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

**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.

**Coltan Scrivner** (0:10)
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, not because I wasn't scared of them, but because they were scared. And that made them interesting and fun to me, especially when I could kind of have them at a distance, right? Pause the movie or pause the game, 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, you know, 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. 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 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. You 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 it. So how do 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. 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 hooked up with Matthias Claisen, 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 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 does that mean about us? Is it good?

**Chris Williamson** (3:08)
Is it bad?

**Coltan Scrivner** (3:09)
Can we learn something from it? How has this 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 character arc for getting into that.

**Chris Williamson** (3:20)
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.

**Coltan Scrivner** (3:33)
Sure.

**Chris Williamson** (3:34)
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.

**Coltan Scrivner** (3:53)
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 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 would enjoy the UFC fight. But materially, they're pretty similar, right? In a lot of ways, they can be.