The surprising psychology of morbid curiosity

0:00This is The Guardian.

0:13Madeleine Finlay: The U.S. made a shocking announcement last week that it would live stream the execution of former U.S. Army Major Nadal Malik Hassan. He's going to get a firing squad of soldiers, as it should be, and we'll make sure that people are able to watch it, that it's public. The rest of the world swiftly condemned the plan. To create some kind of theatre around the state taking away someone's life is barbaric and deeply shocking. But the fact that the Pentagon even considered such an idea suggests they think people would watch it.

0:53Madeleine Finlay: But why would anyone want to? And what could it do to those that choose to? I'm The Guardian Science Editor, Ian Sample, and this is Science Weekly.

1:11Madeleine Finlay: Maddy, today we're going to be discussing what could be the first public execution in the US in almost a century. It's been described as medieval, barbaric and disturbing. So perhaps you just give me some background on this. Yes. So in 2009, US former army major and psychiatrist Nadal Malik Hassan, he fatally shot 13 unarmed US soldiers and injured 32 others at the Fort Hood military base. He said during his court-martial in 2013 that he believed that he was protecting Muslims and the Taliban in Afghanistan from the US military. His execution by firing squad is scheduled for the 3rd of December.

2:00And last week, Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth announced that this would be live-streamed. Now, just over half of the states in America allow the death penalty. According to several surveys, this number actually matches the support that it has from US citizens. That's capital punishment for people convicted of murder. This support has actually been declining over the years. The rules around who is allowed to watch executions vary by state. For military executions, journalists and families can observe, but nobody under the age of 18. Now, we haven't yet heard what the restrictions might be for this live stream.

2:49If there are age restrictions, it's not clear how those will be put in place and it will be very, very difficult to control.

2:57Madeleine Finlay: So why would they do this? Well, Ian, I'm actually going to play you a clip of Pete Hegseth explaining his reasons. Army Major betrays his country, radical Islamist, kills a bunch of Americans at Fort Hood. Of course we're going to do it at Fort Hood. We're going to do it on a Thursday, we're going to do it at one o 'clock, which is when he did it, and it's going to be soldiers with rifles executing the firing squad. And we'll make sure that people are able to watch it, that it's public, because people People need to understand that there's serious consequences for these types of things. This is certainly a show of nationalistic power, of dominance.

3:33However, addressing the kind of deterrent argument, this is something actually that in 2012, a panel from the National Academy of Sciences looked at. They looked at all the evidence and they unanimously concluded that there's no credible evidence that the death penalty deters homicide. That argument certainly can be put to bed. 53 countries around the world still allow capital punishment. And last year, according to a report from Amnesty International, only two countries performed public executions, and that was Iran and Afghanistan. So as you can imagine, there isn't actually a lot of evidence on the impact that public executions have on those watching.

4:18But in an article that our colleague Nicola Davis, science correspondent, wrote after the announcement of this live stream, she included a pretty stark quote, I would say, from Charles Dickens about public executions. And he wrote this in a letter to the Daily News in 1864. And it's about the crowds watching a public hanging. So I'm going to read this to you. No sorrow, no salutatory terror, no abhorrence, no seriousness, nothing but ribaldry, debauchery, levity, drunkenness and flouting vice in 50 other shapes.

4:56Madeleine Finlay: And Nicola was reporting on the response from mental health experts. What did they have to say about this? Dr Simon Duff, he's a forensic psychologist at the University of Nottingham in the UK. He said that there's not a lot of research into the impact of watching a public execution. Now, because journalists are often allowed to watch executions, there have been studies looking at their response. And it does seem as if witnessing this violence, there is suggestive evidence of a trauma response. and obviously there's a lot of concern for people with pre-existing mental health conditions. Professor Rosalind Crone, she told Nicola that public execution in England and Wales was abolished in 1868 because of a persistent and increasing concern about the effects of watching hangings on the crowd.

6:02Madeleine Finlay: Despite this, Maddie, we used to have public executions. They were popular events at the time. And the Pentagon do seem to think that if they go ahead with this, they will get an audience. Yes, I think they probably will. And actually, there was a study that researchers did at the University of California, Irvine, and they did a sample of American citizens. and they found that one in five had watched videos online that ISIS had posted of beheadings. So clearly there will be people drawn to watching this. And like you said, I wanted to know why. So I got in touch with Dr. Colton Scrivener. He's a psychologist at Arizona State University.

6:47And he looks at what motivates people to engage with distressing or gruesome content. And I asked him, first of all, what his reflections were on the announcement from the Pentagon. People are going to be interested in it. People will probably watch it and they'll feel various kinds of ways about it. Right. I think it's important to keep in mind that just because you feel compelled to watch something or learn about something doesn't mean that you approve of it. Doesn't mean that you disapprove of it. Doesn't mean that you think it should be done how it is or done a different way. It just means that your mind is telling you this is a rare opportunity or rare instance where you can learn about something consequential.

7:27And I think that's what this is going to be. And it's going to be up to society, in this case, I guess, the Americans, to decide if this is something that they approve of or disapprove of.

7:38Madeleine Finlay: So what is this in human nature that makes some people drawn to this kind of event, spectacle? What is happening there? It is a really interesting question, isn't it? And it's one I asked myself. And that's how I came across Colton, because he researches morbid curiosity. Now, he defined morbid curiosity as an interest in things that are dangerous or potentially dangerous situations. And he says that there are a few specific areas he's found that people tend to be morbidly curious about. My research has identified at least four broad ways that we tend to be morbidly curious or we tend to express our morbid curiosity.

8:24One of those is an interest in violence, and that's simply an interest in witnessing something violent. A related one is an interest in learning about the minds of people who commit violence. Another one would be an interest in sort of the outcome of violence, so an interest in bodily injuries. and you can learn quite a bit about how dangerous something was by seeing how much damage it has caused to the body. And the fourth one, which sometimes it's not as obvious how it fits in, but it's an interest in supernatural dangers. And this has nothing to do with whether you believe in the supernatural, and it really has more to do with an interest in things that we don't know a lot about, but think could be dangerous.

9:04And so this is where like aliens and demons and ghosts, and even I would argue aspects of AI would fit into this.

9:11Madeleine Finlay: So what makes us or people morbidly curious? What is the sort of process and why are some people drawn to these things? Okay, so I'm going to hand straight over to Colton for this one. One of the classic explanations for why we watch horror movies or why we might be interested in true crime is that it's the case that we are looking for an adrenaline rush, like a cheap adrenaline rush. and that seems to be true for some people. The problem with that explanation as a sole explanation for why we do these things, why we're morbidly curious, is twofold. First is that there are a lot better ways to get a good adrenaline kick than going to a horror movie, right?

9:50You could go skydiving, you could go on a roller coaster, you could ride a motorcycle. I mean, there are a lot of ways that you can get a bigger adrenaline kick than watching a horror movie. The second issue is that the research that I and others have done shows that only a fraction of the people that go to a haunted attraction in Halloween, for example, which is one of the more adrenaline heavy ways you can consume scary entertainment. Only a fraction of the people that go to those tend to qualify as adrenaline junkies or sensation seekers. Many of them instead seem to be very afraid of what's happening in the haunt and they come out, you know, and we'll tell you that they were very afraid of it, but they still enjoyed it because they felt like they learned something about themselves or they sort of challenged themselves, challenged the boundaries of their fear and how they could handle it.

10:34And Colton says that through all his research, the thing that he's found, the reason that we're drawn to this is because it's all about gaining information. It's actually beneficial for animals to learn about dangerous situations. And in particular, when they can learn about dangerous situations from a safe experience or from a safe setting. So, for example, if I'm watching a true crime documentary at home, I'm in very little danger myself, but I might be feeling as if I'm learning something important about something very consequential. And so the need to learn about the dangers around us is what drives us to be morbidly curious.

11:18Madeleine Finlay: So there are some people who are just going to be more morbidly curious than others. Yeah, absolutely. And interestingly, young people are more morbidly curious. And Colton says he thinks that this makes sense from a developmental standpoint, right? Because you are trying to learn about the world around you and you're trying to get information about things that you might not have experienced yet. I did ask about the difference between men and women. I wondered if there was something there. And he said that there isn't a difference in the level of morbid curiosity, but actually there's a difference in what we tend to be morbidly curious about.

11:57So women tend to be more morbidly curious about the psychology of dangerous minds. Now, when you look at the kind of entertainment that women are drawn to, true crime podcast documentaries, that kind of tracks, that makes sense. And you can understand why that might be. And men are more drawn to an interest in violence, which, again, that kind of makes sense. But actually, Colton said all of us are probably on some level morbidly curious.

12:35Madeleine Finlay: Coming up, what does it do to us when we seek out disturbing material?

12:47Madeleine Finlay: maddie the way colton described morbid curiosity it sounds like there are some beneficial reasons why we tend to be drawn to these things but as we learned earlier the interest in dangerous things can have negative consequences right yes there are obviously situations where it may be beneficial to us to learn about dangerous things. But ultimately, just because you're curious about something doesn't mean that you're not going to be psychologically and emotionally impacted by it. And one study that was looking at journalists who were witness to an execution, they found that this was associated for several of them with dissociative symptoms.

13:31And this might be feeling estranged or detached, say, from other people. And Colton did say to me that it is possible to have too much morbid curiosity. It doesn't always tend to do you good to spend time ingesting, engaging with content that's distressing, troubling. You know, having your world shaped by constant or regular engagement with terrible things is not going to be good for your mental health. Morbid curiosity often is a mixed emotional experience, right? You know, as we're engaging our morbid curiosity in whatever fashion it might be, we often feel curious as kind of an emotion. We'll feel interested, intrigued.

14:15We might feel excited, nervous, but then we may also feel fear. We may feel sadness, you know, depending on what we're watching or what we're learning about. Things that trigger our morbid curiosity tend to take us through a range of emotions.

14:28Madeleine Finlay: And this takes us back to the advice from the mental health experts, really, which is that even if we sort of have this morbid curiosity, that sometimes we're probably better off putting it to one side. Yes. I mean, as Nicola said in her article, the experts suggest that this could cause post-traumatic stress disorder, PTSD. You know, if you are curious about it, I think you have to ask yourself, is this something that I need to learn about? How will I feel afterwards? What kind of impact could this have on me? Colton did make the point to me, and I do think this is an important point to make, that you're not necessarily watching something like this because you're agreeing with it or because you're endorsing it.

15:13But I do think that the US administration might look at the viewing figures and see that perhaps as indicative of endorsement. And, you know, you might want to ask yourself, well, do I want to be part of setting a precedent? But ultimately, Ian, you know, the advice, as you say, from experts is do not watch this.

15:36Madeleine Finlay: And just as you're speaking, I can imagine now hearing the administration talking about the viewing figures as if this was, you know, the Super Bowl or something like that. Just the viewing figures and using that to justify the whole thing, which is quite a horrendous thought. Exactly. And, you know, more than 100 countries have moved away from the death penalty, from capital punishment for so many good reasons. There are reasons why we've left this in the past, Ian.

16:17Madeleine Finlay: Thanks again to Madeline and to Dr Colton Scrivener. You can find Nicola's article on theguardian.com and Colton's book is called Morbidly Curious, A Scientist Explains Why We Can't Look Away.

16:34Madeleine Finlay: And that's all from us today. This episode was produced by Madeline, the sound design was by Joel Cox and the executive producer was Ellie Burie. We'll be back on Thursday. See you then.

16:53Madeleine Finlay: This is The Guardian.