Murder Mystery

Why are so many of us drawn to horror, gore, and true crime? Why do we crane our necks to see the scene of a crash on the highway? Psychologist Coltan Scrivner says that our natural morbid curiosity serves a purpose. We talk with Coltan about our fascination with tales of murder and mayhem, and what this tendency reveals about our minds.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Shankar Vedantam?

  This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

• 0:05Shankar Vedantam?

  We often think of the media we consume as food for the mind. The right books, the uplifting films, the inspiring podcasts. We believe that these will make us wiser, kinder, better people.

• 0:22Shankar Vedantam?

  The Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu is supposed to have said, "Watch your thoughts, they become your words. Watch your words, they become your actions. Watch your actions, they become your habits. Watch your habits, they become your character. Watch your character, it becomes your destiny."

• 0:44Shankar Vedantam?

  By this logic, if we want to be good, kind, and ethical people, we should watch movies about good people, read books about kindness, and consume stories about high-minded individuals who always do the right thing.

• 0:59Shankar Vedantam?

  Glance at any list of bestsellers or movies that crush at the box office, and you don't see many high-minded plots and altruistic characters. No, you find people who lie and cheat, family members who betray one another, friends who are not good friends. If we are what we consume, surely, this does not bode well for us.

• 1:25Shankar Vedantam?

  Nowhere is this tension more acute than in stories of violence, gore, and killing, especially in horror movies. The goal of all the spattered blood, severed limbs, and blood-curdling shrieks is to make you horrified, not edified.

• 1:45Shankar Vedantam?

  If most of us want to be good people, what explains the enduring popularity of books and movies that show us not just the worst of human nature, but the worst that the human imagination can conjure?

• 1:59Shankar Vedantam?

  This week on Hidden Brain, and in a companion episode for Hidden Brain Plus, while we crane our necks to observe car crashes, endlessly gape at videos of natural disasters, and deliberately subject ourselves to tales of murder and mayhem.

• 2:27Shankar Vedantam?

  Support for Hidden Brain comes from Liberty Mutual Insurance. Making smart decisions includes considering how to protect your car and home and how much you're paying to insure them. Liberty Mutual customizes your car and home insurance to save you money because when you've worked hard for something, choosing insurance should be easy. Start your quote at libertymutual.com.

• 2:50Speaker 01

  Working as a dedicated Fidelity advisor, I always ask, what's important to you? I'll look at those priorities and goals alongside your full financial picture to build a comprehensive plan designed to help grow and protect your wealth. With proactive portfolio insights and an eye on taxes, I'm here to help you make the most of your money. I'm Laura Maxwell, and I'm a dedicated Fidelity advisor. Learn more at fidelity.com/wealth. Investment minimums apply. Fidelity Brokerage Services, LLC, member NYSE, SIPC.

• 3:21Shankar Vedantam?

  Support for Hidden Brain comes from ADT. It's that time of year, back to school, back to work, back to routine. ADT wants to help you get back to home. With their customizable systems that can be professionally installed and the ADT Plus app that lets you access your whole system from your phone, ADT has your home security covered. Visit ADT.com or call 1-800-ADT-ASAP. When every second counts, count on ADT.

• 3:54Shankar Vedantam?

  What do the kinds of shows and books we choose say about us? How do they shape us? Coltan Scrivner is a researcher at Arizona State University and Orhus University in Denmark. He's a psychologist who studies why we consume certain stories and the effects those tales can have on our minds. Coltan Scrivner, welcome to Hidden Brain.

• 4:17Speaker 02

  Hello, Shankar. Thanks for having me on.

• 4:20Shankar Vedantam?

  Colton, as a kid, I understand that your favorite movies were those featuring Indiana Jones, such as Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Temple of Doom. What scenes in particular were you drawn to in these movies?

• 4:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, I loved those movies as a kid. I still love them as an adult. I've probably lost count of how many times I've seen them. I do remember watching them, you know, on repeat as a kid. And, you know, I can never remember the names of them. You know, there's Raiders of the Lost Ark, there's The Temple of Doom, there's The Last Crusade. But I always remembered them kind of by specific scenes. And so I would remember, you know, oh, well, this one was the one where there were a lot of rats. Or this one was the one where there was a big snake. Or this is the one where the guy's face melts like an ice cream cone. And those scenes were always the ones, I guess that's why

• 5:16Speaker 02

  I remembered them by that. I remembered them by kind of the violent scenes or scary scenes that were in the films. So Temple of Doom, if someone asked, have you seen Temple of Doom? And I'm, you know, if I'm a kid, I would say, well, I think so. Which one was that? Is that the one where he pulls his heart out of his chest and it's still beating? That's kind of how I would, you know, that's how they sat in my mind.

• 5:49Shankar Vedantam?

  So one theory might be that we seek out dramatic stories about violence and gore because our own lives are boring and humdrum. But there's research that suggests that in the aftermath of scary things happening in real life, there's often a surge of interest in scary entertainment. In the early 1970s, a young woman, a college student, was murdered on the campus of the University of Wisconsin. A team of psychologists studied the subsequent entertainment choices of students on that campus. What did they find, Colton?

• 6:21Speaker 02

  What the psychologists were studying was what kinds of films the participants would choose as a reward for taking part in a study, like a psychological study. And in this case, in the town they were in, there were two films that were in theaters. There was Truman Capote's In Cold Blood. And then there was kind of a rom-com, and I can't recall the name of that one. But what they found is that after this murder occurred, the students on the campus were much more likely to choose the scary film as a reward for taking part in a study.

• 6:59Shankar Vedantam?

  I understand that the researchers even drilled down and found that students who were in the same dorm as the victim were more likely to watch the scary movie than students who were in different dorms.

• 7:12Speaker 02

  Correct, yeah. If you think about this like a heat map, you know, where you have different colors and the closer you got to this dorm, you know, the redder it got, the more likely they were to choose to go see Truman Capote's film.

• 7:28Shankar Vedantam?

  So a couple of decades later, in the early 1990s, a super violent video game called Mortal Kombat was released. Two different versions of the game were made available to the public. Why were two versions made available and how did they fare, Colton?

• 7:44Speaker 02

  Well, Mortal Kombat kind of broke ground in video games. It came about at a time when, you know, video game consoles were moving from purely being in arcades to now being in the home. You know, you were having these news stories coming into households. And what you had is you had a couple of sort of big players, I guess, who were able to sell Mortal Kombat. And one of those was Nintendo Entertainment Systems, which of course is still around, still very popular. And they had the Super Nintendo Entertainment System and they wanted to release Mortal Kombat. And then you had the Sega Genesis platform. And the difference between these two is that Nintendo kind of had cultivated this family-friendly approach to video games. And so when this super violent game came

• 8:28Speaker 02

  out, you know, where you could engage in these finishing moves, where you pull an opponent's spine out of their back and hold it up like a trophy, you know. And of course, this is all just sort of pixelated, you know, early 1990s graphics, but still quite violent. What Nintendo decided was that that was simply too much for their family-friendly approach to video games, but they knew that Mortal Kombat would be successful. So the compromise they struck was that for their systems, the blood in the game would actually be turned to kind of a grayish color. And they called it sweat rather than blood. It's almost like the fighters were sweating instead of bleeding. And many of the finishing moves

• 9:08Speaker 02

  had to be altered or removed entirely from the game. Now Sega, which was a much smaller...

• 9:16Speaker 02

  Video game company at the time and you know, Super Nintendo Entertainment Systems outnumbered Sega by probably five to one in American households. And Sega kind of took a big bet on Mortal Kombat and said, no, we're going to show it in all of its, all of its gory glory.

• 9:41Speaker 02

  And so they left the, the blood red, they left it as blood rather than sweat. They left all the finishing moves as they were. And surprising to Nintendo, I think, the Sega Genesis version of the game outsold the Nintendo version of the game by several factors.

• 10:01Shankar Vedantam?

  Wow. So in other words, even though it was much more violent and even though many people might say, you know, we, we are not a fan of violence or we are appalled by violence. The video game that was the more violent version, the very same video game in its more violent version outsold the, the Tamer version.

• 10:17Speaker 02

  Correct. And that's, you know, as a, as a scientist, like, wow, that's the perfect study you could set up, right? And the video game industry kind of accidentally set that study up for us.

• 10:33Shankar Vedantam?

  Let's get forward in time to 2020, when the COVID pandemic hit. People who were stuck at home without much to do but stream movies chose one movie in particular to watch, even though it was nine years old at that point. Here's a clip from the movie in which a research scientist is talking to a public health administrator.

• 10:53Speaker 03

  I thought you said that once we could grow it, we could vaccinate against it.

• 10:57Speaker 04

  We tried using dead virus combined with several adjuvants to boost immune response.

• 11:01Speaker 03

  And?

• 11:02Speaker 04

  No protective antibodies, a lot of dead monkeys.

• 11:05Speaker 03

  Can you get to the part where there's good news?

• 11:07Speaker 04

  Now we have to try a live attenuated virus.

• 11:09Speaker 03

  Like with polio?

• 11:10Speaker 04

  Exactly. The only danger with a live virus is the possibility that it will revert to wild type and kill the host.

• 11:16Shankar Vedantam?

  So this was the 2011 movie, Contagion. What was it about, Colton?

• 11:23Speaker 02

  So Contagion was essentially a film about a global pandemic and what we thought a global pandemic would look like, not just in the form of the virus itself and how it would spread, but also how people would respond to this. What would be the, the social response to this global pandemic?

• 11:42Shankar Vedantam?

  So I understand that Google Trends data kept track of the popularity of this movie. And in 2019, this is the year before the pandemic, the movie was averaging around six on a scale of one to 100 in the popularity index. By January 2020, as the first reports of the pandemic were sweeping across the world, the popularity surged to 84. And by March 2020, when mass closures hit the United States and other countries, it hit 100, the very peak of search interest.

• 12:13Speaker 02

  Correct. So those Google Trends data do a great job of showing you what are people interested in in relation to a particular topic or movie. So with Contagion, the most popular that it had been was in March of 2020, despite having come out nine years earlier and despite, at the time, I believe it was only available on one streaming platform.

• 12:36Shankar Vedantam?

  Now, on one level, this is very puzzling, right? People are terrified about the pandemic. There's a lot of uncertainty. There's a lot of worry. And what do they choose to do in their spare time? They go and watch a movie about another pandemic?

• 12:47Speaker 02

  That seems to be what they did. Yeah, at least many people did. You know, it shot up from, on the Warner Brothers catalog, I think it was ranked like 270 or 271 or something like that. And it had shot up to being the second most popular movie on the catalog overnight.

• 13:13Shankar Vedantam?

  During the pandemic, Colton, you said that another type of movie also surged in popularity. What was this type of movie?

• 13:20Speaker 02

  Well, this may come as a surprise to some, but horror movies kind of had their time to shine in 2020 and 2021. And so what you saw was that kind of in the early year or so of this pandemic, this new novel threat that was, the world was facing, people were seeking out scary movies more in relation to other kinds of movies than they ever had before.

• 13:53Shankar Vedantam?

  So on the surface, Colton, this is puzzling. Many of us say we want to be good, kind, and thoughtful people. And yet, many of us seem to be drawn to stories of gore and violence. One of the things that I've noticed in my years as a podcaster is the sheer size and enduring power of the true crime podcast industry. Millions of people just can't seem to get enough of stories of kidnappings and murders and violent crime.

• 14:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, ever since podcasting has kind of taken off, true crime has always been in the top five or top 10 of most popular podcast genres.

• 14:36Shankar Vedantam?

  Parents, pastors, and pundits denounce violence and other forms of antisocial conduct. But as consumers of entertainment, we seem to eagerly soak them up.

• 14:47Shankar Vedantam?

  When we come back, why we find ourselves rubbernecking on the highway as we pass a car crash, and what our fascination with tales of murder and mayhem reveal about our minds.

• 15:00Shankar Vedantam?

  You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

• 15:14Speaker 05

  Ever notice how every new AI tool asks you to explain your business to it all over again? Google Workspace with Gemini skips that. You get Google's AI built right into the premium versions of Gmail, Docs, Sheets, and more. No new tools, no extra logins, just one subscription that gives you personalized AI right inside your actual workflow. Make work less work. Try Google Workspace with Gemini at g o o dot g l e slash Workspace with Gemini.

• 15:43Speaker 06

  With the Discover Cash Back Card, it's payback time when you earn cash back on everyday purchases. Activate and earn 5% cash back at different categories each quarter on up to $1,500 in purchases. That's 5% cash back at different places each quarter, like grocery stores, on gas, and at restaurants. It pays to discover. Terms apply. See discover.com/five for details.

• 16:12Shankar Vedantam?

  This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. In countries around the world, people tell each other stories about the worst of human nature. Children whisper tales to each other about ghosts and goblins. Adults eagerly read news accounts of crime and violence. The gorier, the better. And in the aftermath of disasters, researchers find many people are more strongly drawn to fictional tales of violence and vengeance. Colton Scrivner is a researcher at Arizona State University and Orhus University in Denmark. Colton, in his 1871 book, The Descent of Man, Charles Darwin tells a story about a group of monkeys at the zoo. What was the story he read about?

• 16:58Speaker 02

  So Darwin had heard this story that a group of monkeys would seem to be fascinated by the thing that they should fear the most, which for a group of monkeys is a bag with a snake. And Darwin was so fascinated by this that he actually ran an experiment himself trying to replicate this.

• 17:18Shankar Vedantam?

  Hmm. What did he do?

• 17:21Speaker 02

  He took a bag and he put a snake in it. And he went to the London Zoological Gardens and he put it, I don't know if he specifies what kinds of monkeys they were, presumably Rhesus macaques or something like that. He put this bag in their exhibit and he noticed that the monkeys would slowly walk up to it, like one monkey, the bravest monkey, would slowly walk up to the bag, peek inside, and shriek. They would yell and they would run away. And you would think, like, okay, that signaled to the other monkeys that they shouldn't look inside this bag because there's something bad in there. And it did signal that there was something bad in there, but what Darwin found was that the other monkeys then decided they needed to take a peek.

• 18:04Speaker 02

  So they would, one by one, slowly creep up to the bag, peek inside, see the snake, shriek, and run away. And, you know, this absolutely fascinated Darwin and he saw this as a form of almost human-like curiosity.

• 18:23Shankar Vedantam?

  He writes, "Monkey after monkey, with head raised high and turned on one side, could not resist taking a momentary peep into the upright bag and the dreadful object lying quietly at the bottom."

• 18:37Shankar Vedantam?

  So the monkeys represent an example of what is sometimes known as predator inspection. What is this, Colton?

• 18:45Speaker 02

  Predator inspection is really interesting because, you know, in the same token as with the monkeys and the snake, you might expect that, you know, if a zebra sees a lion on the savanna, or a gazelle sees a cheetah, that they should just run away, right? I mean, why would the zebra do anything else other than run away when their natural predator is within eye shot? But oftentimes, what they will actually do is stand very still and look at the predator.

• 19:16Speaker 02

  And what's really interesting about this is that, you know, there's some differences in which animals are looking at the predator and when they choose to do so. You know, the gazelles will choose to look at the cheetah more often when they're in a larger group, when they're a bit further away from the cheetah, and it's not evenly spread among the groups. So the gazelles that are adolescents or subadults are much more likely to engage in predator inspection.

• 19:46Shankar Vedantam?

  And what is the logic, the evolutionary logic, to these actions?

• 19:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, so of course, you have to ask, why would a prey animal stop and take a look at its natural predator instead of running away? And the logic here is that, in many cases in nature, prey animals live in very close proximity with their predators. And so every time you see a lion, if you're a zebra, and you run away, you're going to be running for most of your life, right? And that's actually worse for you. You're going to be expending calories that you would otherwise be saving, you are going to be spending time running instead of grazing. It's actually going to put you at higher risk of being caught later on. So that's one sort of side of the coin of the logic. The other side is that if you don't know much about your natural predators, you're kind of in a bad spot, right?

• 20:33Speaker 02

  It's good for you to be curious about them because if you can learn a bit about them, sort of their moods, what they look like when they're hungry or they're hunting, you can be much more efficient in your ability to get away.

• 20:50Shankar Vedantam?

  So we've talked about the many ways that humans are drawn to stories of violence and danger, things that ought to be aversive and unpleasant. You believe that our proclivity to seek out information about dangerous and disturbing things is similar to the interest that the monkey showed in the live snake, and you call this morbid curiosity. What do you mean by the term?

• 21:11Speaker 02

  Well, it's a commonly misunderstood term, I think. If you hear the term morbid with another word, you often think of that thing as being bad. And in the case of morbid curiosity, I don't mean that the curiosity is bad. I mean that people are curious about things that are bad. So the curiosity itself is not pathological, it's not bad, but because the object of the curiosity is about a potential threat, I've called it morbid curiosity. And so the definition that I've used for morbid curiosity is simply an interest in or a curiosity about threats. And this could be visual information, it could be auditory information, any kind of

• 21:56Speaker 02

  information about something that is dangerous or could be dangerous.

• 21:59Shankar Vedantam?

  You say that the concept of morbid curiosity in some way speaks to the puzzle that we have been discussing. On the one hand, we denounce violence and antisocial behavior, but on the other hand, we are drawn to seeing it and hearing about it?

• 22:14Speaker 02

  Correct. Throughout time and across cultures, violence usually is seen as bad. It's usually punished. But the interesting thing is that even in cultures that are the most anti-violence in most circumstances, they often have certain rituals or certain events where violence is not only seen as OK, but it's maybe celebrated. And it was really intriguing to me that people could have these completely opposing views on how moral something is, depending on what kind of situation it occurs.

• 22:50Shankar Vedantam?

  What do you think watching a film like Contagion did to people as they struggled with the uncertainty of the COVID pandemic, Colton?

• 22:59Speaker 02

  You know, if you're introduced to something that's new, what do you want to do? Well, you want to learn about it, right? And if you're introduced to something that scientists in particular are just now kind of trying to figure out, you know, in February and March of 2020, a lot of mistakes were made. People were kind of seeing the scientific method in action. They were seeing how science works in action, which is, you know, you think something might be true and you test it, and maybe it is and maybe it isn't. And I think people aren't used to that. And so the next best thing that they had, the best cohesive story that people had was, in this case, Contagion.

• 23:40Speaker 02

  It was a film about a pandemic and about the social response to that pandemic, about how the virus spread and what it did to you. And it was a neatly packaged, well-told story in about 90 minutes that people could consume.

• 24:00Shankar Vedantam?

  So in some ways, Colton, this puts a different spin on students who go to see a violent movie after something bad has happened on their college campus.

• 24:09Speaker 02

  Correct, yeah. You know, that study came out in the 1970s, and these scientists didn't call what they were observing morbid curiosity, but that's exactly what they were measuring. That's what they were finding was morbidly curious behavior in these college students who presumably felt an urge to learn about interpersonal violence. And again, you know, an easy way for them to do that is to go see a movie.

• 24:44Shankar Vedantam?

  I can think of all kinds of other examples from the news. You know, something bad happens. There's a serial killer on the loose. And suddenly, we're all very fascinated with psychopathy. And it's not necessarily because we're interested in psychopaths, but we're saying something dangerous is out there. Let me learn about it. In some ways, it's a form of predator inspection.

• 25:05Speaker 02

  Exactly right. Yeah, I think, you know, a lot of the neural mechanisms are probably conserved across mammals for predator evasion, predator inspection, just general threat management when it comes to predators. If a zebra had the ability to write a book, or create a documentary, or a fiction film, it would almost certainly create many of those about lions. And I think the same is true of gazelles. They would be creating media entertainment about cheetahs, right? And I think humans do the same thing. The only difference between other animals and their form of morbid curiosity, and humans

• 25:46Speaker 02

  and their form of morbid curiosity, is that humans can actually create stories where they're not exposed to the danger, right? Right. So if a gazelle wants to learn something about a cheetah, it has to be there in person, and there's a much higher risk associated with that. Humans, on the other hand, can consume a story that someone else has created, either because they've had a personal experience with this danger, or because they understand how this danger works, and they can put it actually in a new context in which nobody has ever experienced this danger, but they might. So humans have this incredible ability to forecast into possible futures, and imagine

• 26:27Speaker 02

  what kinds of behaviors are adaptive, what kinds of behaviors are maladaptive, and what these things might look like, how we can prepare for them, how we might see them coming before they actually arrive.

• 26:42Shankar Vedantam?

  So it's much safer, in other words, to sit in a movie theater with a bag of popcorn in your hand, and hear a story about a terrifying killer shark that's on the loose, than to actually be in the waters of the ocean, and potentially have to encounter the shark.

• 26:57Speaker 02

  Correct, yeah. And one of the questions I get a lot is, well, if that's true, why don't we just read science textbooks about sharks in that case? Or why don't we read science textbooks about pandemics instead of watching contagion? And I think the answer is that, you know, humans are storytelling creatures. We learn really well, despite the fact that we can experience a situation cognitively without actually being in the presence of it. You know, we come from a 500 million year line of organisms that have developed brains that can only understand experience in a first-person perspective. And that's exactly what stories do, is they give you a first-person perspective of what it's like to be somewhere and experience a thing.

• 27:41Speaker 02

  And so stories kind of, you know, are crafted in a way that tap into these evolutionarily old parts of our mind that are just used to dealing with everyday experience. And so we consume them more easily, we remember things from them more easily. And, you know, in small-scale societies, most things are told as stories. They're not told as a list of facts.

• 28:12Shankar Vedantam?

  Your research has found that watching content like horror movies can help make people more psychologically resilient. How so, Colton?

• 28:22Speaker 02

  This was one of the more interesting things out of my career so far, I think, was finding that being a horror fan, you know, watching scary movies or reading scary books seems to actually have an effect on how resilient you are to real dangers in the world. And so I first found this in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. You know, we recruited a couple hundred people using online platforms because, of course, we couldn't bring people into the lab. And what we found was that people who were horror fans uniquely were more resilient to the stresses of the pandemic. So even when we controlled for big five personality, we controlled for age, we controlled for

• 29:05Speaker 02

  income, we controlled for sex, we controlled for all these things we could think of that might influence resilience. And we still found that if you watched horror movies, you were more resilient during those early months of the pandemic.

• 29:21Speaker 02

  People who were horror fans were experiencing less psychological distress. So they were experiencing, to a lesser degree, anxiety, insomnia, sleeplessness, depression. They were experiencing those physiological symptoms of stress much less than people who were not horror fans. And when we looked at morbidly curious people, and we isolated that variable by itself, we found that people who scored high in morbid curiosity were experiencing much more positive resilience. So they were much more optimistic about their ability to get through these difficult times. They were feeling, despite how difficult the world was, they maintained their optimism about humanity and about their ability to persevere.

• 30:13Shankar Vedantam?

  I'm wondering if it's also possible that as we watch the movie about the scary shark or the movie about the serial killer, in some ways, it takes our minds off of the things that are worrying us in our real lives. In other words, the fear of the artificial threat in some ways replaces the fear of the real threat and in some ways mitigates how frightened we are in real life?

• 30:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's exactly right. You would think that if you're feeling stressed, you might go watch a feel-good movie, watch a comedy or a rom-com or something that would make you feel good, right? But what's really interesting is people don't seem to do that as often as they seem to seek out scary things or things that are difficult to engage with when they're feeling bad. And this really intrigued me, and I kind of, you know, there was no research on this when I first started thinking about this conundrum, this paradox. And what I was finding were a lot of horror fans who would write about this experience, they would write about their personal experience overcoming their anxiety with horror, and

• 31:20Speaker 02

  they'll write about this on online message boards like Reddit, for example, or they would write op-eds in magazines. And many times, you know, they would accidentally discover this and they don't understand quite why it works, but they were noticing that when they would watch the scary movie, it seemed to kind of calm them down. And so I started, you know, I started thinking about this, like, how could this possibly work? What are the mechanisms here? You know, if this really does work in some people, what could be going on?

• 31:50Speaker 02

  So I think what's happening here is when you are feeling anxious about something, in particular if you're feeling kind of a generalized anxiety, you know, you're not really sure what you're anxious about, but you're getting the sweaty palms, the racing heart, you're feeling vigilant. That just kind of sits in this cycle, this vigilance cycle, where your vigilance is looking for a potential threat and it can't find it. So it turns up the vigilance even more to try to find it and it still can't find it. And those are the cycles of rumination that are pretty familiar to people with anxiety. And what's interesting is, you know, our minds are exceptionally attuned to threats. So threats pretty much overpower any other stimulus in our field of view and our mind.

• 32:34Speaker 02

  And that makes sense because if there's something threatening in your environment, you should kind of pay attention to that over other things. The problem, of course, is in humans, we don't often have threatening things in our environment, but we have them in our heads. And so I thought, well, maybe horror kind of is like fighting fire with fire because you're giving your mind something threatening to latch on to. You know, you're giving it a killer on the screen or a, you know, in the case of true crime, like a serial story about a serial killer or in horror, the story of this terrible monster. And what that does is it does a much better job of kind of dislodging this cycle of rumination. You can imagine it kind of like a highway off-ramp, you know, for your mind so that you can get out of that. And then now you're sucked into the movie or in a book works just as well for many people.

• 33:20Speaker 02

  You're sucked into this story, let's say, this scary story. And you're still feeling anxious. You haven't solved that problem yet. But the difference now is that you have control over the source of the anxiety. It's identifiable. You know what you're anxious about. You have some control over it. You can put the book down. You can pause the movie. You can sit with a friend and watch it. You can do things that make you feel safer. You can collect yourself, right? Or you can kind of, as the movie's playing through some of the less scary scenes, you can kind of collect your self a bit. And then after 90 minutes, the movie ends, the threat goes away. And that triggers to your mind like, hey, the threat is, we found the threat. Now it's gone. Now, what's called the parasympathetic nervous system.

• 34:02Speaker 02

  This is the part of your mind that controls the, you can think of it like the, as the rest and digest part of your nervous system. It helps you kind of relax. That part of your nervous system kicks in and it helps physiologically calm you down.

• 34:28Shankar Vedantam?

  You've been exploring the idea that people might sometimes use scary entertainment as a way to connect with other people. What do you mean by this?

• 34:38Speaker 02

  You know, we talked about earlier how humans are storytelling creatures. A lot of our time is spent talking with others, telling others about things, experiencing these fictional worlds, or past experiences, or future possibilities with others. And sometimes those are scary stories, scary events that might happen, or scary events that did happen, or scary fictions that could happen.

• 35:03Speaker 02

  And so again, you know, we kind of just took the next natural extension of this. You have, okay, well, maybe some people who are anxious seem drawn to horror and it helps them because it gets them out of a cycle of rumination. And then the kind of next step of that is, okay, if they do this a lot, they might actually be building some skills and learning something about themselves. But then if you, you know, if you go to a haunted attraction in October, or you go to a new screening of a new horror movie at a theater, what you notice is that most people are there with someone else. And this is especially true at haunted attractions. And what's especially interesting at haunted attractions, there's two things here. One of them is that, you know, they open usually in late September and they're open through Halloween. That's kind of their prime season.

• 35:47Speaker 02

  But if they're open another time of year, it's almost always during Valentine's Day. It's during, it's during a holiday where we spend time with those we love the most.

• 35:59Speaker 02

  And it's kind, it was kind of intriguing to me that that's when they were open, right? And if you go to a haunted house in October, what you notice is that a lot of people are there with their significant other. If you go to a horror movie, what you notice is a lot of people are there with their significant other, their spouse, or their boyfriend, or fiance, or girlfriend. And so we think kind of this next natural extension of our thinking here was that, well, maybe you're not only learning something about yourself, but maybe you're also learning something about the people around you. Because you're seeing how they respond in these sort of playful simulations of fear. So for example, you know, if I go through a haunted attraction with a friend and my friend acts protective towards me and kind of we stick together, right?

• 36:43Speaker 02

  That's kind of a good clue that maybe they're a good cooperative partner. But if I go to this simulation and I see them kind of lose their cool a little bit, and they leave me behind, or, you know, they don't cooperate with me in these, in the simulation of a fearful experience, it might be an indication that they're not going to cooperate with me in a real situation that's threatening. And so we could be learning not only about ourselves, but about, you know, potential partners or friends in these situations.

• 37:23Shankar Vedantam?

  I mean, I'm thinking even of little kids during Halloween. I mean, who goes trick or treating just by themselves? The whole fun is to go with other little kids and to scream in terror together. And in some ways, it is a very social activity. And of course, I think the idea that horror movies might make for good date night movies or date movies, I think that's well established.

• 37:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, there are some of the earliest work on horror movies was research on couples and what couples do when they go to a scary movie. And this was kind of dubbed the snuggle theory of horror. And this early idea was that, that the reason people enjoyed horror movies was because they could kind of live out these cultural expectations of how they were supposed to react. So for example, if a man and a woman go on a date to a horror movie, there's an expectation that the man will act kind of brave and, you know, it'll give him a good excuse to kind of bring his female counterpart closer to him. And the woman will have this expectation of the man, that he will act brave as well,

• 38:28Speaker 02

  but also that she might be a little fearful and give him the opportunity to act brave, right? Give him, see if he will act brave when she's afraid.

• 38:41Shankar Vedantam?

  It's commonly feared that people who are drawn to dark and disturbing content must themselves harbor unsavory qualities. When we come back, are horror aficionados people to be feared or some of the nicest people around? You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

• 39:09Speaker 05

  Ever notice how every new AI tool asks you to explain your business to it all over again? Google Workspace with Gemini skips that. You get Google's AI built right into the premium versions of Gmail, Docs, Sheets, and more. No new tools, no extra logins, just one subscription that gives you personalized AI right inside your actual workflow. Make work less work. Try Google Workspace with Gemini at g o o dot G L E slash Workspace with Gemini.

• 39:38Speaker 06

  With the Discover Cash Back Card, it's payback time when you earn cash back on everyday purchases. Activate and earn 5% cash back at different categories each quarter on up to $1,500 in purchases. That's 5% cash back at different places each quarter, like grocery stores, on gas, and at restaurants. It pays to discover. Terms apply. See discover.com/five for details.

• 40:04Speaker 07

  Suffering from dry, tired, irritated eyes? Don't let dry eyes win. Use Sustain Pro. It hydrates, restores, and protects dry eyes for up to 12 hours. Sustain Pro, triple action dry eye relief.

• 40:20Shankar Vedantam?

  This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Are you a fan of dark and sinister tales? Do you find yourself gravitating to stories of crime and vengeance? Do you sometimes feel guilty about the books you read and the TV you consume?

• 40:37Shankar Vedantam?

  If you have a personal story you'd be willing to share with the Hidden Brain audience about your interests in the eerie or the macabre, please find a very quiet room and record a voice memo. Two or three minutes is plenty. Email it to us at [email protected] with the subject line SCARY. Again, that's [email protected]. Across the animal kingdom, creatures, large and small, seem to be fascinated by their predators. Humans are no exception. We devour books and movies about pathogens and pandemics, terrorists and traitors, serial killers and psychopaths. Colton Skrivner is a researcher at Arizona State University and Orhous University in

• 41:21Shankar Vedantam?

  Denmark. He is the author of Morbidly Curious: A Scientist Explains Why We Can't Look Away. In the early 1980s, Colton, a new generation of super-gory horror films hit the theaters. Audiences loved them, but many observers were appalled. Here's film critic Roger Ebert sharing his view about one such film.

• 41:43Speaker 08

  Our next movie is Friday the 13th, The Final Chapter, an immoral and reprehensible piece of trash that sold more tickets on its opening weekend than any other movie so far in 1984. And that is a very, very depressing commentary. It really makes me sad to think of all those moviegoers, most of them teenage kids, sitting there watching this sad, cynical, depressing movie.

• 42:05Shankar Vedantam?

  Colton, what do you hear in that expression of outrage about the content of horror movies and the people who go to see them?

• 42:12Speaker 02

  So Roger Ebert hosted this show with Gene Siskel, and they were two of the most well-respected, popular movie critics of their time. So Roger Ebert, they're obviously saying that it was a real shame that people were watching this morally depraved movie. And Gene Siskel chimes in a bit later by saying that people who enjoy it are obviously depraved and they hate women. And what struck me about this clip, when I watched it for the first time, was that The film critics weren't criticizing the film. I mean, they were, but they were even more so, they were criticizing people who watched the film, which is unusual, I think, for a film critic to do.

• 42:52Speaker 02

  And, you know, you might think, well, maybe that only happened in the 1980s because that's when slashers kind of cropped up, right? Halloween's success drove filmmakers to make, you know, hundreds of these slasher movies, the most successful of which, right afterwards, was Friday the 13th. And these were, you know, gory, they were more violent, sure. And Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel and many other critics hated these films, thought they were just, as you said, they're a poor indication of the health of society, if you will, especially of young people, of teenagers. So, yeah, I mean, what I hear there is not a film critic criticizing a film, but a film critic criticizing the sort of moral standing of the film's fans.

• 43:47Shankar Vedantam?

  There was a movie critic from the New York Post who wrote a blistering review about the movie series Saw, where he says that people who watch these movies are, quote, "depraved lunatics who should not be allowed near animals or most other living things." So it's not just that there's something wrong with these people for watching these movies, but that we should be afraid of these people who go and watch these movies.

• 44:13Speaker 02

  Well, it's worth seeing two things. I mean, one, are they right? Are people who are horror fans, you know, low in empathy? Are they not compassionate, not kind, you know, terrible people? As much as I didn't want that to be true, I was open to the possibility, right? Because I'm sympathetic to the intuition that if you can watch really violent things and be OK with it and even enjoy it, that maybe it says something about your psyche or whether or not you approve of violence. I'm sympathetic to that intuition. But as far as I knew, there were really, you know, there was no empirical work that had really shown this. And so the very first thing I did was I actually ran a study where I created these fake user profiles, you know, like you might see on an early version of a social media website,

• 44:58Speaker 02

  where it's just a person's name, their age, whether they were a man or woman, and their favorite movie genre. And I created hundreds of these profiles that were just randomized, you know. And

• 45:11Speaker 02

  I presented them to participants and I asked the participants to kind of guess like what they think this person is like, you know, with minimal information, what can you discern about this individual? And I'd asked them to guess this individual's personality, you know, their big five traits, but also, you know, how empathetic do you think they are? How compassionate do you think they are? How kind? And what I found was that people were much more likely to say that, you know, if one of the profiles said that the favorite movie genre of that individual was horror, they were much more likely to say that that individual is likely to be unkind, not compassionate, and lacking in empathy.

• 45:54Speaker 02

  That really said to me like, okay, it's not just movie critics, you know, it's regular people kind of have this intuition. So then I was, I was like, okay, I really have to study this and see if it's true. So I ran a series of studies. But what I found was that all of my horror fans looked just like regular people, looked like I had a group of non-horror fans kind of as my control. And they looked just like them. There was no relationship between how much of a horror fan you were and how empathetic you were. Except that now there was a couple of instances where I did find something significant, but interestingly, it was in the opposite direction as many people would expect. So some horror fans, and in particular, those who liked paranormal horror movies,

• 46:38Speaker 02

  scored a bit higher in cognitive empathy. So they were a bit better at taking the perspective of other people. What you're doing when you're engaging in a fictional story about someone's experience is you are imagining yourself in their shoes. I mean, you are literally engaging cognitive empathy, right? And when you see shots of their face on the film where it kind of zooms in on the, on the victim, in this case of a horror film, the victim's face, you know, their screams of agony and their fear on their face. I mean, you're then, ideally, you're feeling that, right? You're feeling afraid and you're putting yourself in their situation. And if you're not doing that, you're probably not enjoying the horror movie, right? When I buy a ticket to a horror film, I expect to feel afraid. I expect to be scared.

• 47:21Speaker 02

  And if I don't empathize with the protagonist, then I'm probably not going to feel afraid, right? We're not afraid of monsters because they kill people or they kill people on screen. We're afraid of monsters because they kill people who are like us, right? People we're imagining ourselves to be. That's what generates the fear. And so if you're not empathizing with the protagonist in a horror film, you're probably not enjoying the horror film that much. Now, of course, could someone who is really violent, could they be empathizing with the killer? Sure, I suppose so. I mean, that's true of action movies as well. It's true of rom-coms where there's an evil partner, you know, a really bad, toxic partner. You could be empathizing with them. I think that's not something that's unique with horror. I think in many cases, in many genres of film, people are empathizing with the protagonist.

• 48:06Speaker 02

  That's what, that's how stories are crafted, to be understood.

• 48:10Shankar Vedantam?

  But I'm thinking back to movies like Jaws. You know, the movie is called Jaws. It's about, it's about a shark, but really it's not about the shark at all. It's actually about how people are terrified about the shark, how they're frightened about the shark, how they're trying to defend themselves against the shark. It's really about the people, not the monster.

• 48:28Speaker 02

  I think that's exactly right. And that's a good example of where it would be kind of silly to say that people are empathizing with the antagonist. Like, are they imagining themselves as a shark? That's, that's a strange argument to make, right? I think it's, it's clear in a film like Jaws that people, like you said, are empathizing with and taking sort of the cognitive perspective of the protagonists and the danger they're in.

• 49:00Shankar Vedantam?

  There's another line of evidence that people who enjoy horror are in fact people who are empathetic. And that comes from the genre of The Haunted House. It involves a character known as a pleader. Can you describe one of these houses and who these characters are called?

• 49:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, I was talking to Ben Armstrong, who owns Netherworld Haunted House in Georgia. It's one of the most well-known haunted attractions around Halloween. And I was telling him about this empathy study that I had just conducted. Because I was, you know, like, I was surprised by it. And I was asking him what he thought about it as someone who is in the horror industry. And he said, you know, it kind of makes sense. He said, "In our industry, we have what are called pleaters. And these are usually like younger kids, young women, who are in the haunt, who are actors, they're actors in the experience. But in the story, as you go through the haunt, in the story, they are seen as victims.

• 50:01Speaker 02

  So they're like a visitor who's been captured and is being held captive. And as you go through the haunted house, you kind of have the option to stop and try to help them escape. Or you can continue on, right? And maybe you think it's a trap, or maybe you're too afraid to go try to help this person. And you would think that most people who visit the haunted house would ignore the pleater, because they know that they're an actor. It's no secret that this individual is probably an actor. And there's no requirement to actually help this person, right? You can continue on as you please. But he said, "You know, what you find is that the pleaters are one of the more successful parts of the haunt. I mean, they almost always draw in with their cries of help.

• 50:44Speaker 02

  They almost always draw in these people who are at the haunted house to come help them. And a lot of that is, you know, they're activating the empathy response. They're activating, they look like vulnerable protagonists in this story, or vulnerable, in this case, vulnerable side characters. And they're, you know, activating the empathy response in the haunt goers really well.

• 51:13Shankar Vedantam?

  Another real-life demonstration of this research finding that empathetic people might be the ones who are drawn to horror are so-called horror-themed restaurants. Tell me what a horror-themed restaurant is and why some of them seem to attract a clientele that is especially tender-hearted.

• 51:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's been kind of a recent crop of horror-themed restaurants. There are restaurants that have themes that you would find in a horror movie or are themed like particular horror movies. And you see this with bars and restaurants and sort of all kinds of almost experience-based establishments. And what's really interesting is that a lot of these horror-themed restaurants or coffee shops, they'll have a really high portion of vegan or vegetarian options. And you might think that someone who's a horror fan doesn't, again, as the New York Post critic said, shouldn't be allowed around animals. But what's a little ironic is that many of these horror-themed restaurants

• 52:14Speaker 02

  are either vegetarian or vegan restaurants, or they have a huge aspect of their menu that caters to vegetarians and vegans, presumably horror-fan vegans or horror-fan vegetarians.

• 52:28Shankar Vedantam?

  I mean, in some ways, that runs against the idea that these people who watch these movies are sort of bloodthirsty people, almost by definition.

• 52:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, and I'm myself, I'm not a vegetarian or vegan. And I don't think that it necessarily says anything about the individual if they are or are not. But it certainly would be strange to have an individual who you think shouldn't be allowed around animals, and yet they are a vegetarian or a vegan, perhaps for moral reasons, right? For their own moral reasons.

• 53:05Shankar Vedantam?

  Not everyone feels a natural inclination to feed their morbid curiosity. Maybe you're someone who scurries away when your spouse puts on a gory movie, or cringes when your child plays a violent video game. And yet, maybe you're also curious about the psychological benefits of engaging with the dark side of life. If so, our companion episode on Hidden Brain Plus may be for you. It's called "How to Enjoy the Chills." You can try Hidden Brain Plus with a free seven-day trial by going to support.hidenbrain.org. If you're using an Apple device, go to apple.co/hiddenbrain.

• 53:45Shankar Vedantam?

  Again, those sites are support.hidenbrain.org and apple.co/hiddenbrain. Coltan Scrivner is a researcher at Arizona State University and Orhus University in Denmark. He's the author of Morbidly Curious: A Scientist Explains Why We Can't Look Away. Colton, thank you so much for joining me today on Hidden Brain. Thank you very much for having me on. Are you a fan of thrillers and murder mysteries? Do you love true crime podcasts? Does the idea of going to a haunted house or an escape room seem like great fun?

• 54:26Shankar Vedantam?

  If you have a personal story you'd be willing to share with the Hidden Brain audience, or a question or comment about morbid curiosity, please find a very quiet room and record a voice memo. Two or three minutes is plenty. Email it to us at [email protected] with the subject line "Scary." Again, that's [email protected].

• 54:54Shankar Vedantam?

  Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Annie Murphy-Paul, Kristen Wong, Laura Kwerel, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes, Andrew Chadwick, and Nick Woodbury. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor. This December, Hidden Brain is proud to join Pods Fight Poverty. We're teaming up with other podcasts to raise funds to lift three villages in Rwanda out of extreme poverty. Your donation goes directly, no strings, no middlemen, to the families who know best what they need. Visit givedirectly.org/hiddenbrain to make a difference for someone who needs it most.

• 55:37Shankar Vedantam?

  That's givedirectly.org/hiddenbrain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. See you soon.

• 55:56Speaker 09

  Hi, I'm Angie Hicks, co-founder of Angie. From roof repair to emergency plumbing and more, when you use Angie for your home projects, you know all your jobs will be done well. Angie, the one you trust to find the ones you trust. Find a pro for your project at angie.com.

• 56:11Speaker 10

  Traditional home security only alerts you after a break-in, and that's too late. SimpliSafe is changing that.

• 56:17Speaker 11

  Stop, this is SimpliSafe. Police are on the way.

• 56:20Speaker 10

  We don't just alert, we help stop crime before it starts. Plans starting around a dollar a day. Right now, get 60% off your new system with professional monitoring at simplisafe.com/sxm. SimpliSafe, ahead of crime, in real time. Outdoor deterrence plans start at $49.99 a month. Visit simplisafe.com/licenses for alarm license information.

• 56:43Speaker 12

  Walmart shoppers, meet the debit card designed with you in mind. The Walmart Money Card offers up to $75 cash back on purchases at Walmart each year. Early direct deposit, overdraft protection, and so much more. When Walmart is your everyday store, you need a card to match. That's the Walmart Money Card. Open your account today. The Walmart Money Card is issued by Green Dot Bank, Member FDIC. Fees, terms, and conditions apply. Visit walmartmoneycard.com to learn more.

• 57:10Speaker 13

  Some say Odoo business management software is like fertilizer because of the way it promotes growth. Some say Odoo is like a magic beanstalk, scaling with you while being magically affordable. And some say Odoo's programs for manufacturing, accounting, and more are like building blocks for creating a custom software suite. But I say Odoo is all of it. Fertilizer, magic beanstalk, building blocks for business. Yeah. Odoo, exactly what every business needs. Sign up at Odoo.com. That's O-D-O-O dot com.