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

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

(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.