Science Friday
Hosted by Flora Lichtman and Ira Flatow
Why do we find joy in the scary and the macabre? Two psychology experts weigh in on humans' affinity for horror and desire to get spooked.
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Hey, this is Flora Lichtman, and you're listening to Science Friday. Today on the show...
That was from The Shining, of course. And it makes you wonder, why do we want to watch a murderous psychopath try to ax down a bathroom door so he could kill his family? What draws us to horror? And why are some people more thrill-seeking or morbidly curious than others? Here to flesh out some answers are two experts who happen to fall on opposite poles of the horror fandom genre. Dr. Ken Carter is horrified of horror. He's also a psychology professor at Emory University and author of the book Buzz: Inside the Minds of Thrillseekers, Daredevils, and Adrenaline Junkies. And we have horror file Dr. Colton Scrivner, a behavioral scientist at Arizona State
University and author of the new book, Morbidly Curious: A Scientist Explains Why We Can't Look Away. Ken Colton, welcome to Science Friday.
Thank you very much. Great to be here.
It seems like horror is having a moment right now. Am I imagining that? And if it is having a moment, is there any reason why?
Well, I don't think you're imagining it. If you look at the box office share of horror over the past 30 years, and it was around 17%, which is about two to three times its typical share, and it's the highest that it's been in recorded history, at least since we've been collecting comprehensive records.
Wow.
Yeah. And so if it's highest at the box office, it's probably also more common on streaming platforms. And if it's more common on streaming platforms and in the box office, you're probably also seeing it in big box stores and other places as well.
Do you have a hypothesis for why that is so?
Um, I, I do. The, the short answer, and I actually only came across this idea recently. Um, it got a lot more popular in 2020. So it had about 12% of the box office share in 2020, which was around double what it normally gets. And at the time was the highest that it had ever, ever had. And I think what happened was a lot of people started watching horror movies around the time COVID hit. And a lot of those people that started watching horror movies were people who wouldn't normally watch horror movies. And so I think we have a new crop of horror fans that have popped up in the past couple of years and filmmakers have taken note of that.
Ken, this is kind of counterintuitive to me because, you know, the correlation of the, the world going through this kind of nightmare scenario and then people wanting more nightmare scenarios in their leisure time, like that, that seems surprising.
Yeah, where there's a lot of uncertainty. I think people are also often drawn to sort of cathartic experiences. And so, you know, sometimes people say, I just needed a good cry. And so sometimes people just need a good scare, I think, in order to sort of, you know, flush out some of the emotions they may be feeling. Plus, on the screen, there's a lot of clarity about like, who's the big bad and who's, who's good and who's bad. And you don't often get that in, in everyday life.
Colton, if you, if you like horror, does that mean, you know, what personality traits go along with that? Are you less sensitive? Are you lower in empathy?
I think it's intuitive to believe that that would be the case. I'm pretty sympathetic to that intuition, you know, that, hey, if you like watching movies that are filled with suffering, maybe you're a little lower in empathy. That's not a bad hypothesis to start with. And it was kind of the default answer for a long time. And I decided, well, I'm a scientist, I'm interested in horror, and I should probably study this because it seems like a lot of people haven't. And when I did that, I found that horror fans score just as high as everyone else in affective empathy, meaning that they feel what other people feel to the same extent as anyone else. And they actually score, in some cases, a bit higher in cognitive empathy, which relates to perspective-taking, taking another
person's perspective. And they also score a bit higher in compassion, so caring about another person's well-being. And again, that sounds counterintuitive at first, but if you think about what a horror movie is and why it's scary, and, you know, it's scary because you are empathizing with the protagonist who's in danger, right? The protagonist is undergoing a high adrenaline, high sensation experience, and you're empathizing with that. And that's what causes you to then have a high sensation adrenaline experience.
Yeah, I mean, it's a really great perspective, because I do study a lot of the people that we often call thrill seekers, who are really out for these unusual sensations, whether or not they are experience-seeking of sensations of the mind of the senses, or sort of physical things. And so, one of the things we often think about is, you know, bungee jumpers and wingsuit flyers, and there's physical sense. But there's a lot of cool stuff in terms of what's happening in the brain and the body for those emotional kinds of connections like you see in horror movies.
Well, what is happening in the brain and the body?
Yeah, so we know that a lot of high sensation seekers who are out for those sort of chaotic experiences, experience much more dopamine when they are exposed to those things. That's that pleasure neurotransmitter that makes us feel good. But they often have a lower cortisol response, so they're not having as much of a stress response, so they're really enjoying that in a very different way. So a low sensation seeker like me does not have a lot of dopamine, but has a lot of that stress hormone. So I'm just really frightened, but don't have that sense of enjoyment that a lot of high sensation seekers will feel.
You know, listeners, if you want to know your horror tolerance better or your sensation-seeking score, we're going to have these self-guided sort of quizzes on our website. So Colton, you have this morbid curiosity quiz, and we're going to put it on our website at sciencefriday.com/morbid. And the questions are sort of like, if a head transplant was possible, I would want to watch the procedure. Highly agree or highly disagree. You know, I'm interested in how Ouija boards work. Highly disagree, you know, highly agree. So I took this quiz. And I scored very low on almost every category. Like, all the ones about violence, I was like, on the very low end.
Except for paranormal, where I was like, off the charts. I was like, at the very highest end. Yeah. So that's who I am. How do you score on this, Colton?
I score pretty high, you know, low fives probably across the board and overall.
The top is six, just so everybody knows.
Top is six, yeah. So it's a pretty normally distributed trait, meaning that most people have some morbid curiosity. They might score around a two and a half or a three out of six. And a few people have a little bit, and a few people have a lot. So it looks kind of like an inverted U if you were to plot, you know, everyone's scores on a chart.
Ken, have you taken this quiz?
I did. And I will say that as I took it, I'm not sure if you've ever listened to anyone take it before, Colton.
Yes.
But as I was going through, I was just saying, no, why? With every question, yeah. So I scored a 1.5.
Wow. That's actually one of the lowest scores I think I've seen.
I thought that was very generous, actually, so, yeah.
You think you could even be lower than a 1.5?
Probably, yeah.
You know, Ken, it's so interesting to me that you study sensation-seeking when you, it seems like, are sort of low sensation-seeking. Is that right?
Yeah, very low. Yeah, I'm a pretty low on the scale compared to most people. In fact, I'm an eight out of 40 on the scale.
Ken, on your quiz, which we'll also have at sciencefriday.com/morbid, I was like, a 37.
Wow, that's pretty high.
Yes, very high. It's out of 40. So I was very high on that and very low on yours, Colton. So it makes me wonder if these are separate, you know, that there's overlap probably, but these are maybe separate traits.
Well, let me ask you, I mean, do you like horror movies or do you enjoy anything like that?
I, I don't, I, I don't really, I don't really.
So, so high in sensation seeking, but don't necessarily enjoy horror movies. And that, again, you know, five years ago, people would have thought, well, Flora's crazy, that everybody who loves horror is high in sensation seeking. And most people who are high in sensation seeking must love horror. And again, that was one of those things that I thought, you know, that just doesn't seem right. Anecdotally, I knew a lot of people who were not sensation seekers at all and loved horror. And of course, I knew many people who were high sensation seekers and hated horror. And so I thought, okay, this is an interesting thing to study as well. And so I went to the highest sensation-seeking horror experience I could think of, which would be a haunted attraction during Halloween, right? A very immersive horror experience.
So I, I thought, okay, if horror fans are really sensation seekers, this is where you see it, right? You'd see it at a haunted house. And I devised this scale that pulls a lot from work that like Ken does in sensation seeking, for example, and it essentially categorizes people into sensation-seeking horror fans, scared horror fans, or horror fans who use horror as a way to overcome difficult emotions. So the first group, we called them adrenaline junkies. The second group, the fearful ones, we called them white knucklers, because they walked through with their fists clenched, right? As they were going through the haunted house. And the third group, who used horror to cope, we called them the dark copers. And what we found was that a huge portion of people at this haunted attraction
were not categorized as adrenaline junkies. Some of them were, but, but many people said, no, I didn't actually enjoy the fear itself, but I did like the opportunity to overcome my fear.
Hmm, interesting.
And so they were very afraid. And so this was a great opportunity for them to safely experience fear and then kind of have a chance to overcome that. And it was the overcoming of that challenge of that fear that they really liked. And then, of course, the dark copers felt that the experience helped them kind of understand their own fears and anxieties a bit better.
As someone dressed in a zombie costume chased them, they just saw.
Yeah.
And that doesn't surprise me at all. There's a huge aspect of emotional regulation that really flows throughout a lot of high sensation seeking individuals, the ability to be able to practice really controlling their emotions and using those for, for, for good things. So for example, a slackliner that I interviewed called Slackline Girl.
And a slackliner is, just give us a, it, yeah.
Yeah. So a slackline is a sort of woven, narrow band about the width of a credit card that you can balance on. And Slackline Girl is one of the few people who can do it in high heels as well.
Amazing.
And so part of what she talks about is the ability to be able to do that is really around her ability to control her emotional reaction while she's trying to focus and balance. And so you see the same things in horror kinds of experiences like haunted houses where really you're, you're fighting against your own emotional reaction.
Yeah. I wonder if that is something that is, is maybe somewhat universal among humans, that desire to, to kind of control, you know, emotions that make you feel like you're out of control. And then in high sensation seekers, horror movies, for example, are just not enough for them. It doesn't actually get them to that point. And so they go to more high adrenaline activities like slacklining, you know, 100 feet in the air or, or skydiving or bungee jumping. Whereas people who are a little bit more low in sensation seeking, maybe a horror movie is enough to get them to that point.
We have to take a quick break, but don't go away because when we come back, what's up with our love of zombies?
Zombies, I think, tap into all four domains of morbid curiosity. So those domains are minds of dangerous people, violence, bodily injuries, and the paranormal.
Stay with us.
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Colton, this one's for you.
These things ain't shit. They're not people. They're dead. Ain't gotta feel nothing, Bob, because all they do, they kill. These things right here, they're the things that killed Amy. They killed Otis. They're gonna kill all of us unless we do something. Hey, Herschel, man, let me ask you something. As a living, breathing person, did they walk away from this?
I heard from your laugh. I assume you clocked it. This is from Walking Dead.
Yeah. Season two. I even know what episode that is.
Okay. True expert on the line. Why are we fascinated by zombies in particular?
Yeah, zombies are kind of interesting because zombies, I think, tap into all four domains of morbid curiosity. So those domains are minds of dangerous people. Violence, bodily injuries, and the paranormal. So zombies certainly tap into violence, as we heard from that clip. You probably don't need a visual to know that that was a violent scene, right? And zombies obviously commit lots of violence. They also, though, are kind of people, right? And you heard that in that scene, too. That character kept saying that they're not people, right? These aren't people anymore. Some of the other people in that scene thought that the zombies were still people, or there might still be a person kind of behind the eyes. And they, of course, tap into bodily injuries because they are walking bodily injuries.
You know, their flesh is falling off and their body parts are, you know, only barely hanging on by a thread, and they, of course, cause bodily injuries. And because they are both living and dead, they do kind of violate our intuition about how things can exist. And so they're kind of a paranormal entity as well. And so they capture a broad audience, right? They, whether your interest is in the paranormal, or bodily injuries, or violence, or minds of dangerous people, there's something about zombies that can tap into each of those.
They tick every box.
They tick every box, yeah. And that's why they tend to be the most popular, general audience type of horror, right? I mean, The Walking Dead had, at its height, something like 15 or 16 million viewers a season.
Colton, are there benefits of being scared? Not for, like, the survival of a species, not in terms of evolutionary time, but just for the individual personally?
Yeah. Maybe, it seems like there can be. Experiencing scary things in a safe or playful setting is a really good way to practice emotion regulation skills. I would say that's the primary benefit that you can get from it. And in fact, one lab in the Netherlands has developed a scary game, essentially, for kids with anxiety. The player wears an EEG headband that measures brainwaves associated with relaxation. And as the player moves through the game, if they get too afraid, the EEG headband will pick that up and a pause screen will pop up and kind of remind them, like, hey, you know, this is just a game. You can overcome this. Here are some tips. And when the player begins to calm down, they get more powerful in the game
and they're able to defeat the monsters more easily. So there's some reinforcement there of, if you can face your fear and overcome it, you'll be stronger in the end. And what they found in repeated studies is that playing this game, playing this scary game, is as effective as cognitive behavioral therapy for treating anxiety in kids, which is incredible because cognitive behavioral therapy is the gold standard for treating anxiety.
This is dark coping in action.
Yeah, it kind of is dark coping in action. That's right.
Before I let you both go, any parting wisdom as we as we celebrate spooky season?
I would say just keep in mind that it's OK to be morbidly curious. It's OK to indulge during Halloween.
And for the low sensation seekers out there, I'll say it's OK to be frightened of things. And for the high sensation seekers, just try not to scare your friends.
Thank you both for joining me today.
Yeah, thanks.
Thanks for having us.
Dr. Ken Carter, psychology professor at Emory University and author of the book Buzz, Inside the Minds of Thrill Seekers, Daredevils, and Adrenaline Junkies. And Dr. Colton Scrivner, behavioral scientist at Arizona State University and author of the new book, Morbidly Curious: A Scientist Explains Why We Can't Look Away.
Before we get going, do you crush at trivia? Do you hoard nerdy facts? Do you like free swag? OK, listen up because we are concocting a science trivia game and we need a listener, maybe you, to play with us on air. So if you want to play, please call us at 877-4SYFRI, 877-4SYFRI, and tell us your best nerdiest fun fact and you might just get a chance to play.
Today's episode was produced by Shoshana Buxbaum. I'm Flora Lichtman. Thanks for listening.
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