Why Are We Morbidly Curious?

Hey Vsauce. Michael here.

In 1924, psychologist Carney Landis drew lines on people's faces and then photographed them in various scenarios to study facial expressions. But he didn't use actors, and he didn't tell the participants to pretend to feel emotions. Instead, he subjected them to actual trauma. He had them do things like smell ammonia, look at pornographic images, and even reach their hand in buckets of wet slimy frogs. His most intense directive involved ordering them to take a knife and, while being photographed, cut off the head of a living rat. Seriously.

Most initially refused to cut the head off, but eventually two-thirds agreed to do as they were told, including a 13-year-old boy referred to the psychology department by a doctor for high blood pressure thought to be caused by emotional instability. Many believe his inclusion in Landis' experiment was an accident. If replicated today, Landis might be arrested.

But what is psychologically arresting about these images is that the unease, disgust, and fear they show is real. It's disturbing but fascinating. We are paradoxically drawn towards some pretty repulsive things: car accidents, car chases, the possibility of a crash or a fight, or a natural disaster; I mean not one that hurts anyone, of course, but one that's exciting.

Celebrity scandal, drama, disfiguration, true crime, war, and gore—the macabre. Like the Kangling, a trumpet used during Himalayan Buddhist rituals that's made out of a human leg bone. We often feel guilty for being interested in these types of things; after all, they are unpleasant, but yet we can't look away. Why?

Well, there is no single reason; there are many of them, but they can be molded into a mnemonic. We like disturbing things because we like to scream. They give us strength, catharsis, reality, exploration, acceptance, and meaning. Watching someone eat gross tasting jellybeans, or a ghost pepper, or a spoonful of cinnamon, or suffer in more extreme ways is a kind of strange thing to like to do, but it's part of what keeps us alive.

We are curious, even if the outcome could be bad. We often find uncertainty more unpleasant than unpleasant certainty. At least if we look, we know. There's a neurological basis for exploring in the face of danger. We become more attentive and alert when we are frightened, which makes sense.

Neurotransmitters like norepinephrine and dopamine are released when we are scared, physically and mentally preparing us to take on a threat or successfully escape from it. Dopamine is famously part of the brain's reward system. Dopamine is released in response to pleasurable things, like sex and food, but that doesn't mean our brains find disturbing things pleasurable.

It's more interesting than that. When dopamine systems are inhibited in laboratory animals, they will cease to seek out food and literally starve to death. Does that mean they no longer find food fun? No. If food is placed in their mouths, they will consume it and express signs of satisfaction. Evidence like this suggests that the brain contains systems that motivate seeking, approaching, and curiosity for their own sake.

This has implications in the study of compulsive behavior. Just because you want to do something doesn't mean you like it. The rush of chemicals into our brains and bodies when we are scared helps us when the threats are real. But if the threats aren't real, or if we are safely distant from them, and merely spectating, the same chemicals still appear, making us more attentive, more curious, and making it more difficult to look away.

In the early nineteen hundreds, Eugène-Louis Doyen published incredible images of corpses he cut into stackable slices. The images are amazingly macabre but yet utterly fascinating and a wonderful reminder of what we are literally made of. We often feel like we need an excuse, like Halloween or anatomy homework, in order to look at things like that without coming across as a total weirdo.

I mean, come on, if you look too interested in the macabre, it might look like you are into, approve of, or enjoy the gruesome. Funny enough, that guilt may very well fuel our desire to look in the first place. Sometimes pressure to not do something can actually make people more likely to do that thing.

It's called the Boomerang Effect. There are many different ways for things to boomerang; one is the Streisand Effect, when trying to suppress something unintentionally makes it more widely distributed. In 2003, Barbra Streisand sued to suppress a photo published online as part of a California Coastline Preservation Project. One of the photos, the one she was trying to get rid of, showed her house.

Within a month of the lawsuit going public, nearly half a million people had flooded the website and downloaded the picture. Before the suit, only six people had downloaded the image, two of which were her lawyers. In a similar fashion, social pressures and taboos against viewing disturbing things can make them more interesting, rarer, and thus a more valuable commodity, and also free, in that deliberately viewing them can demonstrate to ourselves and others that we are free and can do what we want.

Disturbing things can also make us feel stronger because their repulsiveness is a challenge. Glenn Sparks at Purdue University has studied the way terrifying films affect us. After watching them, viewers often feel stronger, satisfied that they didn't chicken out, that they made it through, they conquered something disturbing and were able to handle it.

It's almost a form of practice. As Stephen King put it, "We make up horrors to help us cope with the real ones." On the more negative side, following celebrity scandals or seeing defeat on the faces of the rival team can make you feel pretty good. It's called 'Schadenfreude', which means harm joy; getting pleasure from others' misfortunes.

Social comparison theory describes and predicts behavior like this; although grades and rankings cause anxiety, we nonetheless possess a drive to seek out evaluations of ourselves in comparison to others. We especially enjoy the evaluations that put us on top. Now, causing other people to be less well off sort of makes sense under this lens.

If it's relative happiness you're concerned with, trolling or harassing or griefing others sort of works. It doesn't make you happier, but compared to the people you're annoying, you are less annoyed. So... yay? Viewing scenes of anger, vengeance, and violence that don't even involve us can nonetheless cause our own anger and aggression to burn off, as though they're being satisfied.

It's called catharsis—a cleanser, a purification. Creating images and movies and stories that play with our emotions might be grasping at low-hanging fruit, a task beneath such logical creatures as ourselves. Or, it might be a powerful demonstration of the fact that we have control, or at least a leash, around how we feel.

We condemn the actions of serial killers but nonetheless often treat them like rock stars. Websites like RedrumAutographs and Serial Killers Ink sell autographs, souvenirs, trinkets, and works of art made by real serial killers. Some call it murderabilia.

On a spectrum of petty thrills and morose voyeurism to complete overwhelming obsession and fear, our relationship with the morbid is complicated, but it is under our control if we're aware of our actions. One of the most constructive and socially important uses of the morbid is the facilitation of meaning, acceptance, and empathy.

In his book 'Everyone Loves a Good Train Wreck', Eric G. Wilson says that our attraction to the macabre is, on some level, a desire to experience someone else's suffering. Morbid curiosity is often about the imagination. Imagining what it would be like to be that other person: what if that happened to me? Could it happen to me?

Empathetic feelings remind us that our time is limited, that we are fragile, and in doing so, bring us closer together. Sure enough, the last movie I watched made me want to go out and hug the very first friend I could find. It wasn't a happy feel-good comedy. Instead, it was Louis Theroux's somber 'Extreme Love Dementia'.

Viewing unpleasant things doesn't always make them less unpleasant or any less real, but that's not always the point. Morbid curiosity is also about acceptance. Remember, our brains are wired with motivations to explore unpleasant things because doing so can be preferable to ignorance. Gawking at morbidity is often about asking why?

There must be a reason, a meaning behind all of this. When tragedy strikes or horrors are revealed, we listen to experts give opinions, neighbors describe the killer, we look for signs that were missed, and confirmation that others feel the same way we do, that people are helping or making sure justice is served.

Katelin Dodi, the host of 'Ask a Mortician' here on YouTube, just wrote a phenomenal book, 'Smoke Gets in Your Eyes and Other Lessons from the Crematory'. In the book, she says, "accepting death doesn't mean that you won't be devastated when someone you love dies. It means you will be able to focus on your grief, unburdened by bigger existential questions, like why do people die? And why is this happening to me? Death isn't happening to you; death is happening to us all."

That's heavy stuff, but acceptance like that is one of the greatest things morbid curiosity has to offer. And don't worry, there's a funny side to all of this, or at least a funny side related to how morbidity helps us make sense of the world.

A study in Finland found that children were four times as likely to be scared by their usual television programs if a parent was in the room. It surprised researchers, but one explanation lies in the "Uh oh, Mom flinched theory." The idea is that to a young child, almost everything is brand new, but parents are older; they're wiser, they know what's normal.

If they are scared of what's on TV, uh oh... How we feel, and how we feel about how we feel, is to a large degree learned. There's a theory about the origin of humor called the encryption theory of humor. It suggests that one of the great roles humor plays is in measuring who is inside and who is outside, who is similar and who is socially or ideologically too different.

So might we be morbidly curious for the same reason we enjoy telling jokes? Jokes assess what researchers call unstated common knowledge, the teller and listener both share. So, morbidity helps us assess shared underlying attitudes of an existential variety, morality, and justice.

Whether it's used for empathetic or exploitative reasons, morbidity and laughter may share a similar adaptive role. We are morbidly curious because we like to scream, but more strangely, the yuk...and the yuk yuk overlap.

And as always, thanks for watching.