Coltan Scrivner

You don't feel warm towards them.

You know, you're curious about them, but maybe don't feel warm towards them.

Well, I thought the same thing when I first started studying this.

I thought, oh, of course people are studying this because if you talk to anyone on the street or at a bar or wherever, and you just use the phrase morbid curiosity, you ever been morbidly curious?

People give you a hundred examples of when they've done that.

Maybe they're curious about this shady guy they met at a club who works in the Congo with coal sand mining.

I think that's a form of that, right?

And so I thought surely people have studied this.

And when I started looking into it, there was just no science on this.

And this was not that long ago, maybe five, six years ago, seven at the most.

So I thought, okay, this is interesting as a grad student, right?

I found this thing that everyone knows about, but nobody has studied it.

That's a goldmine.

Yeah.

So the first thing I had to do was just try to define it, right?

We had all these concepts about what morbid curiosity is in popular culture.

So film critics talked about it a lot, especially with respect to horror movies.

And a lot of the film critics had a similar opinion as you at first, where they said, who watches this morally bankrupt stuff?

And that was just the answer is like, well, they watch it because they're morally bankrupt or they watch it because they lack empathy or they watch it because they need an adrenaline rush.

And I think everyone just kind of accepted that, including psychologists and media researchers.