Dr. Coltan Scrivner

They mimic that structure because those are the stories that we have at hand.

So there probably are some commonalities.

I think that you're right that a lot of women, either consciously or subconsciously, are consuming those stories because...

again, they see their situation often as the same kind of situation that the victim in the true crime story might find themselves in.

They could envision themselves potentially being in that situation.

So there probably are some clues.

I'm not sure how good the signal is compared to the noise.

I'm not sure if there are surefire clues that you could just write down as a checklist to check off.

But humans are really good at building these sort of mental schemas for how to go about the world or these mental sort of ways that they understand the world to work.

And if there are some commonalities among, let's say, men who are in a domestic relationship with a woman and they're likely to harm them, if there are commonalities among that,

consuming a lot of stories about situations where that's gone wrong might help clue you in sort of, again, instinctively when you start to notice that in an individual you're with.

Holton you have a theory that psychopathy isn't a personality it's a switch so are you saying that we all have a switch in us that yeah this this is a more this is an area of research that I've just started looking into and it but it stems from a lot of the work that I've done with horror fans and with true crime and trying to understand our fascination with dangerous people

The psychopathy literature is really, really mixed, for lack of a better word.

So we're not really sure what psychopathy is or why it happens or even really how to identify psychopaths.

We have measures that we can use to measure what we say a psychopath is, right?

The most common one is the

The PCLR, that's the one, it's a psychopathy checklist revised.

And that's what you use if you are trying to figure out if a prisoner, for example, someone who's in prison has psychopathy.

And the issue with that is that it's sort of conditioned on violence and criminality, right?

Because your population that you're confirming it against are only individuals who've been convicted of a crime.