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

Go see Chris live in America - https://chriswilliamson.live Coltan Scrivner is a behavioral scientist, an expert on morbid curiosity in horror and true‑crime media, and an author. Why are humans so curious about death? From car accidents to scary stories, roller coasters, and horror movies, some people are fascinated while others are repulsed. What draws us toward the very things we should naturally want to avoid? Expect to learn why humans are drawn to dark or morbid content and the evolutionary logic behind watching something that disturbs us, why there is a gender gap of who is more interested in morbid curiosity, why some people find serial killers fascinating while others are repulsed, the biggest differences between terror and horror & the connection between disgust and fascination, what horror can teach us about emotional self-regulation, and much more… 0:00 Why are We Drawn to Dark Content? 7:20 The 4 Domains of Morbid Curiosity 15:25 Morbid Curiosity in Evolution 22:51 Individual Difference in Morbid Curiosity 34:05 What is So Attractive About Serial Killers? 37:46 Why are Certain Groups Attracted to Certain Types of Morbid Content? 47:17 The Perfect Ingredients for a Horror Movie 57:14 Why is There Increasing Desensitisation to Morbid Content? 01:02:59 Find Out More About Colton - Get access to every episode 10 hours before YouTube by subscribing for free on Spotify - https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn or Apple Podcasts - https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Get my free Reading List of 100 life-changing books here - https://chriswillx.com/books/ Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic here - https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

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

• 0:00Chris Williamson?

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

• 0:09Speaker 01

  You know, a lot of people ask me, did I always want to study scary movies and the psychology of them? And the answer is no, I didn't always know that I wanted to study that. But I have always enjoyed them. I've always kind of liked scary things when I was a kid, you know? Not because I wasn't scared of them, but because they were scary. And that made them 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 and kind of collect yourself. But, you know, growing up, I didn't really think I was into archaeology. I thought I was going to be an archaeologist. And then I studied anthropology, a little bit of biology in undergrad, studied some forensic science for my masters. And then I kind of made the switch into psychology during my PhD.

• 0:54Speaker 01

  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. But that doesn't work in grad school. You have to kind of pick something 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

• 1:25Speaker 01

  we think violence is bad and we try to, we shun it, we punish it. But there are certain circumstances where violence is okay, and not only okay, but maybe even revered. They think, you know, like the Colosseum for the Romans, for example, a great example of where violence was revered in many ways and enjoyed by tens of thousands of people. And so I was really interested in how people made sense of 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, so that was sort of my first step into morbid curiosity. And that was like the left foot end. And then the right foot end was I started thinking about these other interesting related paradoxes. Well, humans also scare themselves for fun.

• 2:10Speaker 01

  I scare myself for fun sometimes, right? Like kind of an interesting thing and it seemed related in some ways. And so I looked up, you know, who, like a quick Google search or Google scholar search, like who is studying why people like fear? And the answer was almost nobody, psychology. And you know, as a grad student, that's like a goldmine. You find something really interesting that everyone kind of understands at an intuitive level, but nobody is studying.

• 2:35Speaker 01

  And so I kind of got into it that way. I hooked up with Atias Kleisen, 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. And then over time, those two sort of, those two interests and why humans are interested in violence and why humans scare themselves for fun, kind of went into this whirlwind of, well, why are we interested in things that are threatened broadly? And what, what does that mean about us? 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.

• 3:20Chris Williamson?

  That paradox is so interesting that everybody, if you get involved in a fight, it's a very, very small cohort of people that think, oh, this is going to be fun.

• 3:33Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 3:34Chris Williamson?

  And yet, true crime, or the male equivalent of true crime, which are war stories, UFC, every different modern incarnation of that, police body cam footage, rubbernecking at road crashes as we go past.

• 3:53Speaker 01

  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, 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 enjoy the UFC fight. Materially, they're pretty similar, right? In a lot of ways, it can be.

• 4:18Chris Williamson?

  Very interesting. Okay. After all of this time thinking about it, what have you come to believe about why humans are drawn to dark or morbid content? What's the compulsion?

• 4:28Speaker 01

  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, the only way that we're different is that we can kind of create stories. We don't have to be there, right? You know, if a zebra wants to learn about a lion, or a gazelle wants to learn about a cheetah, which they often do in the wild, there's some great studies showing that zebras, under certain circumstances, will kind of watch lions when they're not actively hunting them, or gazelles in particular will just observe. It's called predator inspection. They'll observe cheetahs. And in particular adolescent gazelles, those who are healthy, who can get away if something bad happens, but maybe don't have a lot of experience with their sort of local predators.

• 5:13Speaker 01

  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.

• 5:27Speaker 01

  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, oh, you're 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.

• 5:43Chris Williamson?

  Okay, yeah, so you get to kind of sandbox scary, scary situations. I'm gonna guess, Bro Science Cap is coming on early today. 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, it's really unlikely we're gonna see someone die in the UFC. So is it, is it to do with control, safety, sort of boundaries?

• 6:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think, I think that has a lot to do with it. You know, there's a lot of things that play into that. Some people are more prone to feeling disgust than others, right? And so obviously, watching something, or hearing about something, reading something.

• 6:30Speaker 01

  Where a threat is attacking a victim, that often involves a lot of disgust elements. It involves blood, or it involves gore in many ways. And that can be kind of a turnoff for many people. So, yeah, I think some of it is the amount of control. So, for example, if you're high in disgust sensitivity, you may not watch a horror movie. You might be willing to read a book about the same topic because you can kind of control how vivid that image is. Whereas in a movie, it's just whatever that director gives to you, right? Whatever the movie feeds to you, that's your representation of what's going on. And if you don't like it, you have to cover your eyes, or pause it, turn it off, walk out of the room. But if you're reading a book, you have a little bit more control in some ways about how vivid that is, right?

• 7:13Speaker 01

  It's more difficult to make that really vivid, like it's not going to look like a Christopher Nolan film in your mind's eye.

• 7:19Chris Williamson?

  That's interesting. Are there different domains of morbid curiosity? There are different categories and types?

• 7:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, that was one of the first things I did, right? So if you're a psychologist, you're studying this new concept, or at least new to the academics concept, one of the first things you do is, well, how can I easily measure it, right? Well, one way to easily measure something as a psychologist is to have a survey or a questionnaire, you know, like the big five, or disgust sensitivity scale, or psychopathy scale, or any number of ways to measure these different traits. And there really was no scale to measure morbid curiosity. So what I did is I collected a bunch of items from people from different forums, like online forums, from interviews, from sort of your own theoretical grounding about different

• 8:06Speaker 01

  scenarios that might elicit interest, that have a threat involved. And you collect all of those together, and you have a bunch of people, a bunch of disciplines, say how likely they would be to be interested in this thing if it were to happen to them. How likely would they be to look at this thing, learn about this thing, read about this thing? And then what you get is you can actually see how those questions are answered in similar kinds of ways, and they break into different domains, as you mentioned. And so one of the first things I found was that there seems to be at least four different kinds of domains of morbid curiosity. So the first one is kind of obvious, it's violence, right? So kind of witnessing violence, that was sort of what.

• 8:45Speaker 01

  Intrigued me initially about this is why are we so intrigued by violence? Why are we interested in violent conflicts? The second one is one you mentioned, which is kind of the true crime or the interest in in people who could be violent, right? Like, maybe you're not actually witnessing the violent act, but you're learning about the type of people who would commit that violence or the way that they committed that violence. The third one is kind of the outcome of violence. That would be the bodily injuries or body violation domain. And so this is important in a lot of ways because humans, of course, try to treat and other animals try to treat injuries. And it's important to know something about an injury if you're going to treat it. Also important, if you come across someone who's wounded, it's important to know what

• 9:29Speaker 01

  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 the forest and they have a cut on their arm, you're not really going to be too worried about what caused that cut, right? You come across someone in the forest and their whole arm is missing, that's a different story, right? That means there's something really large and formidable and dangerous in the environment. And so injuries capture our attention, probably for those reasons as well. And the fourth one, I kind of struggled with at first. It was the supernatural or the paranormal. And I thought, well, like, personally, don't believe in ghosts, right? I find them interesting and fun, but I don't believe in them. And so I thought, well, why would the mind have this interest in things that, you know,

• 10:11Speaker 01

  if I'm right, presumably aren't real? And it turns out, there's a lot of reasons why we might have magical beliefs or supernatural beliefs or paranormal beliefs, whether or not they're like, for example, Ed Hagen, he had a really great paper recently, and I think Aaron Lightner was his co-author on that, suggesting that paranormal beliefs kind of help us, they give us a starting point from which we can start to think about other minds, right? They give us kind of a way to ratchet, a way to take the world of a trillion possibilities and bring them down to, you know, A hundred thousand possibilities. It makes it graspable so that we can actually get some traction in understanding other minds.

• 10:56Speaker 01

  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 exception of Casper, most people think ghosts are pretty malicious, like they're pretty scary. It's 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. Like, well, what if they are going to harm us? 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 put up and they're kind of lurking around.

• 11:39Speaker 01

  Why are they trying to hide themselves? Right? And I think we ask those same kinds of questions about things like ghosts and aliens and demons and all these entities that we've come up with that don't make themselves fully available to us, but do influence us usually in malicious ways. So I think that's kind of tapping into that. And it gets into a whole bunch of things like infectious disease, you know? Before the germ theory of disease, we had supernatural explanations for disease. Witches did it or gods did it. It was never like something really natural, right? We didn't have a good explanation for that. So our minds immediately went to, oh, someone with bad intentions probably did this and they must be powerful because I didn't see them do it. And they did it from way over there. They did it uh, using, you know, magical ingredients.

• 12:24Chris Williamson?

  I'm trying to work out what the common thread is between these four, between stuff that's violent, people who commit violence, the impact of violence on the human body and supernatural spooky.

• 12:36Speaker 01

  Like things that, things that probably will be violent because they're being sneaky. It's kind of similar actually to the uh, that's pretty similar to the uh, minds of dangerous people or the true crime on it. There's a lot of overlap in those two in some ways.

• 12:48Chris Williamson?

  What's the, what's the thread between all of these?

• 12:50Speaker 01

  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? So if I'm watching a violent encounter, I'm watching a UFC fight, I'm learning about. Mechanics of the fighting, right? I'm learning about in the moment, mechanics of what's happening during a fight. Same thing with a street fight, same thing with the police body cam. What's happening in that exact scenario? If I'm reading a true crime book, listening to a true crime podcast, I'm kind of learning about like, what leads up to that scenario? What did the victim not see that they should have seen, right? What did they use to escape if they escaped? Like, what trick or tool did they use to escape?

• 13:31Speaker 01

  There's actually been a study showing that people find that aspect of the true crime story most interesting. The one where like, if a victim escapes, what did they do to escape? People find that more interesting than any other part of the story. It's a similar idea for body violations, right? Like, what caused this injury and how can I make sure it doesn't happen to me? And then for the sort of unknown or paranormal type of dangers, are they real? How, why do people, 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 aliens probe them and others don't? And, and how can I avoid these things happening to me?

• 14:15Speaker 01

  So if I learn something about these, I might be able to identify some, some similarities in them and then protect myself.

• 14:22Chris Williamson?

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

• 14:26Speaker 01

  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 this positive feeling of curiosity, this approach orientation, because otherwise we would just avoid those things, right? It's, it's natural to avoid things that are dangerous. But if you counteract that with a bit of curiosity, in particular in situations where you're not in danger. So if your mind senses, okay, here's a potential threat, but I'm not in danger. That's a really valuable learning opportunity. You kind of do have to have this push and pull of like, pull away so I don't get injured, but approach and push forward so I can learn something about it and actually makes me better prepared in the future.

• 15:07Chris Williamson?

  Watch the UFC fight, but from this side of the ring, the octagon.

• 15:11Speaker 01

  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 and kind of what you're learning, but it may not be worth the cost, right?

• 15:25Chris Williamson?

  This episode is brought to you by Element. Summer hits different when you're actually hydrated. That tired, foggy, muscle, crampy feeling most people chalk up to heat or exhaustion. It might be electrolytes and plain water alone won't fix it, which is why Element is such a game changer. It's a zero sugar electrolyte drink mixed with sodium, potassium and magnesium in the exact ratio your body needs. No sugar, no food dyes, no artificial junk. And this summer they've dropped something new, lemonade salt. It's like a lemon popsicle grew up, got its life together and started supporting your adrenal system and your hydration. And best of all, there's a no questions asked refund policy. So you can buy it, try it for as long as you want. And if you don't like it, they'll give you your money back and you don't even need to return the box. That's how confident they are that you'll love it. Plus they offer free shipping in the US.

• 16:10Chris Williamson?

  Right now you can get a free sample pack of all eight flavors with your first box by going to the link in the description below. By heading to drinklmnt.com/ModernWisdom. That's drinklmnt.com/ModernWisdom. I'm interested in the sort of adaptive story of morbid curiosity. Or maybe the evolutionary examples of this, because I'm trying to think.

• 16:35Chris Williamson?

  There's a big difference between being able to read a book, being able to watch a UFC fight, being able to watch body cam footage or a true crime podcast or a true crime documentary or a horror film. I'm wondering what morbid curiosity would have looked like ancestrally. Yeah.

• 16:54Speaker 01

  Well, we can, we can ask what it looks like in non-humans, right? And that gives us a sense maybe of what it looks like. You know, I mentioned earlier the gazelles and cheetahs. There's a really great study, it was like a two year safari study where the zoologist actually went out and just observed gazelles in their natural environment and kind of how they interacted with their natural predators, which are the cheetahs. And what she found were that.

• 17:23Speaker 01

  They don't always run away when they see a cheetah. What they sometimes do is they stop and they actually observe the cheetah. And there are some things that influence the likelihood of that, right? One of those is if you're an adolescent gazelle, you're much more likely to observe the cheetah than run away or do something else. If you are in a large group, I think if you were in a large group, you were more likely to observe the cheetah. If you were further away from the cheetah, if you had some distance from the cheetah, you would observe it. And that makes sense, right? Because you can't always run away when you see a predator. You would always be, on the savannah, you would always be running, right? Because you live amongst your predators, right? Lions and zebras live amongst each other. Gazelles and cheetahs live amongst each other.

• 18:06Speaker 01

  The gazelles are, lions and cheetahs aren't always hungry, right? Cats do a lot of like lazing around, like 22 hours a day, they lay around. And so if you see a lion laying around, it's not good if you're a prey to actually run away every single time, because then you're going to deplete all your caloric resources. And so one of the answers to that problem is to learn something about them so that you know when they're hungry, when they're hunting, what they even look like, right? What they look like when they're going to, when they're trying to prey upon you versus when they're laying around. And you can see the same thing in hunter-gatherer societies where they don't have television, they don't have written language,

• 18:50Speaker 01

  but they do have oral storytelling, right? And if you look at folklore, predators are one of the most common themes cross-culturally in folklore. They show up in all different kinds of stories, and not always scary stories, but predators do show up in all different kinds of stories across the world, across time, different languages. And I think one other piece of evidence for this that I didn't initially come to until I started writing the book was that they show up a lot in our dreams. And there's this really great A theory that, you know, everybody wants to know, what do my dreams mean, right? Like, the one question a psychologist should be able to answer is, what do my dreams mean? At least, that's what people think.

• 19:35Speaker 01

  And I never had really thought much about dreams, you know, I just, they're hard to study. As, how do you, how do you tell what somebody is actually experiencing when they're dreaming? 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, I started reading about dreams a lot. And what I found was that one of the most influential and empirically backed theories for why dreaming, like, the capability for dreaming exists, is that it's really good at rehearsing threats when you're sort of offline. So again, you can learn about something when it's not costing you energy.

• 20:15Speaker 01

  It's not taking the place of foraging, or mating, or social status building, or whatever else you might be doing during the day.

• 20:25Speaker 01

  Then that's a really valuable thing that you can take, right? So, that's not to say that dreams only simulate threats. But dreaming itself is a pretty high-investment activity. Takes quite a bit of work to dream something up and to hallucinate it, because your body actually responds, you know, you're paralyzed, ideally, you're paralyzed when you dream, right? Otherwise, you're sleepwalking.

• 20:51Speaker 01

  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.

• 21:13Speaker 01

  And, you know, you can do this with, there was a study in the, I think it was the 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 got up and moved around in these sort of, either predatory types of ways, or prey types of ways, where they were being hunted. So they were hunting or being hunted when they were asleep. At least, they were acting those out. Physically. Um, so yeah, I, I, and there's a, there's a lot of evidence that threats show up in our dreams, not just in our nightmares, right? So, uh, if you, if you talk about scary dreams or threats in dreams, people tend to think about nightmares.

• 21:56Speaker 01

  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, 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.

• 22:31Speaker 01

  But without going on too much of a tangent, I mean, I talked about an example in my book where, uh, there's an anthropologist, Thomas Gregor, who, uh, he studies, I think it's the Mehakaku is how you say their name, people. And one thing that's interesting about the Mehakaku people is that they reliably recount their dreams when they wake up to like people around them, to their friends and to their family. And so it makes them a great case study for learning about dreams because they reliably regurgitate their dreams. Um, and so he did 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, snakes.

• 23:13Speaker 01

  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.

• 23:23Chris Williamson?

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

• 23:44Speaker 01

  That's a good way to describe a nightmare. Yeah.

• 23:46Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Um, okay.

• 23:49Chris Williamson?

  Well, it seems so far that the main thing that we're doing is preparing for threats, right, that we need to get some sort of adaptive explanation for why morbid curiosity is there. Typically, these things would be invoking a fear or disgust. But curiosity balances the scales so that we can learn from this experience. It encourages us to overcome our disgust response or our fear and to lean in a little bit, but not too much, and sort of tolerates that accelerator back and forth. Okay, that's a nice explanation. I'm particularly interested in where individual differences in morbid curiosity come from.

• 24:33Chris Williamson?

  What's a predictor that somebody is more likely or less likely? Personality differences, gender, background, upbringing, stuff like that. What are the big contributors there?

• 24:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, that was one of the first studies I did, right? So I had the scale now. What's the next thing you do? Well, the next thing you should do is make sure that you're measuring something that is distinct from other things, right? It should be correlated with some things, right? There should be some predictors and some things that shouldn't predict it at all. But there shouldn't be a complete overlap in variance where if I give somebody, let's say, a big five, it doesn't explain away all the variance in morbid curiosity. So I ran this big personality study where I gave people every kind of test I could think of that might be related to morbid curiosity. So they took the morbid curiosity test. They took a hexaco, which is like big five with honesty, humility in it, right?

• 25:25Speaker 01

  That's kind of your main domains of personality that explain a lot of attitudes and behaviors in daily life. They took a disgust sensitivity scale. They took a psychopathy scale that had one of the Lillian Feld's that has multiple subscales in it.

• 25:43Speaker 01

  Past, you know, their age, their sex, their, I think, income. Threw in a lot of different things that it was kind of just like a pot where I threw in all these different personality tests to try to see, can I explain away morbid curiosity if I have enough data? And the answer was no. The closest I got, that's a good thing. That's a good thing. For me, it was anyway. 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 and morbid curiosity if I looked at disgust and psychopathy and big five and sex and age and all these different things. However, there were a few things that were much more strongly correlated with morbid curiosity

• 26:28Speaker 01

  than other things. So psychopathy was one of them, which is interesting. We can talk a little bit about, I have my own sort of thoughts on psychopathy and what it's really measuring. But psychopathy was one of them.

• 26:41Speaker 01

  And this is subclinical psychopathy, so not clinically, you know, no clinical diagnosis.

• 26:47Speaker 01

  Another one was.

• 26:50Speaker 01

  Oh, I also, I used the five dimensions of curiosity from Todd Kashdan, because I wanted to see maybe if it could be explained by other dimensions of curiosity. The answer there was no.

• 26:59Chris Williamson?

  Generally curious.

• 27:00Speaker 01

  Generally curious. Yeah. And there were some positive correlations, but they were small. They were point two to point three or maybe four on one of them. Right?

• 27:09Speaker 01

  So the variance there would be, you know, 10 to 30% at the most, explained away by other dimensions of curiosity.

• 27:16Speaker 01

  There was, I think, psychopathy, and in particular in psychopathy, it was the rebelliousness subscale. That was the one that was most strongly correlated. It was like the single thing I measured that was most strongly correlated with morbid curiosity by itself. There wasn't a lot of difference between men and women. There were some differences in the subscales. Men tend to be more interested in violence. Women tend to be more interested in the minds of dangerous people. The other two were kind of a wash.

• 27:44Speaker 01

  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.

• 27:50Speaker 01

  Age, younger people were definitely more morbidly curious than older people. Which kind of makes sense, because if it's about learning, you're learning when you're young, you're not going to 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.

• 28:05Speaker 01

  Morbid curiosity looks like it decreases on average with age.

• 28:11Speaker 01

  And that aligns up with animal literature on the gazelles, for example, right? The adolescents were the ones that did the most predator inspection. But there weren't a lot of other major, like disgust. You would think disgust would be highly correlated. I thought it would be, right? I thought disgust sensitivity surely would be highly negatively correlated with morbid curiosity. And it was a little bit like some of the subscales, I think, you know, maybe explain 10% of the variance, but it wasn't much. And I was really interested in why it didn't explain away the body violations. Because I thought that, you know, surely, how easily you're disgusted by something should be strongly negatively correlated with how interested you are in learning about a bodily injury, right?

• 28:54Speaker 01

  But it turns out, I think what's happening is that

• 28:59Speaker 01

  there's two different kinds of body injuries, right? There are infectious body injuries and there are non-infectious body injuries. And I talk about this in the chapter on bodily violations in the book, where there was a really cool study done several years ago by Tom Kupfer, where he set up these like fake

• 29:20Speaker 01

  dressings for injuries, like bandages for injuries. And he said, you know, this one was caused by, and he would say some sort of infection, right? And this one was caused by, you know, a fish hook or something, a knife, something that's not infectious, but does cause a lot of 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 to pick up this bandage, you know, how comfortable would you be with it? And how disgusting is it? 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.

• 30:03Speaker 01

  And that makes sense to us, no, because we know what infections are, right? 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, 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.

• 30:44Speaker 01

  And those tend to be the ones that we're morbidly curious about are the ones that are not about infection. They're about injuries from typically violence or accidents.

• 30:53Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I mean,

• 30:56Chris Williamson?

  that's so interesting. People would, I'm just trying to think about examples. People would be maybe interested in documentaries about the Black Death, but it's so long ago that they feel like they're protected. Whereas if we look at the amount of like discomfort and psychological distress that lots of people went through when they lived through COVID. And they were hearing about this and it's the sort of thing that's out there and it could get you. Yeah. 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.

• 31:34Speaker 01

  Probably so.

• 31:35Chris Williamson?

  Square that circle for me.

• 31:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I think, you know, and it's not to say that we wouldn't be interested in things like a documentary, like the example you gave.

• 31:45Speaker 01

  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 in the non-infectious.

• 31:58Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 31:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, so if you're watching a documentary about the Black Death and it's showing examples of what bubonic plague looks like on someone, the person with disgust sensitivity is gonna like shy away from that a little more than they would from, say, other kinds of bodily injury documentaries.

• 32:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, I when COVID was announced as a national pandemic or a world pandemic back in March of 2020, like every other scientist in the world who wasn't studying viruses, I had to kind of stop what I was doing. Our labs closed down. And I was really bummed because I had this really fun study planned where I had this cabinet of curiosities I had curated and some of them were morbid and some of them weren't. And I was going to do this really great eye tracking study with it. And all of that had to get shut down. So I thought, okay, how can I shift some of this online? Because that was the only way we could study, continue studying things was online. And I thought, well, most

• 32:58Speaker 01

  people, probably everyone alive today, has never lived through a global pandemic like this, right? The last big thing like that would have been like Spanish flu, probably. There were certainly other pandemics between now and then, but that was probably the last like major thing that kind of shut down the way the world operates, right? And it didn't happen at the same scale because we weren't as connected. We couldn't fly across the planet in six hours, right? We had to, in 1918, it just wasn't like that. And so I thought, well, that's probably pretty scary for a lot of people. It was, you know, it's like, we didn't know what was going on because there was this virus. We don't know how dangerous it is. But on top of that, like, our entire way of life is changing. We don't know when

• 33:40Speaker 01

  we can continue to go outside, when things will go back to normal, if our family, our older family members will be okay. And so I thought, well, this is a really good way to study whether or not people who are morbidly curious are actually feeling more prepared for this. Like, this is actually working. This is kind of a natural experiment. So that's what I did is I studied, you know, are people who are more interested in true crime, are they dealing with the pandemic better, right? Are they, are people who are horror fans, are they dealing with the pandemic better? Are they feeling less anxious about it? And again, here I tried to control for when I did this study, I tried to control for factors that would influence that. Your big five personality, your, your income, especially during COVID, you could kind of, you know, seclude yourself a little more if you were wealthy.

• 34:22Speaker 01

  You maybe did, you weren't a necessary worker that had to still go in to work. I included age, I included a bunch of other personality facets. And asked the question, are people who are more really curious, more resilient in these like early months? I did this study in like April of 2020. And the answer was yes, even controlling for all those other factors that influence, you know, how you respond to this novel situation. People who are more really curious were reporting a greater level of psychological resilience. They were feeling optimistic about the future, experiencing, you know, lower levels of anxiety, lower levels of depression compared to, compared to pre pandemic levels than non more really curious people.

• 35:02Chris Williamson?

  A quick aside, I've been drinking AG1 every morning for years now, and it just got even better. AG1 Next Gen keeps the same simplicity, one scoop, once a day, but now comes with four clinical trials backing it. In those trials, AG1 Next Gen was clinically shown to fill common nutrient gaps, improve key nutrient levels within three months, and increase healthy gut bacteria by 10 times, even in healthy adults. Basically, they've upgraded the formula with better probiotics, more bioavailable nutrients, and clinical validation, and it's still NSF certified for sport, so you know that the quality is legit. AG1 genuinely care about holistic health, which is why I've got my mom to take it, my dad to take it, and tons of my friends too, and why I put it inside of my body every single day. And if I found something better, I would switch, but I haven't, which is why I still

• 35:47Chris Williamson?

  use it. And if you're still unsure, they've got a 90 day money back guarantee, so you can buy it and try it for three months. If you don't like it, I'll just give you your money back. Right now, you can get a year's free supply of vitamin D3, K2, and five free AG1 travel packs, plus that 90 day money back guarantee by going to the link in the description below or heading to drinkag1.com/modernd wisdom. That's drinkag1.com/modernd wisdom. All right. We, we, we need to dig into this. Why do some women want to date serial killers? There's no sex difference, it's only slight, it's not that predictive, blah, blah, blah. I'm not familiar with that many guys sending love letters to female serial killers, angels

• 36:30Chris Williamson?

  of mercy, or whatever they're called, or these nurses that get caught having killed a ton of babies. The reverse. Some chicks love a serial killer.

• 36:39Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 36:40Chris Williamson?

  What's going on there?

• 36:41Speaker 01

  Even, uh, even serial killers that would not be interested in them, like Dahmer, 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.

• 36:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, this, this was a question that I've been getting for a long time and finally, uh, had a study that kind of addressed this.

• 37:06Speaker 01

  I think what's going on, and it makes a lot of sense in light of what we've been discussing, is that if you take a very dangerous man, Ted Bundy, you know, someone who, if you're a woman, would be a prime, you'd be a prime prey for him, right?

• 37:21Speaker 01

  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 incredible way to learn about you, maybe what is one of the most dangerous people on the planet as a young female.

• 37:52Speaker 01

  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, 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, like those traits are associated with being like a bad boy. And, but what was interesting is there was a distinction. So you were morbidly curious, you were, you were behaviorally interested in these guys, but you didn't necessarily feel like warm and cozy

• 38:35Speaker 01

  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 made up these like fake dating profiles where, you know, the profile, uh, depicted a man who was high in the dark triad or, and, uh, 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. But when they were asked about it, there was a distinction between, um,

• 39:02Speaker 01

  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.

• 39:12Chris Williamson?

  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.

• 39:40Speaker 01

  Yeah. And you know, a dangerous person is only dangerous to you if they don't like you. Right? A dangerous person likes you, then they become a huge asset to you.

• 39:50Speaker 01

  Especially if you're not a high formidable ability person, right?

• 39:53Chris Williamson?

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

• 40:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:14Chris Williamson?

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

• 40:19Speaker 01

  They are true crime for dudes. Absolutely.

• 40:21Chris Williamson?

  So what's going on here? Have you thought about the taxonomy of different types of of content? And why certain people are interested in it?

• 40:30Speaker 01

  Kind of, I think, um, yeah, so we, I've, I've, I've looked at the true crime and women thing because it's again, something I get asked all the time. Are women actually more interested in true crime than men? Answer seems to be resoundingly yes, right? And, and whatever modality it is, podcasts, books, whatever, right?

• 40:51Speaker 01

  I haven't looked at men and war stories, but I would imagine that that is true for the same reasons. Right? Um, that's, you know, historically.

• 41:00Speaker 01

  What kind of violence is a man likely to encounter? Well, violence from another man, right? And probably in the context of a war or a battle or some sort of dispute. What kind of violence is a woman most likely to encounter? Probably that from a man as well, right? But not in the context of a war, but in the context of a personal relationship. So those are the, 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 those personal relationships. And like most domestic abuse cases, right? Or kind of by definition, like violence against women tends to be men they know. Among men, it's kind of just other men, right? And historically, it's been other men

• 41:44Speaker 01

  who are not part of your group. And that translates pretty, pretty directly into a war story.

• 41:49Chris Williamson?

  Hmm, I suppose playing with war as well. That makes complete sense. Like that's, 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, didn'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. The, the guys, the little boys, cowboys versus aliens versus, you know, whatever.

• 42:20Speaker 01

  Monsters or whatever they come up with, right?

• 42:22Chris Williamson?

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

• 42:28Speaker 01

  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 assume would show up the same thing. Like, it doesn't matter if you're in a horticulturalist tribe or a hunter gatherer tribe or LA or Austin or New York or rural Maine, that's probably true, right? Like, if you're hanging out with other, like a little boy's hanging out with other little boys, they're gonna play somewhat more violent games and girls are gonna play somewhat less violent. Or different kinds of violent games, right? Again, direct violence versus kind of learning about someone who's maybe dangerous. I mean, I, I saw this when I was, when I was in my master's program,

• 43:12Speaker 01

  I worked as a mad scientist, which is like the coolest job title. And all it meant was that I would go around and I would do science shows and camps for kids. It was like, I was like a cheap version of Bill Nye. And one of the camps, one of the first camps I did was a summer camp. And I had, I don't know, 15 or so kids that ranged from ages, I want to say like five to nine generally. And I was, I was a young 20 something, didn't have kids, didn't really know how to like, I mean, I mean, I played with kids, but I didn't really know how to like, teach a group of kids something, right? And what you quickly learn is that kids have very short attention spans and they require a lot of free time,

• 43:55Speaker 01

  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 Oklahoma. It was 100 and whatever degrees outside. And so they couldn't play outside that long. It was just like, it was too hot. And so we had to find 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. I mean, every now and then we had access to a gym and we would play like Red Rover, 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.

• 44:35Speaker 01

  And so the one, the one game that came to mind was this game called Mafia or Werewolf, if you've ever heard of it.

• 44:41Chris Williamson?

  I've played Werewolf many times, yes.

• 44:42Speaker 01

  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, because I need something simple that kids could learn quickly and they wouldn't get bored with rules, right? And I was like, okay, this is very simple, imaginative. They get to play, like, let's try this. And, you know, the basic premise is there's a narrator who first was me. And then all the kids are part of this like, fake town. And they get these secret identities for these little pieces of paper with a secret identity written on it. And, I mean, the first challenge was that some of the kids couldn't read very well, so they had to help them know what their identity was. But once we got all of that sorted, most of them, you know, are townspeople.

• 45:26Speaker 01

  Two of them were mafia members. One of them was a doctor and could heal people. And one was a sheriff who could arrest people. And the basic premise is the narrator tells the story about how the town goes to sleep at night. And in the middle of the night, the mafia or the bad guys come out and they they attack someone. And the doctor, you know, can wake up and try to heal them. And the sheriff has to figure out who did it, right? But the crux of this is that when they wake up, the town has to vote. They have to vote on like who they think did it and who they're going to, in this case, like hang for the mafia, right? Who are they gonna hang in like an old west style hanging? And I tried to keep it very tame because I was like, okay, these are like five to nine year olds. I don't want them going home to their parents and being like, I killed my friend at at science camp today.

• 46:11Speaker 01

  Because he was a member of the mafia, something. But I kept the I kept the narration very tame. It was so and so died last night at the hands of the mafia. Eventually, once the kids started to learn how to play, I let them be the narrator, right? So I would let one of them try a narration. And it became this like awful scene of like out of the worst horror movie. I mean, the descriptions of like what happened to the people who were murdered by the mafia became bloody and violent. And their entrails, you know, their their guts were thrown out and their heads were cut off. It was like this horribly violent thing. So without me provoking them, and in fact, I was trying to keep them from being overly violent.

• 46:52Speaker 01

  The kids had this desire to, and in particular, the little boys had this desire to like tell these awful stories of what happened. And how they need to get justice for it and they have to hang someone. They were so excited about hanging someone for doing that.

• 47:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think I think kids are super morbidly curious.

• 47:12Speaker 01

  But it shows up in their pretend play a lot, you know, where they have control over over. How that feels to them.

• 47:18Chris Williamson?

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

• 47:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:26Chris Williamson?

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

• 47:31Speaker 01

  Really?

• 47:32Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I mean, I did the freedom of information requests or whatever. There's entire channels that are just built from asking to get access to this, which, I mean, I don't know where the freedom of information thing came in with police body cam footage. What they probably didn't think was that, wow, in future, we're going to be fueling an entire YouTube ecosystem of people that just like narrate mad shit happening to police officers.

• 48:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:00Chris Williamson?

  But yeah, is this just the people are injured? I want to see how they're injured, how to fix it, how to avoid it? Or is there more going on there?

• 48:07Speaker 01

  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,

• 48:20Speaker 01

  you know, when, when, when police stories make the news, it's only the bad stories, right? And those can be a very small fraction of what happens, but it's like the ones that are the worst, the most awful. Usually the most ambiguous as well. Those are the ones that make the news. Those are the ones that 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? Or feel, you know, making them seem like an aggressor to the police officer?

• 48:59Speaker 01

  I think in particular, those really violent, ambiguous police videos are what really get people paying attention because, you know, there's different interpretations of what could happen and different interpretations of like, how, 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.

• 49:16Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 49:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think the ambiguity really fuels that, the ambiguity of like what's happening.

• 49:20Chris Williamson?

  This episode is brought to you by Incogni. If you've ever typed your name into Google and found your info on some weird website that you've never heard of, that's not a fluke. Data brokers and people's search sites collect your personal information like your name, address, phone number, buying habits, your income, your medical history, and they sell it without your consent. And there are hundreds of them, which is why I partnered with Incogni. It finds these bad actors and gets your info removed from their databases automatically. You don't have to email anyone, fill out forms, or jump through hoops. They handle the entire process for you and keep going as new brokers pop up. Best of all, you can cancel at any time and they offer a 30 day money back guarantee. So you can buy it completely risk free, use it for 29 days. If you don't like it for any reason, they'll just give you your money back. Right now, you can get a 60% discount on an annual plan by going

• 50:03Chris Williamson?

  to the link in the description below. I'm heading to incogni.com/ModernWisdom and using the code MODERNWISDOM at checkout. That's I-N-C-O-G-N-I dot com slash Modern Wisdom and Modern Wisdom at checkout. Yeah, that makes complete sense. When it comes to creating horror as it's sort of shown on TV, I'm not a cinematographer or a director, but I have to assume that there's a formula for how that's put together. What does that look like when it's sort of deconstructed? What is horror? What's the difference between terror and horror? How does all of this fit together?

• 50:45Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, this is something actually that I've been thinking a lot about recently is, you know, people tend to agree when they watch a film, like, oh, this is a horror film. It's just like one of those things, you know it when you see it. If you watch a film, you're like, oh, that's kind of a horror film. And so, 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 and in fictional settings.

• 51:16Speaker 01

  And so I became really interested in how do we define the horror genre? Like, what is it about that movie that makes me say, aha, that's a horror movie? And so this is something that I've been coming up with recently. Just wrote a paper with 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. You've got a really strong antagonist, strong villain, very formidable, and you have a very vulnerable protagonist. And if you think about it, that doesn't really happen in any other genre of movie. It's like historically, people have tried to define the horror genre as, you know, the way that the audience feels like. For example, they feel afraid. It's like, if it scares you, it's a horror movie.

• 51:59Speaker 01

  Well, that's not a very good definition because what scares me may not scare you or may scare someone else. May scare me today, but not in 10 years. That doesn't change what the story is, right? It doesn't change like what that story is meant to be.

• 52:12Speaker 01

  Other people have said, well, it's about the intention of the writer. So if the writer is trying to scare you, that's a horror story. And that didn't really sit right with me either because

• 52:21Speaker 01

  somebody can try to do something and not do it very well, right? Or they can try to do one thing, but actually it ends up looking like another thing. So I thought about, I started thinking about this as kind of a biologist and thinking about the characters involved and like their relationship to one another. Well, it seems like in horror movies, and empirically so, we did this study on like 600 different films. Horror movies feature very vulnerable protagonists, very formidable antagonists. And I think that's a really archetypal type of story where you're, you're the underdog, right? Or in this case, the person you're empathizing with, the protagonist is the underdog. And there's nothing they can do really to get out of this situation.

• 53:04Speaker 01

  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.

• 53:14Chris Williamson?

  That's interesting. What about zombie movies? What's the appeal of those? Because that's a specific type.

• 53:21Speaker 01

  That's a weird one, right?

• 53:22Chris Williamson?

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

• 53:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. 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 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? It still looks human, still kind of acts human in some ways and has bad intentions, right? It wants to eat you. That kind of taps into the the minds of dangerous people. What's really going on? Is there anything left in the zombie's mind? Is there still a human in there? Or is it just a monster? But taps into that domain. They're obviously very violent if they catch you. If they catch you, they want to eat you, right? So there's a lot of violence in zombie films that taps into the violence domain. There's also usually warring sort of survivor groups, right?

• 54:14Speaker 01

  There's a lot of like intergroup violence in zombie movies usually.

• 54:19Speaker 01

  They're also kind of supernatural, right? They they're alive, but not really. Or are they dead? You know, it's unclear like what their status is. Are they alive or dead? Can they be brought back? Are they gone forever? Why do they keep coming when I shoot them? They do all of these things that are sort of tapping into the paranormal danger or the uncertain danger. And of course, the last one, body violations. I mean, they're like walking body violations, right? They have horrible injuries all over them. If they catch people, they tend to create horrible injuries, whether that's bites or scratches or ripping off their arms. And so I think zombie movies sort of reliably tap into all four domains of morbid curiosity. Which makes them really appealing and it, you know, those tend to be the highest grossing like horror TV shows or movies.

• 55:04Speaker 01

  If you think of like World War Z is like an action zombie movie. I mean, that's the perfect combination.

• 55:08Chris Williamson?

  I am legend.

• 55:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, I am legend, 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.

• 55:18Chris Williamson?

  It's funny that you're.

• 55:21Chris Williamson?

  Different categories of elements of morbid curiosity that you can kind of reverse engineer that and use it to explain those. I'd never even considered that. Are you familiar with this monster enters left tactic? Have you heard of this?

• 55:36Speaker 01

  What is it?

• 55:37Chris Williamson?

  Monster enters left. So it's a filmmaking trope, I suppose. Apparently, horror filmmakers know that the human eye has a tendency to drift slightly to the right of the screen when they're viewing a movie. So on average, shocks and surprises come from the left side.

• 56:00Speaker 01

  Really?

• 56:00Chris Williamson?

  This is this guy, Will Musham. He's a composer and a writer. Horror cinematography seems to sort of exploit negative empty space, right? That's how it builds tension, primes viewers for something to emerge. But it often comes from the left, where attention is weakest. So it uses the imbalance to heighten the impact, jump scares, and sort of the way that it's integrated into the broader atmospheric heightened tension. And we've got this cognitive asymmetry that favors right brain surprise. People tend to scan screens in one way, and then an appearance on the left, it hits faster. Even though our eyes drift to the right, we

• 56:40Chris Williamson?

  tend to scan from left to right, which means that a left-sided sudden appearance hits the brain more quickly, and it processes more quickly. And perhaps that's a reason why sort of misdirection works when you're trying to work out what's going on on the screen.

• 56:58Speaker 01

  Oh, that's so cool. Yeah. And I imagine, I guess the left to right thing is just a artifact of us reading left to right. Is that the idea?

• 57:05Chris Williamson?

  I'm not sure. I mean, perhaps, perhaps it's trained.

• 57:12Chris Williamson?

  I would be interested to know whether this would be correct in different cultures that have different kinds of ways that they put that. Exactly. Yeah. The ancient Egyptians.

• 57:25Chris Williamson?

  We'll put it from the bottom.

• 57:27Chris Williamson?

  I just, this is something that needs a little bit more. I've done a bit of research on it and I wanted to talk to you about it today, but I don't know how, just quite how much truth there is in it. What would be lovely would be to do a, an assessment of jump scares in movies.

• 57:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 57:45Chris Williamson?

  And work out which side of the screen they come from.

• 57:47Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. I think, and that would be a hard one to do because you would have, I think you would have to, like in this study that I mentioned, we used large language, language models to

• 57:58Speaker 01

  describe plots and describe characters in the plots, right? You can do that with like chat GPT. If you have the right kind of prompts, you can say like, you know, rate this antagonist in this movie on all these different features that we think tap into, into formatability, right?

• 58:14Chris Williamson?

  Oh, this is interesting. I've just, I've just done a little bit of digging there. So you've got this thing called pseudo neglect, which is linked to right hemisphere dominance for spatial awareness. That paradoxically results in leftward attention bias in some visual search tasks. But during screen watching, attentional drift to the right is commonly observed, likely due to learned scanning patterns. So yeah.

• 58:37Speaker 01

  So the reading, right?

• 58:39Chris Williamson?

  Sudden movement or emergence on the left side of the screen can be more startling because it taps into the right hemisphere. So we cross over, right? We sort of right goes to left, left goes to right. Tapped into the right hemisphere, which is more reactive to emotion, novelty and spatial alertness. And the viewer's attention is often not focused on the left during buildup sequences because of this drift to the right.

• 59:02Speaker 01

  Right.

• 59:02Chris Williamson?

  This misdirection taxes cognitive resources, meaning that we're less able to anticipate a threat when it comes from an unexpected place. So that's the left hand side.

• 59:11Speaker 01

  So it's sort of like a, it's like a one, two punch. It's like, it surprises you more and it activates the brain more. That's, that's more likely to respond. That's so cool.

• 59:18Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 59:19Speaker 01

  Was there, was there a name for this? What was the name for this phenomenon?

• 59:22Chris Williamson?

  Monster enters left.

• 59:23Speaker 01

  Monster enter. Okay. I'll look that up.

• 59:25Chris Williamson?

  Which is an interesting one. Psychological and cinematic principle. Somewhat unexplored, formerly in peer reviewed research. Well, that stinks. That stinks of a blue ocean.

• 59:35Speaker 01

  Like, that's almost like everything I study. I feel like. You know, it's nice when something is not, somebody's not looked into it because then you're like, oh, I can do that and I can kind of be the one to discover this. But the downside is you don't have the time or the money or the energy to do all the studies. And so you kind of hope that like other people will do some of these interesting things so that I can actually just read about it and enjoy it and learn from it. Yeah, I'm not surprised to hear that, you know, the empirical research is lacking.

• 1:00:03Chris Williamson?

  Oh.

• 1:00:04Speaker 01

  I buy it, though. I think that that makes a lot of sense, especially the scanning left to right, the drift, the surprise factor. I think that makes a lot of sense, but I'd never heard of that.

• 1:00:14Chris Williamson?

  Well, look, we're learning everything 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? Lots of violent media being shown to people at a young age, sensitive developmental stages. I'm interested in whether that's changing people's morbid curiosity.

• 1:00:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't know. I mean, you know, again, developmental studies are 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 can, 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 it was much harder to see something graphic like that, right? And so the cohort analysis is actually really hard to do. You kind of have to do a longitudinal study. So I haven't done it and I don't know anyone who has. I will say that two, two things. One is that, you know, we obviously live in like the, I would say the least violent in the US. Like we live in like the least violent

• 1:01:24Speaker 01

  time that we can imagine for humans, you know? Human life has been much more awful and violent for most of its history than it is in 2025 for the average American. Now, we can witness, we, on the same coin, 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.

• 1:01:52Speaker 01

  I know that, you know, one of the concerns that people have is, as you mentioned, are we becoming desensitized to it? So do we stop caring about it? Does it make us less aesthetic? I actually did a study on this, looking at, because one of the main critiques of horror films, turns out, I think is unfounded, but one of the main critiques is that they, one of two things, either one, only people with low empathy watch them, or two, if you watch them, you will get low empathy, right? So you're doomed either way. And so I actually looked into this and did a couple of studies on it and found that, 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,

• 1:02:35Speaker 01

  you know, if you, if you're, if horror is interesting to you, it's interesting to you

• 1:02:43Speaker 01

  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, or if you were not afraid of what was going on, you wouldn't really enjoy the movie. That's like the most common criticism of a horror movie is like, it wasn't scary, or I didn't, you know?

• 1:03:09Chris Williamson?

  The very thing that it was supposed to deliver, it didn't manage to deliver.

• 1:03:12Speaker 01

  Yes. And so in order for that to deliver reliably, like you kind of have to empathize with the protagonist and you have to be a little bit afraid. So, you know, it kind of, 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 Chris, he's this age and his favorite movie genre is horror. And then I come up with a bunch of those different little bios. I switch out the name and the sex and the age and the, or you can keep those the same rather, and change out the favorite movie genre. Uh, what I found was that when I asked people, well, how empathetic do you think Chris is?

• 1:03:57Speaker 01

  How compassionate 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 empathetic and compassionate. And and I always have a fill in the blank, you know, at the end of my surveys or into my studies to get people's like real thoughts, not just their button clicking thoughts. And some people explicitly told me like, well, I rated him as less compassionate because he said he liked horror movies. It's like people have this intuition that you should, you know, have lower empathy if you can enjoy these kinds of things.

• 1:04:32Chris Williamson?

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

• 1:04:36Speaker 01

  Because he's got low empathy.

• 1:04:38Chris Williamson?

  If if he was empathetic, he would simply not be able to do it. Whereas what it appears is the whole reason that you're interested is because of your empathy. That's the precise mechanism that it's working on.

• 1:04:50Speaker 01

  There's, there's one caveat to that, which is that. Let's say you're like a, like a totally cold, like, like a Jeffrey Dahmer, just totally cold serial killer interested in violence. You can still be interested in violence because it's sort of, it's 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. But for different reasons than 99.9% of the population. Yeah, exactly. It's a different kind of training, right? They're training with the predator and not with the prey.

• 1:05:23Chris Williamson?

  Oh, so interesting. Yeah, well, I guess, you know, you just roll in the dice. Someone says that their favorite genre of movies is, is horror. Maybe they're a highly empathetic person, maybe they're a serial killer.

• 1:05:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, maybe, maybe, you know?

• 1:05:37Chris Williamson?

  You never know.

• 1:05:37Speaker 01

  I think, I think it probably airs on one side or the other, but.

• 1:05:40Chris Williamson?

  You can never be too, you can never be too careful.

• 1:05:42Speaker 01

  Well, but that actually is a little bit like a, of a, I mean, I guess a meta approach to this, which is that, well, people are concerned about people that like horror movies because some of them might be serial killers, right? So you, so your threat detection is, uh, is going off on the horror movie fans because some of them might, might be dangerous.

• 1:06:00Chris Williamson?

  Beautiful. Colton Scrivner, ladies and gentlemen. Colton, your stuff's great. Your Substack is awesome. Your book's awesome. Everyone should go and check it out. Where, uh, where should they go?

• 1:06:09Speaker 01

  I mean, for the book, you can order it from whatever bookstore you tend to go to. So, you know, you can get it on Ping and Random House, or Amazon, or Bookshop, or your local bookstore, starting October 7. And then for my other writing that didn't make it into the book, my Substack, MorbidlyCuriousThoughts.com. Thank you. Colton, I appreciate you. Thank you, man. Yeah, thanks for the fun conversation. Mr. President, my company told me of the explosion on our rig on October 2nd.

• 1:06:36Speaker 02

  Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me. Tom Cruise is. Digger got us into this mess, and Digger's gonna dig us up. From the director of Birdman and The Ravenhead.

• 1:06:48Speaker 03

  What would happen if I stopped drilling? You stop, you freeze to death, that's what.

• 1:06:53Speaker 02

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 1:06:56Speaker 03

  I'm not the first daddy.

• 1:06:57Speaker 02

  Digger, see the trailer online, only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R, under 17, not a middle without parent.