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

27:00Just generally curious. Yeah, and there were some positive correlations, but they were small. They were 0 .2 to 0 .3 or maybe 4 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, in a particular encyclopathy, it was the rebelliousness sub -scale. 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. There wasn't a lot of difference between men and women. There were some differences in the sub -scales.

27:36Men tend to be more interested in violence. Women tend to be more interested in the minds of dangerous people. the other two are kind of a wash. I don't think there were any significant differences there. Even in other studies I've done, it tends to be pretty close. Age younger people, we're 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 gonna do your learning when you're older, right? And you should be less interested in the things that you've already learned about. The morbid curiosity looks like it decreases on average with age, and that aligns up with animal literature on the gazelles, for example, right, the adolescence for the ones that did the most predator inspection.

28:19But 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 negatively correlated with morbid curiosity. And it was a little bit like some of the sub -scales, 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?

28:53But 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 bodily violations in the book where there was a really cool study done several years ago by Tom Cuffer where he set up these fake dressings for injuries, so like bandages for injuries. And he said, this one was caused by, and he would say some sort of infection, and this one was caused by a fish hook or something, a knife, something that's not infectious, but does cause a lot of blood and gore out of things.

29:36And he asked people, like, 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 bandage from a knife wound, people were way more likely to pick that up than they are bandaged from an eye infection or something. And that makes sense to us, no, because we know what infections are, right?

30:07But I think that's important because we're making our minds, we're making a distinction in how dangerous something is, or at least how dangerous it is to interact with something. And discuss 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 and sensitivity is driving us away from things that are infectious, right? It is making us avoid those.

30:41But there's a lot of other kind of injuries out there. And those tend to be the ones that we're more broadly curious about are the ones that are not about infection or about injuries from typically violence or accidents. Yeah, I mean, it'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 discomfort and psychological distress that lots of people went through when they lived through COVID, Yeah, and they were hearing about this and it's the sort of thing that's out there and it could get you.

31:26Yeah I imagine that there's lots of people who would have been both incredibly scared of COVID and also massive fans of true crime Yeah, probably so square that circle for me. Yeah, well, I think you know It's not to say that we wouldn't be interested in things like a documentary like the example you give I think you know So 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. Yeah, so if you're watching a documentary about the Black Death and it's showing examples of what a 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.

32:15But yeah, you know, I wouldn't 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 lab school is down. And I was really bummed because I had this really fun study plan 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 gonna 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.

32:56And 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 were certainly other pandemics between now and then, but that was probably the last like major being that kind of shut down the way the world operates. 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. 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. We didn't know what was going on because there was this virus.

33:33We don't know how dangerous it is. But on top of that, our entire way of life is changing. We don't know when we can continue to go outside, when things 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. As 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?

34:04Are they dealing with the pandemic better? Are they feeling less anxious about it? Mm -hmm. And again, here, I tried to control for when I did the study at Trediction Troll for factors that would influence that. Your big five personality, your income, especially during COVID, you could kind of, you know, seclude yourself a little more if you were wealthy. You maybe 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 religious, more resilient in these like early months, at the study in like April of 2020.

34:39And 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 religious, who are reporting a greater level of psychological resilience. They were filling up to mystic about the future, experiencing, you know, lower levels of anxiety, lower levels of depression, compared to pre -pendemic levels, than non -marbitly curious people. 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 once a day, but now comes with four clinical trials backing it.

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36:23I'm not familiar with that many guys sending love letters to female serial killers, angels of mercy or whatever they're called, are these nurses that get caught having killed a ton of babies? Uh, the reverse, some chicks love a serial killer. Yeah. What's going on there? Even serial killers that would not be interested in them, like Dahmer, uh, got tons of fan male from women, uh, presumably he was not very interested in, uh, and he was not a particularly good looking guy either. Um, yeah, this, this was a question that I've been getting for a long time, And finally, I had a study that kind of addressed this.

37:06I think what's going on, and it makes a lot of sense, and a lot of what we've been discussing, is that if you take a very dangerous man, headbundi, you know, someone who, if you're a woman, would be a prime, you'd be a prime prey for him, right? If you take someone like Ted Bundy, and you put him in prison, where he and 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 first hand, right? That's an incredible way to learn about you, maybe what is one of the most dangerous people on the planet as a young female.

37:51Now, I don't know if I can explain the sexual attraction. I mean, Ted Bundy was a decent looking guy, but I don't know if I can explain like the effective attraction or the feelings of warmth people have towards them. But I have done some research with 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. It's like, the satism, akivellenism, the bad boys, right? Like those traits are associated with being like a bad boy. And, but what was interesting is there was a distinction.

38:26So, you were morbidly curious, you were behaviorally interested in these guys, but you didn't necessarily feel like warm and cozy around them, right? But you would say like, oh yes, I would love to like talk to this person or learn more about them. So we've made up these like fake dating profiles where, you know, the profile depicted a man who was high in the dark triad or in 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 and 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.

39:05And it was that they were really just interested in learning about them.

39:12It'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 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 the sexuality in order to get them on side. 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. Especially if you're not a high -formatibility person, right?

39:53Looking 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, the True Crime, True Crime podcasts lean female. I'm going to guess. The UFC, lean is very, very heavily male. I do have this theory that real -world war stories are just true crime for dudes. They are true crime for dudes, absolutely. So what's going on here? Have you thought about the taxonomy of different types of content and why certain people are interested in it? Kind of. I've looked at the true crime and women thing because it's against something I could ask all the time.

40:39Are women actually more interested in true crime than men? The answer seems to be resoundingly yes, right? and whatever modality it is, podcasts, books, whatever, right? I haven't looked at men in war stories, but I would imagine that that is true for the same reasons, right? That's, you know, historically, 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.

41:20So 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 as most 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 who are not part of your group and that translates pretty pretty directly into a war story. 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 kindergarteners and you look at the games that girls play and the games that boys play, this is before they've been socialized, doesn't social learning, social roles theory stuff.

42:09If girls will be caring for something, keeping something alive, they're playing nurse, they've got a bunny rabbit. The guys, the little boys, cowboys versus aliens versus whatever they come up with, right? One is doing sort of nurturing and care and the other is doing war and battle. Yeah. Yeah, I think I would love to have, I mean, I don't know if there's probably data on in the 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 L .A. or Austin or New York or rural Maine.

42:50That's probably true, right? Like if you're hanging out with other, like a little boys hanging out with other little boys, they're going to play somewhat more violent games and roles are going to play somewhat less violent games, right? Again, direct violence versus learning about someone who's maybe dangerous. I mean, I saw this when I was when I was in my master's program, I worked as a mad scientist, which is the coolest job title. And all that meant was that I would go around and I would do science shows and camps for kids. It was like a cheap version of Bill and I. 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.

43:40And I was a young 20 something, didn't have kids, didn't really know how to like, I mean, I played with kids, but 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 is 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 unfortunately when I was doing this camp, it was in the middle of summer in Oklahoma, it was a hundred and whatever degrees outside. And so they couldn't play outside that long, it was just too hot.

44:14And so we had to find games for them to play inside during their break time. And I didn't really know a lot of 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, which was just the room that we were in. We couldn't play these more like physical games. And so the one game that came to mind was this game called Mafia, or Werewolf. If you've ever heard of it. I played Werewolf many times, yes. Yeah, Mafia is the same exact thing, but it's instead of Werewolf, it's a Mafia member.

44:47It's the same structure, same everything. I thought, okay, that's a pretty simple, because I need something simple. The 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 old pieces of paper with a secret identity written on it. And, I mean, the first challenge that some of the kids couldn't read very well, so they wanted to help them know what their identity was.

45:20But once we got all of that sorted, most of them, you know, were a town's people, 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 attack someone. And the doctor, you know, can wake up and try to heal them in 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?

45:57Who are they going to hang and 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 science camp today because he was a member of the mafia, something. I kept the, I kept the the narration very tame. It was so -and -so, died last night, the hands of the mafia. Eventually, once the kids started to learn how to play, I let them be the narrators, right? So I let one of them try a narration. And it became this awful scene of out of the worst horror movie.

46:33I mean, the descriptions of what happened to the people who were murdered by the mafia became bloody and violent, and there are entrails, there are 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 too, and in particular, the little boys had this desire to 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. Yeah, I think kids are super morbidly curious.

47:11But it shows up in their pretend play a lot, you know, where they have control over how that feels to them. What about when it comes to car crashes, gory films, yeah, I guess there's a growing creator economy as well for police body cam footage to Yeah, I mean the freedom of information requests or whatever this entire channels that had just built from asking to get access to this. Which, I mean, I don't know why 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 gonna be fueling an entire YouTube ecosystem of people that just like narrate mad shit happening to police officers.

48:00But yeah, is this just the people are injured? I wanna see how they're injured, how to fix it, how to avoid it? Is that more going on there? Yeah, I think with police body cams, in particular, you know, that's like a situation you could find yourself in, interacting with a police officer, right? And I think there's a certain, you know, 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.

48:38And 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 where they're really being aggressive or not being aggressive? You can learn something really important from that. How do you look from the police officers' point of view? What are they doing that is making them a target or making them seem like an aggressor to the police officer? I think in particular, those really violent, ambiguous police videos or what really get people hang attention because there's different interpretations of what could happen and different interpretations of like how well how would I interpret that or how would I act in a situation.

49:12Well I wouldn't have done this. I would have just put my hands up or I would have done this or that. But yeah, I think the ambiguity really feels that the ambiguity of like what's happening. 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 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.

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50:10That's i n c o g n i .com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom. A checkout. Yeah, that makes a complete sense. When it comes to creating horror as it's sort of shown on TV. I'm not 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? 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.

50:56It's just like one of those things you know it when you see it. If you watch it 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, horror games and stories because those are the ways that we talk about these scary things and 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.

51:32I think what's going on in horror movies in particular is that you have a really powerful bad guy. I've got a really strong antagonist, strong Dylan, 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.

52:07that 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 about the intention of the writer. So if the writer is trying to scare you, that's a horror story. And not I didn't really sit right with me there because somebody can try to do something and not do it very well, right? Or they can try to do one thing that 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 their relationship to one another. Well, it seems like in horror movies, and empirically so, did this study on like 600 different films, horror movies feature very vulnerable protagonists, very formidable antagonists.

52:51And 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 really attracted information for people who are high and morbid curiosity. That's interesting. What about zombie movies? What's the appeal of those? Because that's a specific, a weird one, right? Yeah, it's kind of horror, but by design is fantastical. Yeah, yeah. I think zombies are interesting because they tap into all four domains of morbid curiosity.

53:37I think they're probably one of the only horror stories that reliably do that. If you think about what a zombie is, it's a... 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 taps into 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? Is it just a monster? So taps into that domain. They're obviously very violent if they catch you. 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.

54:11There's also usually warring sort of survivor groups, right? There's a lot of like into group violence. It's not being moved. It's usually They're also kind of supernatural, right? They They're alive, but not really or are they dead? It's unclear 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 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. They have horrible injuries all over them.

54:46If 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. Trace and really appealing. And it, you know, those tend to be the highest grossing, like horror TV shows or movies. If you think of like World War Z as like an action zombie movie, I mean, that's the perfect combination. I legend. 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. It's funny that your different categories of elements of morbid curiosity that you can kind of reverse engineer that and use it to explain those.

55:29I'd never even considered that. Are you familiar with this monster enters left tactic? Have you heard of this? What is it? 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. Really? This is this guy Will Mushroom. He's a composer and a writer. Horror cinematography seems to sort of exploit negative empty space, right? That's how it builds tension. Yeah, sure. Primes of yours for something to emerge.

56:11But 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 height and 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. And it hits faster, even though our eyes drift to the right, we tend to scan from left to right, which means that a left side did a sudden appearance hits the brain more quickly and it processes more, more quickly. And perhaps that's a reason why I sort of missed direction works when, yeah, you're trying to work out what's going on on the screen.

56:58Oh, 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? I'm not sure. I mean, it's getting perhaps, perhaps it's trained. I would be interested to know whether this would be correct in different cultures that have different kinds of ways that they put exactly the ancient Egyptians. We'll put it from the bottom. Just this is something that needs a little bit more. I've done a bit of research on it, and I want 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.

57:45Yeah. I'm work out which side of the screen they come from. Yeah. Yeah, I think, uh, and that would be a hard one to do because you would have, I think you would have to, like in the study that I mentioned, we used, uh, large language, language models to, uh, 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 formate ability, right? Oh, this is interesting. I've just done a little bit of digging there.

58:18So you've got this thing called pseudoneglect, which is linked to right hemisphere dominance for spatial awareness. That paradoxical results in the leftward attention bias in some visual search tasks, but during screen -watching, attentional drift to the right is commonly observed, likely due to learning scanning patterns. So yeah, going that way. Southern 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, the right goes to the left, left goes to the right. Tapped into the right hemisphere, which is more reactive to emotion, novelty, and spatial alertness.

58:53And the viewer's attention is often not focused on the left during build -up sequences because cause of this drift to the right, 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. Sort of like a one -two punch. It surprises you more and it actually moves a lot more. That's more likely to respond. That's so cool. Was there a name for this? What was the name for this phenomenon? Monster Rances left. Monster Inter. Okay. All of that up. which is an interesting one, psychological and cinematic principle, somewhat unexplored formally in peer reviewed research.

59:31Well, that stinks. That stinks of a blue option. That's true, like, for you to do. It's almost like everything I study, I feel like, you know, it's nice when that 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.

1:00:04I buy it though. I think 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've never heard of that. I have what look we're learning everything today. 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 mean, just in whether that's changing people's morbid curiosity. Yeah, I don't know.

1:00:43I 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 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 for us. 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.

1:01:11So I haven't done it and I don't know anyone who has. I will say that two things. One is that we obviously live in, like I would say the least violent in the US. Like we live in the least violent time that we can imagine for humans. Human life has been much more awful in violent for most of its history than it is in 2025 for the average American. Now, we can witness, on the same coin, we've been 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 that we can't do anything about it, if it's better because it's not actually impacting us.

1:01:51I know that one of the concerns that people have 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 or, 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?

1:02:48And 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 know. The very thing that it was supposed to deliver, it didn't manage to deliver. Yes. And so in order for that to deliver reliably, you kind of have to empathize with the protagonist and you have to be a little bit afraid. So looking back on it, it's like, well, that kind of makes sense that they're not lower or an 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.

1:03:31So 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 four, you can keep those the same, rather and change out the favorite movie genre. What I found was that when I asked people, well, how empathetic do you think Chris is? How compassionate do you think 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.

1:04:10And I always have a film, the blank, you know, at the end of my surveys or into my studies to get people's real thoughts, not just their butt 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 have lower empathy if you can enjoy these kinds of things. But if he's able to do it, he is distancing himself from it. Because he's got low empathy. 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.

1:04:47That's the precise mechanism that it's working. There's one caveat to that, which is that, let's say you're like a, like a, totally cold, like a Jeffrey Dahmer, just totally cold, zero killer, interested in violence. You can still be interested in violence because it's sort of 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 zero killer might actually enjoy a horror movie. But for different reasons, than 99 .9 % of the cost training. Yeah, exactly. It's a different kind of training, right? They're training with the predator and not with the prey.

1:05:23Oh, so interesting. Yeah, well, I guess, you know, you just roll in the dice. Someone says that the favorite genre of movies is horror, maybe the highly empathetic person, maybe the serial killer. Yeah, maybe, you never know. I think it probably airs on one side or the other, but you can never be too careful. Well, but actually is a little bit like of a, I mean, I guess a meta approach to this, which is that what people are concerned about people that like horror movies because some of them might be serial killers. Right. So your threat detection is going off on the horror movie fans because some of them might might be dangerous.

1:06:00Beautiful. Colton Scrivener, ladies and gentlemen, Colton, your stuff's great. Your sub stack is awesome. Your book's awesome. Everyone should go and check it out. Where should they go? I mean, for the book, you can order it from whatever book store you tend to go to. So, you can get it on Ping on Random House or Amazon or Bookshop or your local bookstore starting October 7th. And then for my other writing that didn't make it into the book, my substack, morbidlycuriousthoughts .com. I can. Colton, I appreciate you. Thank you, man. Yeah, thanks for the fun conversation.