At first glance, our collective obsession with all things morbid seems genuinely strange. Why do we marathon horror movies every Halloween until we’re jumping at shadows? Why do we queue up yet another unsolved mystery right before bed?
By all logic, our survival instincts should make us want to distance ourselves from anything that could cause harm, real or imagined. But, turns out, the opposite is true. That same survival instinct is exactly what fuels our morbid curiosity.
In an interview with Psychology Today, psychologist Coltan Scrivner, who studies morbid curiosity, explains that enjoying something scary by watching or reading about it is our brain’s way of learning about potential threats in a safe environment.
Think of prey in the wild learning about their predators. It’s good for a zebra to know about the lions that live around it. How does the zebra learn about predators? According to Scrivner, the only way to learn is to be curious about it, to feel compelled to observe it under certain circumstances.
“You see the same thing with humans. The difference is that we have culture and language to tell stories, so we don’t have to learn about it firsthand,” Scrivner says. “That drastically reduces how dangerous it is to learn about threats. You can learn about almost any kind of awful, terrible danger from the comfort of your home. Our brains pick up on that.”
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Other researchers support this line of reasoning. In a paper published in Psychological Review, David March of Florida State University lays out evidence that people are often especially drawn to morbid information when it feels socially meaningful.
For example, behavioral and eye-tracking studies have shown that when people could choose between looking at unpleasant social scenes involving violence or harm, decontextualized images of injury, or natural threats like an attacking shark, they were more likely to choose the social scenes.
In his own work, March also found that participants spent longer looking at morbid images than at neutral ones, or even images that were equally arousing and clearly threatening but easier to understand.
Neuroimaging research showed something similar. When participants chose to view unpleasant but socially meaningful images, rather than images that were simply graphic, brain regions linked to reward, decision-making, and weighing costs and benefits became active.
That does suggest there is something about morbid curiosity that helps us process and learn from danger.
Modern understanding of morbid curiosity also pushes back against old worries about what it means to enjoy horror. Scrivner notes that some studies from the 1980s found horror fans had lower empathy, but he questioned both the logic and the methods behind those findings.
“There weren’t very many, and I was critical of their methodology. It also didn’t make sense to me. (Why does someone enjoy scary movies? They enjoy feeling afraid. Why do they feel afraid? Because they’re empathizing with the protagonist. How is that possible if they’re lower in empathy?)” he told Psychology Today.
