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#984 - Coltan Scrivner - Why We’re Drawn to Death, Crime, & Danger - Modern Wisdom | Wave AI Podcast Notes

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

Modern Wisdom

Sat Aug 23 2025

Summary

Modern Wisdom #984: Colton Scrivner – Why We’re Drawn to Death, Crime, & Danger

Date: August 23, 2025
Host: Chris Williamson
Guest: Colton Scrivner (Researcher, expert on morbid curiosity)

Overview

In this riveting episode, Chris Williamson explores the psychology of “morbid curiosity” with Colton Scrivner, a leading researcher in the field. The conversation delves into why humans are fascinated by violence, danger, death, and true crime, examining the roots and roles of this dark aspect of curiosity. Together, they discuss evolutionary explanations, personality differences, genre distinctions like horror, societal implications, and what our collective appetites for macabre content say about us.

Key Discussion Points and Insights

Colton’s Path to Morbid Curiosity

Academic Journey: Colton describes shifting from archaeology and anthropology into psychology during his grad studies after being drawn to human paradoxes—such as why violence is shunned in everyday life but celebrated in certain contexts (e.g., the Roman Coliseum).
- “There are certain circumstances where violence is okay, and not only okay, but maybe even revered...” (Colton, 01:03)
Initial Questions: Scrivner highlights the puzzle of why people scare themselves for fun (e.g., horror movies), and notes a lack of psychological research on why people are drawn to their own fear.
- “You find something really interesting that everyone understands at an intuitive level, but nobody is studying. And so I kind of got into it that way.” (Colton, 02:35)

The Paradox of Enjoying Danger

Societal Contradictions: Chris points out that most people avoid real violence, but are drawn to media representations—true crime, UFC, crash footage.
Control and Distance: Scrivner explains that the key is the context and the degree of safety and control. People enjoy simulated danger when it’s clearly bounded and under their control (e.g. a horror film, not a real street fight).
- “It’s like candy for our minds, right? Like, are you telling me we can reap the benefits of this without having any of the costs?” (Colton, 05:38)

Evolutionary and Adaptive Roots

Threat Simulation: Colton posits that morbid curiosity is an evolutionary tool for threat learning, allowing us to gain knowledge about dangers without directly experiencing harm, much like predator inspection in animals.
- “Humans can tell a story about something that could happen or something that did happen…we can gain the learning benefits of predator inspection without actually being in any danger.” (Colton, 04:36)
Dreams as Simulations: He extends this to dreaming, suggesting dreams serve as threat-rehearsal, referencing cross-cultural anthropological studies.
- “Dreaming itself is a pretty high investment activity… one of the most influential and empirically backed theories… is that it’s really good at rehearsing threats when you’re offline.” (Colton, 18:05)
Curiosity as Counterweight: Evolution imbues us with curiosity to offset the natural tendency to avoid danger, maximizing learning when risk is minimized.

Domains of Morbid Curiosity

Colton’s research identifies four main domains:

Violence — Witnessing acts of violence.
People Who Commit Violence — True crime, exploring criminals’ minds.
Body Violations — Interest in injuries or mutilation (often separated into infectious vs. non-infectious).
The Supernatural/Paranormal — Curiosity about threats we don’t fully understand, like ghosts or aliens.

“There seems to be at least four different kinds of domains of morbid curiosity... what the paranormal domain is really tapping into is an interest in things that are dangerous that we don’t fully understand.”
(Colton, 08:07–11:39)

Common Thread: The thread connecting all four domains is “threat”—how it operates, how to detect it, and how to mitigate it.
- “It’s threat itself, right? It’s what could possibly harm me, and what do I know about it—or, more importantly, what do I not know about it?” (Colton, 12:50)

Individual Differences

Personality Correlates:
- Subclinical psychopathy (especially rebelliousness) shows the strongest correlation with morbid curiosity.
- General curiosity is only a weak predictor.
Demographics:
- Age: Younger people score higher in morbid curiosity; matches animal models showing adolescents are most exploratory.
- Gender: Small differences overall; men are more interested in violence, women more in understanding dangerous people. Interest in body violations and supernatural is similar.
- Disgust Sensitivity: Has only a small/moderate (and often specific) negative correlation, particularly with infectious injuries.
Notable Study: During COVID-19, people with high morbid curiosity showed more resilience and lower depression/anxiety, possibly due to feeling mentally prepared for scenarios of danger.
- “[They] were reporting a greater level of psychological resilience...feeling optimistic about the future, experiencing, you know, lower levels of anxiety...” (Colton, 34:07)

Gender, Attraction, and True Crime

Why Some Women Are Drawn to Serial Killers:
- It’s partly about the ability to “safely” learn about dangerous individuals.
- Research shows morbidly curious women are more likely to express behavioral interest (e.g., swiping right) on men with dark triad traits, but aren’t necessarily attracted in an emotional or romantic sense.
- “You were morbidly curious, you were behaviorally interested in these guys, but you didn’t necessarily feel warm and cozy around them...” (Colton, 38:58)

Content Preferences: Gender Differences

True Crime vs. “War Stories”:
- True crime leans heavily female; “war stories” and violent sports lean male.
- Each aligns with historically and evolutionarily relevant dangers for each gender.
- “Historically, what kind of violence is a man likely to encounter? ...for women, [danger] is most relevant in close personal relationships.” (Colton, 41:14)

Fiction, Horror, and the Cinematic Psychology

Definition of Horror:
- Horror features a highly vulnerable protagonist against a formidable antagonist (unique among genres).
- “In horror movies … you have a really powerful bad guy … and you have a very vulnerable protagonist.” (Colton, 50:53)
Zombie Movies:
- Popular because they tap all four domains of morbid curiosity.
- “They’re like walking body violations … they tap into all four domains.” (Colton, 54:01)
Monster Enters Left Trope:
- Chris introduces the filmmaking tactic that shocks most often come from the left side of the screen due to our scanning bias, leading to greater impact—a field ripe for research.
- “Sudden movement or emergence on the left side of the screen can be more startling because it taps into the right hemisphere...” (Chris, 58:14)

Empathy, Desensitization, and Social Concerns

Are Horror Fans Less Empathetic?
- Empirically, no—horror fans have average empathy levels; enjoyment is often tied to empathy for the victim.
- Public perceptions, however, are that they’re less compassionate.
- “People rated horror fans as less empathetic … People have this intuition that you should have lower empathy if you enjoy these kinds of things. But empirically… it’s not true.” (Colton, 63:12)
Exposure and Desensitization:
- No firm evidence that more exposure to fictional violence reduces empathy or increases real-life violence, though true developmental/longitudinal data are lacking.

Notable Quotes and Memorable Moments

Why humans indulge safe threat-learning:
“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. One of them is a little safer than the other…” (Colton, 15:11)
On gender-specific attraction to ‘bad boys’:
“A dangerous person is only dangerous to you if they don’t like you. If a dangerous person likes you, then they become a huge asset to you…” (Colton, 39:40)
Zombie movies’ unique appeal:
“Zombies are interesting because they tap into all four domains of morbid curiosity… probably one of the only horror stories that reliably do that.” (Colton, 54:01)
Empathy in horror fans:
“In order for [horror] to deliver reliably, you have to empathize with the protagonist and you have to be a little bit afraid.” (Colton, 64:32)
Why true crime is “true crime for dudes”: “Real world war stories are just true crime for dudes.” (Chris, 40:15)
On play and development: “Children are super morbidly curious, but it shows up in their pretend play a lot, where they have control over how that feels to them.” (Colton, 47:06)

Timestamps for Key Segments

00:00–03:20: Colton’s background and academic journey
04:19–06:17: Why humans are drawn to morbid content; evolutionary perspective
07:27–12:24: The four domains of morbid curiosity
12:50–15:25: Common thread: threat-learning and simulation
16:53–23:23: Animal vs. human morbid curiosity; dreams as threat rehearsal
24:44–30:53: Predictors of morbid curiosity: personality, age, gender
34:07–35:02: Morbid curiosity and resilience during the COVID-19 pandemic
36:39–39:12: Women’s interest in serial killers and dark trait attraction
40:19–44:41: Gendered content preferences, development, and play
47:19–49:20: Car crashes, body cams, fascination with real violence
50:45–55:18: Horror genre mechanics and the psychology of zombie movies
56:00–59:36: Cinematic techniques: "Monster enters left"
60:14–66:00: Empathy, desensitization, violent media, social perceptions

Tone and Delivery

Scrivner’s approach remains measured, scientific, and inquisitive throughout. Chris Williamson injects humor (“Bro Science Cap is coming on early today…” 05:43), brings pop culture references, and blends speculative questions with serious scientific inquiry, fostering an engaging and accessible conversation.

Further Resources

Colton Scrivner’s Book: Available from major retailers starting October 7th
Substack: morbidlycuriousthoughts.com

This summary was prepared for listeners seeking a comprehensive, nuanced understanding of morbid curiosity, its roots, domains, and cultural expressions as discussed by Chris Williamson and Colton Scrivner.

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Transcript

Chris Williamson (0:00)

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

Colton Scrivener (0:09)

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. They were scared. Um, and that made them, you know, interesting and fun to me, especially when I could kind of have them at a distance. Right. You could pause the movie or pause the game and kind of collect yourself. Um, but, you know, growing up, I didn't really think I was into archeology. I thought I was going to be an archeologist. And then I studied, you know, anthropology, a little bit of biology and undergrad, studied some forensic science for my master's, and then I kind of made the switch into psychology during my PhD and, you know, like a lot of eager young grad students, I was interested in everything under the sun that had to do with human behavior. But that doesn't work in grad school. You have to kind of pick something and. And stick with it. And so I remember, you know, I had a couple of these sort of paradoxes in my mind that humans did. And there's lots of paradoxes about humans. 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 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 Coliseum for the Romans, for example, great example of where violence was. 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 for my first step into morbid curiosity. And that was like the left foot in. And then the right foot in was. I started thinking about these other interesting, related paradoxes. Well, humans also scare themselves for fun. I scare myself for fun sometimes, right? Like kind of an interesting thing. And it seemed related in some ways. And so I looked up, you know, who. Like a quick Google search or Google Scholar search, like, who is studying why people like fear? And the answer was almost nobody. Psychology and you know, as a grad student, that's like a gold mine. You find something really interesting that everyone kind of understands at an intuitive level, but nobody is studying. And so I kind of got into it that way. I. I hooked up with Matthias Clayson, 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.

Colton Scrivener (7:27)

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. One way to easily measure something as a psychologist is to have a survey or a questionnaire, you know, like the big five, or discuss 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 collect a bunch of items from people from different forums, like online forums, from interviews from sort of your own theoretical grounding about different scenarios that might elicit interest that are. That have a threat involved. And you collect all of those together and you have a bunch of people, a bunch of participants say how likely they would be to be interested in this thing if it were to happen to them. How likely. How likely would they be to look at this thing, learn about this thing, read about this thing, and then what you get is you can actually see how those questions are answered in similar kinds of ways and they break into different domains, as you mentioned. And so one of the first things I found was that there seems to be at least four different kinds of domains of morbid curiosity. So the first one is kind of obvious. It's violence, right? So kind of witnessing violence. That was sort of what 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 people who could be violent. Right. Like maybe you're not actually witnessing the violent act, but you're learning about the type of people who would commit that violence or the, or the way that they committed that violence. The third one is kind of the outcome of violence. That would be the, 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 caused that injury, Right. And the injury itself can kind of give you some insight into that. You know, if you come across someone in a, in the forest and they have a cut on their arm, you're not really 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, for those reasons as well. And the fourth one I kind of struggled with at first it was the, the supernatural or the paranormal. And I thought, well, like, I 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, 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, I think Aaron Leitner 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, the world of a trillion possibilities and bring them down to, you know, a hundred thousand possibilities. That makes it, makes it graspable so that we can actually get some traction in understanding other minds. 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, with the exception of Casper, most people think ghosts are pretty malicious, like they're pretty scary. It's a, you say at a haunted hotel not to like hang out with the ghosts and have fun, but because it's potentially scary, right? If we think of aliens, we don't think of usually friendly aliens. We think of like, well, what if they are going to harm us? What, what do they actually want? Why are they coming here? And I think that goes kind of back to this. You know, if you see someone on the street and they're wearing all black and they have their hood up and they're kind of lurking around, why are they trying to hide themselves? Right? And I think we ask those same kinds of questions about things like ghosts and aliens and demons. And all these entities that we've come up with that don't make themselves fully available to us, but do influence us, usually in malicious ways. And 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. There's never, like, something really natural. Right. We didn't have a good explanation for that. So our minds immediately went to, oh, someone with bad intentions probably did this, and they must be powerful, because I didn't see them do it. And they did it from way over there, or they did it using, you know, magical ingredients.

Colton Scrivener (16:53)

Yeah, well, 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 and their natural environment and kind of how they interacted with their natural predators, which are the cheetahs. And what she found were that 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, or do something else. Um, 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. So if you had some distance from the cheetah, you would observe it. And that makes sense, right? Because you, you can't always run away when you see a predator. You would always be on, 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, but gazelles aren't, or lions and, and cheetahs aren't always hungry, right? Cats do a lot of like lazing around like 22 hours a day. They lay around. And so if you see a lion laying around, it's not good if you're, if you're a prey to actually run away every single time 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, in hunter gatherer societies where uh, they don't have television, they don't have written language, but they do have oral storytelling. Right? Um, and 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 theory that 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. And I never had really thought much about dreams. You know, I, I just, they're hard to study because how do you, how do you tell what somebody is actually experiencing when they're dreaming? 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, it's not taking the place of foraging or mating or social status building or whatever else you might be doing during the day, then that's a really valuable thing that you can take, right? So that, that's not to say that dreams only simulate threats. Um, but dreaming itself is a pretty 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, you're paralyzed. Ideally you're paralyzed when you dream, right? Otherwise you're sleepwalking. Um, but if you, you know, hook up electrodes to animals or people, you can actually see that a lot of the muscles involved in locomotion are being activated or be, Are 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. 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 predatorial 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. 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 if, if you talk about scary dreams or threats and dreams, people tend to think about nightmares. But nightmares are really a little different, I would say, than 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, 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, 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. But without going on too much of a tangent, I mean, I talk about an example in my book where there's an anthropologist, Thomas Greger, who he studies, I think it's the Mehaku is how you say their name, people. And one thing that's interesting about the Mehaku 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. 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. Women would often talk about, like, like poisonous insects or things that they're sort of unable to defend themselves against.

Colton Scrivener (24:44)

Yeah, that. 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? It should. There should be some predictors and some things that, you know, shouldn't predict it at all. But there shouldn't be an over a complete overlap in variance. Where if I give somebody, let's say, a big five, it doesn't explain away all the variance and morbid curiosity. So I ran this big personality study where I gave people every kind of test I could think of that might be related to morbid curiosity. So they. They took the morbid curiosity test. They took a hexaco, which is like big five with honesty, humility in it. Right. That's kind of your. 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 lilienthelds that has multiple subscales in it. I asked, you know, their age, their. Their sex, their. I think income, threw in a lot of different things that. It was kind of just like a. 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. That's a good thing. That's a good thing. Uh, for me it was. Anyway, um, the closest I got when I included all of the significant predictors was about 50%. So I could explain about 50% of people's scores and morbid curiosity if I looked at disgust and psychopathy and big five and sex and age and all these different things. Um, however, there were a few things that were much more strongly correlated with morbid curiosity 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. And this is subclinical psychopathy. So not clinically, you know, no clinical diagnosis. Another one was. Oh, I also, I used the five dimensions of curiosity from Todd Cashin because I wanted to see maybe if it's be explained by other dimensions of curiosity.

Colton Scrivener (27:00)

Generally curious, yeah. And there were some positive correlations, but they were small. They were.02 to.03 or maybe four on one of them. Right. So the variance there would be, you know, 10 to 30% at the most. Explained away by other dimensions of curiosity. There was, I think, psychopathy, and in particular in psychopathy it was the rebelliousness subscale that was the one that was most strongly correlated. That was like the single thing I measured that was most strongly correlated with morbid curiosity. By itself. Um, there wasn't a lot of difference between men and women. There were some differences in the subscales. Men tend to be more interested in violence. Women tend to be more interested in the minds of dangerous people. The other two were kind of awash. Um, it was. I don't think there were any significant differences there. Even in other studies I've done, it tends to be pretty close. Um, age, younger people were definitely more morbidly curious than older people, which kind of makes sense because if it's about learning, do you're learning when you're young, you're not gonna do your learning when you're older. Right. You're less. And you should be less interested in the things that you've already learned about. Um, morbid curiosity looks like it decreases on average with age. Um, and that lines up with animal literature on the gazelles, for example. Right. The adolescents were the ones that did the most predator inspection. Uh, but, but there weren't a lot of other major like Disgust. You would think disgust would be highly correlated. I thought it would be, right. I thought disgust sensitivity surely would be highly correl negatively correlated with morbid curiosity. And it was a little bit like some of the subscales I think, you know, maybe explained 10% of the variance, but it wasn't much. And I was really interested in why it didn't explain away the body violations because I thought that know surely how easily you're disgusted by something should be strongly negatively correlated with how interested you are in learning about a, a bodily injury, right? But it turns out, I think what's happening is that there's two different kinds of body injuries, right? There are infectious body injuries and there are non infectious body injuries. And I talk about this in the chapter on, 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 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, if you had to pick up this bandage, you know, how, 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, or something. 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 and those tend to be the ones that we're morbidly curious about are the ones that are not about infection. They're about injuries from typically violence or, or accidents. Yeah.

Colton Scrivener (31:36)

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. 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. Okay, right. 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 going to like, shy away from that a little more than they would from, say, other kinds of bodily injury documentaries. But 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 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 are 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, 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 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, is this actually working? This is kind of a natural experiment. So that, 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?

Colton Scrivener (36:41)

Even, even serial killers that would not be interested in them, like Dahmer, got tons of fan mail from women that presumably he was not very interested in. And he was not a particularly good looking guy either. Yeah, this, this was a question that I've been getting for a long time and finally had a study that kind of addressed this. 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 would be a prime prey for him. Right? Um, if you take someone like Ted Bundy and you put him in prison where he can't hurt anyone, including you, he can't influence your life in any kind of way, but you can still interact with him, you can write him letters, you can go visit him in jail behind the safety of shackles, that's an incredible way to learn about someone firsthand. Right? It's an incredible way to learn about. To you, maybe. What is one of the most dangerous people on the planet as a young Female. 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 done some research with some. Some 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, 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 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 depicted a man who was high in the dark triad, or in the reverse depicted a man who was not high in the dark triad. And 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 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. Hmm.

Colton Scrivener (42:28)

Yeah, yeah, I think 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 is hanging out with other little boys, they're going to play somewhat more violent games and rurals are going to play somewhat less violent games or different kinds of violent games. Right. Again, direct violence versus kind of learning about someone who's maybe dangerous. I mean, I, I, I saw this when I was, when I was in my master's program, I worked as a mad scientist, which is like the coolest job title. And all it meant was that I would go around and I would do science shows and camps for kids. Right? It's like I was like a cheap version of Bill Nye. And 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. Um, and I was, I was a young 20 something, didn't have kids, didn't really know how to like, I mean, I mean, I 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, 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, 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. Uh, I mean, I, every now and then we had access to a gym and we would play like Red Rover or Capture the Flag or something like that. But many times there wasn't a gym. It was like just the room that we were in. We couldn't play these more, like, physical games. And so the, the one game that came to mind was this game called Mafia or, or Werewolf, if you've ever heard of.

Colton Scrivener (44:42)

Yeah, yeah. Mafia is the same exact thing, but it's instead of a werewolf, it's a mafia member, but it's the same structure, same everything. And I thought, okay, that's a pretty, like, simple. Cause I 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 wanted to help them know what their identity was. But once we got all of that sorted, most of them, you know, are townspeople. Two of them were mafia members, one of them was a doctor and could heal people, and one was a 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 members. Right. Who are they going to hang in like an old west style hanging. And I tried to keep it very tame because I was like, okay, these are like 5 to 9 year olds. I don't want them going home to their parents and being like, I, I killed my friend at Mad Science camp today because he was a member of the mafia or something. So I kept the, I kept the narration very tame. It was, you know, so and so died last night at the hands of the Mafia. Eventually, once the kids started to learn how to play, I let them be the narrators, right. So I 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 describe 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. The kids had this desire to, and in particular 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. And they were so excited about hanging someone for doing this. Yeah, I think, I think kids are super morbidly curious, but it shows up in their pretend play a lot, you know, where they have control over, over how that feels to them.

Colton Scrivener (50:45)

Well, I mean, this is something actually that I've been thinking a lot about recently is, you know, people send. 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 I, you know, as someone who's interested in why people are interested in scary things, obviously I'm very interested in horror movies and horror games and stories because those are the ways that we talk about these scary things in, in fictional settings. 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. 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. Other people have said, well, it's. It's about the intention of the writer. So if the writer is trying to scare you, that's a horror story. And I didn't really sit right with me either, because 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 and 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. And yet they still somehow usually make it out. And I think that's. That's really attractive information for people who are high and morbid curiosity.

Colton Scrivener (60:42)

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, 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 things. One is that, you know, we obviously live in like, I would say the least violent in the U.S. like, we live in like the least violent 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. Um, now we can witness, we on the same coin. We, we can more easily witness horrific violence because we can look it up online. Right? So I don't know if that's kind of a wash or if it's actually worse because we're seeing it, but we can't do anything about it, if it's better because it's not actually impacting us. 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 empathetic? 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. It's a. 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, you know, if you. If you're. If horror is interesting to you, it's interesting to you mostly because you're empathizing with the protagonist who is in danger. Right. And that elicits some sort of emotional reaction in you, usually fear or disgust or dread. If you weren't empathizing with that protagonist 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, the.