thing with a street fight, same thing with a 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, uh, not see that they should have seen, right? Uh, 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.

   15. CWChris Williamson13:36

       Hmm.

   16. CSColtan Scrivner13:36

       The one where, like, if, if a victim escapes, uh, what did they do to escape? And people find that more interesting than any other part of the story. Um, si- similar idea for, um, body violations, right? Like, what caused this injury and how can I make sure it doesn't happen to me? Um, and then for the sort of, uh, unknown or, or paranormal type of dangers, um, are they real? How, h- w- why do people f- 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?

   17. CWChris Williamson14:12

       Mm-hmm.

   18. CSColtan Scrivner14:12

       And, 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, and protect myself.

   19. CWChris Williamson14:22

       Right, so threat detection, um, mitigation, being able to plan for the future. Um-

   20. CSColtan Scrivner14:27

       Yeah, threat learning I would say. Like threat... Yeah, threat mitigation, threat learning is really what it's about. And of course, you know, evolution kind of imbues positive feeling of curiosity, uh, this approach orientation, because otherwise we would just avoid those things, right? It's, it's natural to avoid things that are dangerous. Um, but if you counteract that with a bit of curiosity, in particular in situations where you are 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-

   21. CWChris Williamson15:02

       Mm-hmm.

   22. CSColtan Scrivner15:02

       ... approach and push forward so I can learn something about it and it actually makes me better prepared in the future.

   23. CWChris Williamson15:07

       Watch the UFC fight but from this side (laughs) of the ring-

   24. CSColtan Scrivner15:09

       (laughs) That's right.

   25. CWChris Williamson15:10

       ... or the, the, the, the octagon.

   26. CSColtan Scrivner15:11

       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, there is a incremental gain in, in kind of what you're learning, but it may not be worth the cost, right?

3. 15:25 – 22:51

   Morbid Curiosity in Evolution

   1. CSColtan Scrivner15:25

   2. CWChris Williamson15:25

      Mm. I'm interested in this sort of adaptive story of morbid curiosity, um, or, 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, uh, watch body cam footage or, or a true crime podcast or a, uh, true crime documentary or a horror film. I'm wondering what morbid curiosity would have looked like ancestrally.

   3. CSColtan Scrivner15:56

      Yeah.

   4. CWChris Williamson15:57

      What, what, what do you think about that?

   5. CSColtan Scrivner15:57

      Well, we can, uh, well we can ask what it looks like in non-humans, right? And that, that gives us a sense maybe of what it looks like. Um, you know, I mentioned earlier the gazelles and cheetahs. There's a really great study, it was like a two-year safari study where, uh, the zoologist actually went out and just observed gazelles in their natural environment and kind of how they interacted with their natural predators, which are the cheetahs. And what she found were that, um, 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, or do something else. Um, if you are in a large group, I think it was, if you were in a large group, you were more likely to observe the cheetah. If you were further away from the cheetah, so if you had some distance from the cheetah, you would observe it. And that makes sense, right, because you, you can't always run away when you see a predator. You would always be... Uh, on the, on the savanna, you would always be running, right? Uh, because you live amongst your predators, right? Lions and zebras live amongst each other. Gazelles and cheetahs live amongst each other. But gazelles aren't, or lions and, 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, if you're a prey to actually run away every single time, 'cause then you're gonna deplete all your caloric resources. Um, and so one of the, uh, 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 going to, when they're trying to, um, prey upon you versus when they're laying around. Um, and you can see the same thing in, uh, in hunter-gatherer societies where, uh, they don't have television, they don't have written language, but they do have oral storytelling, right? Um, and, and if you look at folklore, predators are one of the most common themes cross-culturally in folklore. Uh, 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. Um, and I think one other piece of evidence for this that I didn't initially come to until, until I started writing the book was that they show up a lot in our dreams. Um, and there's this really great...... uh, theory that, you know, everybody wants to know what do my dreams mean, right? Like so, so the one question a psychologist should be able to answer is, "What do my dreams mean?"

   6. CWChris Williamson18:35

      Mm-hmm.

   7. CSColtan Scrivner18:35

      At least that's what people think. Um, and I never had really thought much about dreams. You know, I, I just... They're hard to study because 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, you know, the, the way that we remember them or talk about them, uh, I started reading about dreams a lot. And what I found was that one of the most influential and, 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, if you can learn about something when it's not costing you energy, it's not, uh, taking the place of foraging or mating or social status building or whatever else you might be doing during the day, uh, then that's a really valuable thing that you can take, right? So that, that's not to say that dreams only simulate threats. Um, but dreaming itself is a pretty, um, 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, you're paralyzed... Ideally, you're paralyzed when you dream, right? Otherwise, you're sleepwalking. Um, but if you, you know, hook up electrodes to animals or people, you can actually see that a lot of the muscles involved in locomotion are being activated or be- or 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, you know, you can do this with... There, there was a study in the, I think it was '60s with cats where they, you know, 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 what they found is that cats almost always, uh, got up and moved around in these sort of either, uh, predatorial types of ways or prey types of ways where they were being hunted. So, they were hunting or being hunted, uh, when they were asleep. At least they were acting those out, physically. Um, so yeah, I, I... And there's a, there's a lot of evidence that, uh, threats show up in our dreams, not just in our nightmares, right? So, uh, if, if you talk about scary dreams or threats in dreams people tend to think about nightmares, but nightmares are really a little different, I would say, than, um, 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, uh, 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 and 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. Um, 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, uh, there's an anthropologist, Thomas Gregor, who, uh, he studies I think it's the Mehenaku is how you say their name, people. And one thing that's interesting about the Mehenaku people is that they, uh, 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. Um, and so he did a, a great analysis of, like, 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 or 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.

   8. CWChris Williamson22:26

      Mm. I, I had, uh, Rahul Jandial on the show yesterday, he wrote a book about dreaming. And, um, he, I think he identified the difference between nightmares and bad dreams is nightmares are things that usually cause you to wake up-

   9. CSColtan Scrivner22:41

      Mm.

   10. CWChris Williamson22:41

       ... they actually disrupt your sleep, and, uh, have a greater chance of bleeding over and ruining your next day.

   11. CSColtan Scrivner22:47

       (laughs) That's a good way to describe a nightmare, yeah.

   12. CWChris Williamson22:49

       Yeah. Um,

4. 22:51 – 34:05

   Individual Difference in Morbid Curiosity

   1. CWChris Williamson22:51

      okay. Well, the... It seems so far that the main, the main thing that we're doing is preparing for threats, right? That we, we, we need to get some sort of adaptive explanation for why morbid curiosity is there. Typically, these things would be, uh, invoking a fear or disgust, but, uh, curiosity, uh, balances the scales so that we can learn from this experience. It encourages us to overcome our disgust response, uh, or our fear and to lean in a little bit, but not too much-

   2. CSColtan Scrivner23:22

      Right.

   3. CWChris Williamson23:22

      ... and sort of tolerates that accelerator back and forth. Okay, that's a... I think that's a nice, a nice explanation. I'm particularly interested in how w- where individual differences in morbid curiosity come from. What- what's a predictor that somebody-

   4. CSColtan Scrivner23:37

      Yes.

   5. CWChris Williamson23:38

      ... is more likely or less likely? Personality differences, ge- uh, gender, uh, background-

   6. CSColtan Scrivner23:43

      Right.

   7. CWChris Williamson23:43

      ... upbringing, stuff like that. What are the big contributors there?

   8. CSColtan Scrivner23:47

      Yeah, that, that was, uh, 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? It should, there should be some predictors and some things that, you know, shouldn't predict it at all, um, but there shouldn't be an over- 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 to 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?

   9. CWChris Williamson24:27

      Mm-hmm.

   10. CSColtan Scrivner24:27

       Um, and it's kind of your, your main domains of personality that explain a lot of, um, attitudes and behaviors in daily life. Um-They took a disgust sensitivity scale, they took a psychopathy scale that had one of Lilienfeld's that has multiple subscales in it. Um, I asked, you know, their age, their, their sex, their, I think, income, um, threw in a lot of different things that it was kind of just like a, a pot where I threw in all these different, uh, s- personality tests to try to see, can I explain away morbid curiosity if I have enough data? And the answer was no. Um, the closest I got-

   11. CWChris Williamson25:05

       Ah.

   12. CSColtan Scrivner25:05

       That's a good, that's a good thing, that's a good thing. Uh, for me it was, anyway. Um, the 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. Um, however, there were a few things that were much more s- strongly correlated with morbid curiosity than other things. So, um, 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, a- and this is subclinical psychopathy, so not clinically, you know, no clinical diagnoses. Um, another one was, uh... Oh, I also, I used th- the Five Dimensions of Curiosity from Todd Cushton, um, because I wanted to see maybe if it could be explained by other dimensions of curiosity. The answer there was no-

   13. CWChris Williamson26:01

       That's just people that are generally curious.

   14. CSColtan Scrivner26:03

       Just generally curious, yeah. And there were some positive correlations, but they were small. They were .2 to .3 or maybe 4 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. Um, there was, uh, I think psychopathy, and in particular in psychopathy it was the rebelliousness subscale. That was the one that was most strongly corre- That was, like, the single thing I measured that was most strongly correlated with morbid curiosity by itself. Um, 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. Um, it was... I don't think there were any significant differences there. Even in other studies I've done, it tends to be pretty close. Um, 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 gonna do your learning when you're older, right? You're less, and you should be less interested in the things that you've already learned about. Um, the mor- morbid curiosity looks like it decreases on average with age, um, and that lines up with, uh, animal literature on the gazelles, for example, right? The adolescents were the ones that did the most predator inspection. Uh, but, but there weren't a lot of other major... Like disgust, you would think disgust would be highly corre- I thought it would be, right? I thought disgust sensitivity surely would be highly corre- negatively correlated-

   15. CWChris Williamson27:32

       Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

   16. CSColtan Scrivner27:32

       ... with morbid curiosity. And it was a little bit, like some of the subscales I think, you know, maybe explained 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, you know, surely how easily you're disgusted by something should be strongly negatively correlated with how interested you are in learning about a, a bodily injury, right? Um, 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, uh, in the chapter on, on bodily violations i- in the book, where there was a, a really cool study, um, done several years ago by Tom Kupfer where he set up these, like, fake, um, dressings for injuries, and, 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, uh, you know, a fish hook or something, a knife," something that's non-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? If you had, if you had to pick up this bandage, you know, how, 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 non-infectious. So if it's a, it's a bandage from a knife wound, people were 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 we're make, 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 infections not other kinds of bodily injuries. Not broken bones, not knife cuts, not, uh, you know, 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, or accidents.

   17. CWChris Williamson29:55

       Mm. Yeah. I mean, that's so interesting. People would... Oh, I'm just trying to think about examples. People would be maybe interested in documentaries about the, the Black Death-

   18. CSColtan Scrivner30:09

       Yeah.

   19. CWChris Williamson30:09

       ... but it's so long ago that-

   20. CSColtan Scrivner30:11

       Yeah.

   21. CWChris Williamson30:12

       ... they, they feel like they're protected.

   22. CSColtan Scrivner30:14

       Yeah.

   23. CWChris Williamson30:14

       Um, 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-

   24. CSColtan Scrivner30:24

       Yeah.

   25. CWChris Williamson30:24

       ... and they were hearing about this and it's the sort of thing that's out there and it could get you-

   26. CSColtan Scrivner30:28

       Yeah.

   27. CWChris Williamson30:28

       ... um, I, I imagine that there's lots of people who would have been both incredibly scared of COVID and also massive fans of true crime at the same time.

   28. CSColtan Scrivner30:37

       Yeah, yeah, probably so.

   29. CWChris Williamson30:38

       Uh, well, square that circle for me.

   30. CSColtan Scrivner30:39

       Yeah. Well, I think, uh, you know-And, and it's not to say that we wouldn't be interested in things like a documentary, like the example you gave. I think, you know, 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-
5. 34:05 – 37:46

   What is So Attractive About Serial Killers?

   1. CSColtan Scrivner34:05

   2. CWChris Williamson34:05

      All right. We, uh, we, we, we need to dig into this. Why do some women want to date serial killers?

   3. CSColtan Scrivner34:10

      (laughs)

   4. CWChris Williamson34:10

      If there's no sex difference-

   5. CSColtan Scrivner34:13

      Mm-hmm.

   6. CWChris Williamson34:13

      ... it's only slight, it's not that predictive, blah, blah, blah.

   7. CSColtan Scrivner34:17

      Yeah.

   8. CWChris Williamson34:17

      I'm not familiar with that many guys sending love letters to female serial killers or d- Angels of Mercy or whatever they're called, or these nurses that get caught having killed a ton of babies. Uh, the reverse, some chicks love a serial killer.

   9. CSColtan Scrivner34:33

      Yeah.

   10. CWChris Williamson34:33

       What's, what's going on there?

   11. CSColtan Scrivner34:35

       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, this was, uh, a question that (laughs) I've been getting for a long time and finally, uh, had a study that kind of addressed this. Um, 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 pri-... You would 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, uh, 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, uh, done some research with some, some, uh, researchers here at the University of Arkansas, uh, 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, uh, the bad boys, right? Like the, like those traits that are associated with being, like, a bad boy. And, but what was interesting is there was a distinction. So you're morbidly curious, you were, you were behaviorally interested in these guys, but you didn't necessarily feel, like, 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, uh, depicted a man who was high in the dark triad or, in the reverse, uh, 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, um, 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.

   12. CWChris Williamson37:04

       Mm. It's interesting, that crossover into the sexual attraction thing. I suppose, you know, 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.

   13. CSColtan Scrivner37:34

       Yeah, yeah. And, you know, the, a- a dangerous person is only dangerous to you if they don't like you, right?

   14. CWChris Williamson37:39

       Yeah.

   15. CSColtan Scrivner37:39

       If a dangerous person likes you, then they become a huge asset to you-

   16. CWChris Williamson37:43

       Hmm.

   17. CSColtan Scrivner37:43

       ... especially if you're not a high formidability person,

6. 37:46 – 47:17

   Why are Certain Groups Attracted to Certain Types of Morbid Content?

   1. CSColtan Scrivner37:46

      right?

   2. CWChris Williamson37:46

      Looking at, um, some more of the sort of group differences here, do certain cohorts prefer different types, different categories? There is certainly no, uh... at least I've heard that true crime, true crime podcasts lean female, I'm gonna guess. The UFC leans very, very heavily male.

   3. CSColtan Scrivner38:06

      Yeah.

   4. CWChris Williamson38:07

      Um, uh, I do have this theory that real world war stories are just true crime for dudes.

   5. CSColtan Scrivner38:13

      They are true crime for dudes, absolutely.

   6. CWChris Williamson38:15

      So what's going on here? Are- y- have you thought about the taxonomy of different types of, of content and why certain people are interested in it?

   7. CSColtan Scrivner38:24

      Kind of. I think, um... Yeah, so we, I, I, I've, I've looked at, uh, 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, and whatever modality it is, podcasts, books, whatever, right? Um, I haven't looked at men and war stories, but I, I would imagine that that is true for the same reasons, right? Um, that's, you know, historically, what kind of violence is a man likely to encounter? Well, violence from another man, right? And probably in the context of a- 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. Um, so those, those are the, those are the types of stories that are most relevant to those demographics, right? The type of story, when it comes to threats, for women that is most relevant is close personal relationships, um, in, like, most domestic abuse cases, right? Or, um, kind of by definition, like, violence against women tends to be men they know. Uh, among men, it's kind of just other men, right? And historically, it's been other men who are not part of your group, uh, and that translates pretty, pretty directly into a war story.

   8. CWChris Williamson39:43

      Mm. I suppose playing with war as well, that makes complete sense.

   9. CSColtan Scrivner39:48

      Yeah.

   10. CWChris Williamson39:48

       Like, that's, y- y- guys are prepping for war. That's why, you know, 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, this isn't 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. They're, the guys, little boys, uh, th- cowboys versus aliens versus y- who, uh, wha- whatever-

   11. CSColtan Scrivner40:14

       Monsters or whatever they come up with, right?

   12. CWChris Williamson40:15

       Yeah, exactly, yeah.

   13. CSColtan Scrivner40:16

       Yeah, yeah, yeah.

   14. CWChris Williamson40:16

       One, one is doing sort of nurturing and care, and the other is doing war and battle.

   15. CSColtan Scrivner40:21

       Yeah. Yeah, I think, uh, I would love to have, I mean, I don't, I don't know that there's, there's probably data on this somewhere, but, you know, like a cross-cultural analysis of that, I, 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, uh, little boys hanging out with other little boys, they're gonna play somewhat more violent games and girls are gonna play somewhat less violent games, or different kinds of violent games, right? Um, again, direct violence versus kind of learning about someone who's maybe dangerous. Uh, I mean, I, I, I saw this when I was, when I was in my master's program, I worked as a mad scientist, which is, like, the coolest job title in the world. Um, and all it meant was that I would go around, and I would do science shows and camps for kids, right? It's like I was like a cheap version of Bill Nye. And, uh, one of the camps, uh, 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've 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, uh, 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, you know, unfortunately, when I was doing this camp, it was in the middle of summer in, in Oklahoma, it was 100 and whatever degrees outside, and so they couldn't play outside that long. It's just, like, it was too hot. And so we had to find, like, games for them to play inside during their break time. And I didn't really know a lot of, like, group games for kids. Uh, I mean, I, w- w- ev- ev- 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. 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, the one game that came to mind was this game called Mafia or, or Werewolf, if you've ever heard of it, right?

   16. CWChris Williamson42:34

       I've played Werewolf many times, yes.

   17. CSColtan Scrivner42:36

       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, okay, that's a pretty, like, simple 'Cause I needed 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 at first was me, and then all the kids are part of this, like, fake town, and they get these secret identities with these little 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 (laughs) had to help them know what their identity was. But once we got all of that sorted, um, most of them, you know, are townspeople. Two of them were mafia members, one of them was a doctor and could heal people, and one was a, a sheriff who could arrest people. And the basic premise is the narrator tells this 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, you know, can wake up and try to heal them, and the sheriff has to figure out who did it, right? Um, 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, uh, in this case, like, hang for the mafia member, right? Who they're gonna hang in a, like an Old West-style, uh, hanging. And I tried to keep it very tame, because I was like, "Okay, I- these are like five to nine year olds. I don't want them going home to their parents and being like, 'I, I killed my friend at, at science camp today,' uh, because he was a member of the mafia or something." So I kept the, I kept the, uh, the narration very tame. It was, you know, "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 let, would let one of them try narration. And it became this, like, awful scene of, like, out of the worst horror movie. I mean, it describ-... The descriptions of, like, what happened to the people who were murdered by the mafia became bloody and violent and their entrails, you know, or their guts were thrown out and, um, their, their heads were cut off. It was, like, this horribly violent thing. So without me provoking them, and in fact I was trying to, to keep them from being overly violent, uh, the kids had this desire to... And in p- in particular, the little boys had this desire to, like, tell these awful stories of what happened, um, 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. (laughs)

   18. CWChris Williamson45:00

       (laughs)

   19. CSColtan Scrivner45:01

       So yeah, I think, I think kids are super morbidly curious, um, but it shows up in their pretend play a lot, you know, when they have control over, over how that feels to them.

   20. CWChris Williamson45:12

       Mm. What about when it comes to car crashes, gory films?

   21. CSColtan Scrivner45:19

       Yeah.

   22. CWChris Williamson45:19

       Um, I guess there's a growing creator economy as well for police body cam footage too.

   23. CSColtan Scrivner45:25

       Really?

   24. CWChris Williamson45:25

       Yeah. I mean, I, I... The, the freedom of information requests or whatever. There's entire channels that are just built from asking to get access to this so... Which, I mean, I don't know where the freedom of in- 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-

   25. CSColtan Scrivner45:45

       (laughs)

   26. CWChris Williamson45:46

       ... YouTube ecosystem of people that just, like, narrate, uh, mad shit happening to police officers.

   27. CSColtan Scrivner45:53

       Yeah.

   28. CWChris Williamson45:53

       Um, but yeah. Is this just that people are injured, I want to see how they're injured, how to fix it, how to avoid it? Or is, is there more going on there?

   29. CSColtan Scrivner46:01

       I, yeah, I think with police body cams, uh, 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, when, when police stories make the news, it's only the bad stories, right? And tho- 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, uh, people are most interested in. And, 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? You can learn something really important from that, like how do you look from the police officer's point of view? Like, what are they doing that is making them a target, uh, or, or, or feel that, you know... Making them seem like a, an aggressor to the police officer? Um, I think and in particular, those really violent, ambiguous police videos are what really get people, um, paying attention because, you know, there's different interpretations of what could happen and different interpretations of like, "How, well, 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."

   30. CWChris Williamson47:09

       Mm.
7. 47:17 – 57:14

   The Perfect Ingredients for a Horror Movie

   1. CWChris Williamson47:17

      When it comes to creating horror as it's sort of shown on TV-

   2. CSColtan Scrivner47:24

      Mm-hmm.

   3. CWChris Williamson47:26

      ... I'm not a cinematographer or a director, uh, but I have to assume that there's a formula for, um, how that's put together. It-

   4. CSColtan Scrivner47:34

      Yeah.

   5. CWChris Williamson47:35

      What does that look like when it's sort of deconstructed? What is horror and wha- wha- what's the difference between terror and horror? How, how does all of this-

   6. CSColtan Scrivner47:43

      Yeah.

   7. CWChris Williamson47:43

      ... fit together?

   8. CSColtan Scrivner47:44

      Well, I mean, this is something actually that I've been thinking a lot about recently is, you know, people s- people tend to agree when they watch a film like, "Oh, this is a horror film." It, it's just like one of those things you know it when you see it. If you watch a film and you're like, "Oh, that's kind of a horror film." Um, and so I, uh, you know, 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 in, in fictional settings. Um, 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." Um, and so this is something that I've been coming up with recently. I just wrote a paper with, uh, a colleague of mine on this. I think what's going on in horror movies in particular is that you have a really powerful bad guy, but 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. It's like historically people have tried to define the horror genre as, you know, the way that the audience feels, like, for example, um, 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. Um, that doesn't change what the story is, right? It doesn't change, like, what that story is meant to be. Um, other people have said, "Well, it's- it's about the intention of the writer." So if the writer's trying to scare you, that's a horror story and that 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 another thing. Um, so I thought about... I started thinking about this as kind of a biologist in thinking about the, um, characters involved and, like, their relationship to one another. Well, it seems like in horror movies, uh, and- and empirically so... We did this study on, like, 600 different films. Uh, horror movies feature very vulnerable protagonists, very formidable, um, antagonists, and I think that's a really, um, archetypical 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- that's really attractive information for people who are high in morbid curiosity.

   9. CWChris Williamson50:12

      That's interesting. What about zombie movies? What's the appeal of those 'cause that's a-

   10. CSColtan Scrivner50:18

       Yeah.

   11. CWChris Williamson50:18

       ... a specific type.

   12. CSColtan Scrivner50:19

       That's a weird one, right? Yeah.

   13. CWChris Williamson50:20

       Yeah. I- it- I- it's kind of horror, but by design is fantastical.

   14. CSColtan Scrivner50:27

       Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think zombies are- 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's- it was a human, right? And it still looks human, still kind of acts human in some ways, uh, and has bad intentions, right? It wants to eat you. That kind of taps into the, uh, the minds of dangerous people. What's really going o- is there anything left in the zombie's mind? Is- is there still a human in there or is it just a monster? Um, so it taps into that domain. They're obviously very violent if they catch you. If they catch you, they wanna eat you, right? Um, 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, inter-group violence in zombie movies usually. Uh, they're also kind of supernatural, right? They, uh, they're alive but not really, or are they de- you know, it- it's unclear, like, what their status is. Are they alive or dead? Can they be brought back? Are they gone forever? Um, 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 uncertain- danger. Uh, and of course the last one, body violations. I mean, they're like walking body violations, right? They have, uh, horrible injuries all over them. If they catch, uh, people, they tend to create horrible injuries whether that's bites or scratches or ripping off their arms. Um, and- and so I think zombie movies sort of reliably tap into all four domains of- of morbid curiosity.

   15. CWChris Williamson51:56

       Mm.

   16. CSColtan Scrivner51:57

       Which makes them really appealing and it, you know, those tend to be the highest grossing, uh, like horror TV shows or movies. If you think of, like, World War Z as, like, an action zombie movie, I mean that's the perfect combination, right? High budget-

   17. CWChris Williamson52:08

       I Am Legend.

   18. CSColtan Scrivner52:08

       Yeah, I Am Legend, uh, Walking Dead for TV shows, right? I mean, those are the ones that if you do them right, you can really capture a broad audience.

   19. CWChris Williamson52:16

       It's funny that your different categories of, uh, elements of morbid curiosity that- that c- you can kind of reverse engineer that and use it to explain those.

   20. CSColtan Scrivner52:27

       Yeah.

   21. CWChris Williamson52:27

       I'd never- I'd- I'd never even considered that. Are you familiar with this "monster enters left" tactic? Have you heard of this?

   22. CSColtan Scrivner52:34

       What is it?

   23. CWChris Williamson52:35

       "Monster enters left."

   24. CSColtan Scrivner52:37

       No.

   25. CWChris Williamson52:37

       So it's a- it's a filmmaking, um, 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.

   26. CSColtan Scrivner52:53

       Yep.

   27. CWChris Williamson52:53

       So on average, shocks and surprises come from the left side.

   28. CSColtan Scrivner52:58

       Really?

   29. CWChris Williamson52:58

       So this is this guy, Will Muschamp, 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-

   30. CSColtan Scrivner53:07

       Yeah. Sure, sure.
8. 57:14 – 1:02:59

   Why is There Increasing Desensitisation to Morbid Content?

   1. CWChris Williamson57:14

      today. Have you, have you looked at any correlations between the fact that people, especially at younger ages, are 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?

   2. CSColtan Scrivner57:33

      Yeah.

   3. CWChris Williamson57:33

      Sensitive developmental stages?

   4. CSColtan Scrivner57:34

      Yeah.

   5. CWChris Williamson57:35

      I'm interested in whether that's changing people's morbid curiosity.

   6. CSColtan Scrivner57:40

      Yeah, I don't know. I mean, uh, you know, again, developmental studies are h- like, 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 c- you can get some, like, cohort data, but cohort data is hard because technology is changing so fast. 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, (laughs) it was much harder to see something graphic like that, right?

   7. CWChris Williamson58:05

      Mm-hmm.

   8. CSColtan Scrivner58:05

      And so the cohort analysis is actually really hard to do. You kind of have to do a longitudinal study. So I, I haven't done it and I, I don't know anyone who has. I will say that, um... tw- two things. One is that, you know, we, we obviously live in, like, the l- I would say the least violent... in the US. Like, we live in, like, the least violent time of, that we can imagine for humans. You know, h- human life has been much more awful and violent for most of its history than it is in 2025 for the average American. Um, now, we can witness... we... n- on the same coin, we, we can more easily witness horrific violence because we can look it up online, right? 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, you know, one of the concerns, um, 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? Um, I actually did a study on this looking at... becau- because one of the main critiques of horror films, um, turns out I think is, 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? So-

   9. CWChris Williamson59:16

      Mm-hmm.

   10. CSColtan Scrivner59:17

       ... you're doomed either way. Um, and so I actually looked into this and did a couple of studies on it and found that, um, you know, 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, um, if you're, if, 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 elicits some sort of emotional reaction in you, usually fear or disgust or dread. If you weren't empathizing with that protagonist, um, or if you were, um, 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..." y'know? Um-

   11. CWChris Williamson1:00:07

       Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. The, the, the very thing that it was supposed to deliver, it didn't manage to deliver.

   12. CSColtan Scrivner1:00:10

       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. Um, so, you know, it kind of w- 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 m- movie genre is horror." And then I come up with a bunch of those different little bios and I switch out the, the name and the sex and the age and the, um... or you can keep those the same, rather, and, and change out the, uh, favorite movie genre. Uh, what I found was that when I asked people, "Well, how empathetic do you think Chris is? How compassionate do you think-"

   13. CWChris Williamson1:00:57

       (laughs)

   14. CSColtan Scrivner1:00:58

       "... Chris is? How..." You know, all these different traits. People rated horror fans as less empathetic, less compassionate. They, they expected them to be less, um, empathetic and compassionate.And, and I always have a fill in the blank, you know, at the end of my surveys or end of my studies to get people's 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 have lower empathy if you can enjoy these kinds of things. But empirically-

   15. CWChris Williamson1:01:31

       If, if he's able to do it, he is distancing himself from it-

   16. CSColtan Scrivner1:01:34

       He is.

   17. CWChris Williamson1:01:34

       ... because-

   18. CSColtan Scrivner1:01:35

       It's because he's got low empathy, yeah.

   19. CWChris Williamson1:01:36

       If, if he was empathetic, he would simply not be able to do it.

   20. CSColtan Scrivner1:01:39

       Yeah.

   21. CWChris Williamson1:01:40

       Whereas what it appears is the whole reason that you're interested is because of your empathy. That's the precise-

   22. CSColtan Scrivner1:01:46

       Because of it. Exactly.

   23. CWChris Williamson1:01:46

       ... mechanism that it's working on.

   24. CSColtan Scrivner1:01:47

       Now, there's, there's one caveat to that, which is that let's say you're like a s- like a totally cold... like, like a Jeffrey Dahmer, just totally cold, serial killer, interested in vi-... You can still be interested in violence because it's sort of a s-... (laughs) 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 the population.

   25. CWChris Williamson1:02:16

       Oh, for them it's training.

   26. CSColtan Scrivner1:02:17

       Yeah, exactly. It's a different kind of training, right? They're training with the predator, not with the prey. Uh-

   27. CWChris Williamson1:02:22

       Oh, so interesting.

   28. CSColtan Scrivner1:02:23

       (laughs)

   29. CWChris Williamson1:02:24

       Yeah, well, I guess, you know, you're just rolling the dice. Someone says that their favorite genre of movies is, is horror.

   30. CSColtan Scrivner1:02:31

       Yeah.
9. 1:02:59 – 1:03:40

   Find Out More About Colton

   1. CWChris Williamson1:02:59

      Colton Scrivner, ladies and gentlemen. Colton, your stuff's great. Your Substack is awesome. Your book's awesome.

   2. CSColtan Scrivner1:03:04

      Thank you.

   3. CWChris Williamson1:03:04

      Everyone should go and check it out. Where, uh, where should they go?

   4. CSColtan Scrivner1:03:07

      Uh, I mean, for the book, you can order it from whatever bookstore you tend to go to. So, you know, uh, you can get it on Penguin Random House or Amazon or Bookshop or your local bookstore starting Augu-... uh, October 7th. Um, and then for my other writing that didn't make it into the book, my Substack, uh, morbidlycuriousthoughts.com.

   5. CWChris Williamson1:03:25

      Heck yeah. Colton, I appreciate you. Thank you, man.

   6. CSColtan Scrivner1:03:28

      Yeah. Thanks for the c- fun conversation. (upbeat music)

   7. CWChris Williamson1:03:30

      Congratulations. You made it to the end of the episode. And if you want more, well, why don't you press right here? Come on.

Episode duration: 1:03:40