Coltan Scrivner

They supposedly loved the game Doom and they loved Mortal Kombat.

This is in the 90s when those are the violent games.

And so, of course, in both of those cases, people are like, aha.

That's why Dahmer killed and ate people because he liked The Exorcist 3.

And that's why those kids shot up the school because they played Doom.

Yeah.

Along with 10 million other kids who didn't shoot up the school.

Exactly.

Along with every other kid in school.

No.

But we want answers.

Again, that's an intuitive answer, right?

But then you have to ask, well, what about every other kid that plays violent video games?

And what about the evidence that shows that it's not related to aggression, which is pretty much all the evidence.

now and if you actually look at this is not work that I've done but if you look at school shooters which are almost all boys or men and you look at whether or not they played violent video games for the ones we have data for they're actually less likely to have played violent video games than the average teenage boy right and that doesn't mean that playing violent video games keeps you from being a school shooter either it probably just means it has nothing to do with it they were probably social outcasts in other kinds of ways they had interests that were different from other boys their age and they also have all these other things going on besides that so the question is

Does morbid curiosity make you violent or dangerous?

No.

But if you have all these other things where maybe you lack empathy, and you have low levels of disgust sensitivity, and you have high levels of psychopathy, and you're morbidly curious, maybe then you get a cocktail of things, right?

But by itself, and even in combination with many other traits, it doesn't seem to be related to any kind of dangerous or psychopathological outcomes.

Okay, good.