Coltan Scrivner

And we punish it more harshly because we recognize it's a problem.

And so for millions of years, primates basically signaled to you, I'm reactively aggressive.

Don't mess with me.

And then it was like overnight when we had language.

Now we have people who can plot and they're not showing us that they are aggressive.

That's why you get the, I could never imagine that he would have done this with Dahmer and Bundy and all these charismatic serial killers.

And that makes us really curious about them because the only way to learn how you might avoid those people and who they are and how to find out if they're truly dangerous is to hear a story about something that's already happened where they did it.

Sure.

And you can go too far.

A lot of my work counters a lot of myths that people have about morbid curiosity.

One of those is that it could lead you to be violent or all these things.

None of that has panned out.

But there are some negative side effects if you only consume true crime at the expense of everything else and you sit inside your room all day and you don't go outside and touch the grass and go to the supermarket.

The counter to that is just to consume other media with it.

Go out into the real world, go to the supermarket.

It's an easy fix, right?

It's easy to avoid some of those downsides.

And the downsides that have historically been associated with being a horror fan or being morbidly curious don't seem to pan out.

It doesn't have anything to do with a lot of bad things in human life.

As you mentioned, you learn things throughout your life.