Horror and Morbid Curiosity with Coltan Scrivner
2025-10-07 12:00:00.000 +00:00

Welcome. My name is David Petrozowski. And I am David Pinsoff. And David, what is this? Uh as far as I'm aware, it's Evolutionary Psychology the Podcast. And what is the tagline again? The tagline is two guys nerding out about evolutionary psychology. Oh no, that was the alternative. You said the subtext there. You should have said the actual. You mixed them up. Oh, okay. So uh it's uh evolutionary psychology the podcast, uh actual evolutionary psychology by actual evolutionary psychologist. Right. And you know, it really is two two guys nerding out about evolutionary psychology, but we don't say that because it's not a very appealing title. Typically with a guest. Yeah, usually we have a guest.

And we have a day we have a guest. We have a great guest, a scary episode, uh, but we'll tell you about that in a second. David, uh you know, I love this time of year because um I don't know, I always fall was always my favorite time of year. Um even in Southern California, I still like the idea that like Halloween's coming around the corner. Yeah, I think Halloween is my favorite holiday because it combines spooky things with candy, which are two of my favorite things. I think I mentioned I think I made that exact same joke in the episode, so you'll get to hear this joke twice. Lucky you. You know, I w I once had a teacher who I thought was a really good teacher, and then it was in college, and then she literally forgot that she had done the class beforehand, uh

beforehand. And so she just started doing it again. And it was literally word for word, and it freaked me out. It was like it was like robotic. I mean, she was quite old. I mean she was lovely, but I think she had just sort of, yeah, but it was interesting. But anyway, it was uh yeah. Well well that response being freaked out is uh uh what what this episode is about. So who do we have uh in this episode? We have uh Colton Scrivener and he studies morbid curiosity and horror movies and horror genre and fiction. He does basically the evolutionary psychology of horror and you know, things all around that. Yes. And today is the day that his book, Morbidly Curious, is coming out. So you'll get to hear all about his research and decide whether you want to buy his book,

which spoiler alert, you absolutely should because it's a great book. Yeah. And David, it sounds like you read it already. Yeah? I did. I got an advanced copy and I blurbed it. So if you so another bonus is is if you if you buy the book, you'll get to see my awesome blurb. Look at this jet setter getting true advanced copies of books and blurbing them. All right. Uh without further ado, it's a really fun uh episode. And if you're if you're interested in uh scary things or if you're anxious, um, I would I would say this is a great episode to listen to. Yeah, no, we get a lot into into the mechanics of anxiety and how horror can potentially uh be therapeutic for anxious people. So it's we we cover a lot of ground.

It's a really uh awesome conversation. I had a blast. Uh and I'm sure you'll have a blast listening. One one quick thing to say. We do talk about how it's probably a good idea to like let people who uh are anxious or who want to consume uh scary things consume them. But one thing we didn't say that I think is worth saying is that does not mean you should force people into doing that, because that's a very different thing. You should let people uh satisfy their own appetites, which is a very different thing than forcing people who don't want to consume something scary. I just want to uh note that before, because we don't really mention that in the episode. Yes. Good caveat. Well, without further ado, let us begin the spookiness.

Oh, that was skilled. Wow, David, that's a really good go. Is that a good good sound? So uh uh so David, happy Halloween. Uh happy Halloween uh to you as well and to you, Colton Scrivener, uh who is with us here to talk about all things uh spooky and horrifying. Yeah, why we celebrate Halloween anyway? Yeah, I I love Halloween. I don't know uh d how do you feel about Halloween, David? I love it's actually probably my favorite holiday. I mean, it's candy, it's spooky, like what it's the two of my favorite things. Yeah. Colton, how how uh we'll we'll say hello to you in a second, but we want to get right into how do you feel about Halloween? Like, did you have uh did you enjoy Halloween as a kid?

Sure. I think most kids probably enjoy Halloween. Maybe for different reasons, I don't know. But uh, most kids at least enjoy the the candy aspect of it. And and you know, the play pretend aspect. I think that uh every kid probably enjoys that. Yeah. Were you uh did you have a thing where you like made your own costumes? Were you super into costumes, or was it like a last minute thing? I am not crafty enough to make my own costume and and make it any kind of fun for anyone. So uh, but I am in love love the costume thing, still do it as an adult for uh certain events here in town, but um yeah, definitely don't make my own. Cool. Were were were you did you dress like more of more in more of a standard spooky way, like

you dressed as like a scary serial killer or monster, or were you more like the Spider-Man, Superman type? I think I was uh I was usually a dead something, like a dead army guy or a dead whatever, or a vampire, or just like things that were dead. Even is it even as a child. Yeah, like not real scary, but still dead. Okay. Interesting. We're just gonna ask you about your Halloween experiences. Yeah, just my kid. Just ask me about my childhood. That's exactly we orbit around that all the time on this podcast. So yeah. Yeah. No, honestly, um uh I'm glad we have you on, uh, just because my daughter is very morbidly curious and um understanding your research and the development of morbid curiosity has

helped me to deal with that as a parent and sort of harness it and uh nurture it. Um but yeah, it's been it's been very cool to to witness. Um just uh one one anecdote. Um I was uh I was trying to get her to brush her teeth because she doesn't like brushing her teeth. Um and so I decided to show her pictures of rotting teeth to show her what happens to your teeth if you don't brush it. And it was actually a very effective way of getting her. Now she she always is willing to brush her teeth. But it had this um side effect. It had a side effect, which is now she just wants to look at pictures of rotting teeth for fun. And now I like I have to now I can use it as a reward. Like, oh, if you clean up your toys, I'll let you look at pictures of rotting teeth.

In J David, in Germany, there's like a part of anti-smoking campaign is there's like yeah at the grocery store in the checkout aisle, there's like you can buy cigarettes and there's pictures of like really like, you know, d like I don't even know how to describe it, but like really gross like medical pictures that are the results of smoking. And I'm just imagining your daughter going, oh like grabbing the cigarette. I'll take two. Yeah, exactly. So uh David will be here all week for uh parent hacks. So cool. Yeah. Um Colton, uh can you uh so I don't know if you want to just talk about morbid curiosity as a broad thing, but one question I think a lot of people will have is so you're taking an evolutionary approach, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, to our interest in

things that are gross or scary or sort of just to understand what swath of science or human phenomena you're carving out, how would you characterize the thing that you are interested in? That's sort of been the north star for your writing and your research and what you're thinking about? Yeah, I mean I was definitely trained, was trained as a in anthropology and biology. And so but I'm interested in humans and so in the the wonderful world of science, that means you do psychology things. But I do take a dip a different perspective, obviously, than most psychologists, but pretty similar to the two of you, which is I think that uh, you know, humans are evolved creatures and that influences um our psychology and can help if we use an evolutionary perspective,

it can help us uh understand human behavior pretty well. And um, you know, there's been a lot of work on why humans are or the fact that humans are sort of drawn to threats or drawn to negativity or drawn to things that um they may otherwise try to avoid. But as far as I can tell, uh when I started researching this, nobody had really tried to explain that any further than, oh yeah, we uh negative things jump out to us, you know, um, or in some cases, like oh threatening things seem to jump out to us, even more than negative things. Um, and so what I've done is try to understand why why that is, but then also why we not not only why does it jump out to us, but why do we seek it out and create it and enjoy it

even? Um yeah, and then and then further than that, I mean, um working on a paper right now with Edgar Du Borg, um looking at can we understand the horror genre specifically from an evolutionary perspective and sort of what inputs um is our mind taking from a horror movie that that make it interesting, that make it scary? Um, and how can we better understand the emotion of fear by looking at the entertainment we produce? Cool. Um, one of the things that Dave and I talked about doing um as just adaptationists is you just go around the world, and whether it's like the thing your daughter or your son is doing, or just people are doing online, is sort of just being an anthropologist about it and sort of thinking about well, what what are the combination or cocktail of adaptations

underlying this thing? And um I I actually find myself being kind of doing that um implicitly, like about Halloween and horror stuff. And I don't even actually know what that category is. And I'm curious if you have some intuition about what that category is. But like to me, it's I find it interesting, for example, that like along with obviously things like, you know, scary, threatening things, there's also like things being old and like cobwebby. And just, and I don't know how much of that is sort of like, you know, universal, how much of it is just sort of like the cultural evolution baggage of just like this is traditionally what it's like, like a Victorian home, right? Like, right. But but it's also interesting that it's like an older architecture or there's evidence of

like past agents and it's unclear. So like I'm just I am personally very curious about like, and I would love to hear like what is your it's if you if you've been thinking about like what's the grammar of what this category is? And is it incidental or is it like a feature that there's like cobwebs and dust, for example? Yeah. Well, I think, I mean, that's a big question, right? Because I think there's the question of what are the features of all the dangerous things we might be interested in. And then there are the features of what are those things that we seem to latch on to and uh produce in material culture, right? And replicate. So kind of what are those broad features? And then what are the ones that really seem to get our attention to the extent that we tell

stories about them and then consume those stories, spend resources to consume those stories. Right. I think the cobweb thing and like abandoned buildings thing is interesting. I did an interview, I don't know, a couple of months ago about abandoned theme parks. And we sort of explored that question a little further because it's something that I hadn't thought about too much. I mean, I think one just sort of from my gut and having studied these things, one thing that it might be is that, you know, if you see somewhere that looks like it has a lot of resources, could be a good place to live, and you see that it's abandoned, you might ask, well, why would people leave such a rich place of resources?

Right. And one answer is that, well, because it's actually more dangerous than it looks, right? I think we do that with ancient civilizations. I think that's one reason we find like the ancient Mayan civilizations and just ancient civilizations generally kind of interesting to us. It's like, well, if they built all these great things, they must have had great resources. So what happened? Or where did they go? And you know, the obvious answer, and the one that archaeologists often look to is disaster, right? And so if this great civilization in this case didn't see this disaster coming, like what did they miss? What got them? And could it happen to me, right? Could it happen to us? Um, so that's that's my first instinct.

And of course, cobwebs, at least in you know, I don't know, uh, I'm not a cobweb expert, so I don't know if they show up around the world and different kinds of uh materials, but you know, in the US at least, uh and in many places, cobwebs signify we we understand that that signifies it's been abandoned for a while or not taken care of, and so if we see them in a in a big beautiful house, like a big castle, Again, there's like all these resources. We understand all these resources were poured into building this beautiful castle. Someone of great power must have lived there. And yet they're gone and their family is gone. So what happened? Yeah. So I think there are those are more like cues, cues of danger in some ways, right?

Like acc accidental or incidental cues of danger. Yeah. It's interesting. As you're saying that I'm imagining like the opening scenes of a movie and like what's scarier? Like imagining like all the three of us walking through a town and there's nobody in it. And you go into the houses and like even the stove is on, and you know, there's still food cooking and burning, and like everything is perfectly, but everybody's gone. Well, that's exactly the first episode of the Twilight Zone, isn't it? Like he's walking around and it's just like an empty town. Right. It's very eerie, very creepy. Yeah, that's uh so I love that, and I love that that example then also highlights this sort of if you take a step back, and I love this about an evolutionary approach too, is you

think about like were organisms, and it's we're talking we're starting to like get into that. What we're talking about is curiosity or information seeking about a class of things that might be relevant for it. Like in the same way a rat might be interested in like the things around a dead rat, so long as it doesn't like kill the rat for sort of obvious reasons, right? Um, and maybe that's too facile, but like I like that like I was thinking about, you know, like whenever we have somebody on, I sort of think about what to think about. And I think like what liking hu like horror or like liking things that are a little bit gross or scary to me feels like very deeply human in the same way of like getting paper

cuts or like sneezing is. You know, it's just like one of these things that's just very human. Um, is when I think importantly, though, there's a you don't have to like something to find it interesting either. There's actually like empirical evidence for that that you can distinguish liking and finding things interesting. Now you can have both, right? You can like something and find it interesting, but you can certainly find things interesting and be intrigued and drawn and have these approach motivations motivations toward it without actually enjoying it. Right. And I think morbid curiosity does a little of both of those, right? It kind of has, it's kind of got a two-pronged uh access to our minds.

Um, and I'm still kind of teasing that apart, like what it looks like and why in some people it's approach and like or interest and like and why in some people it's just interest. So I feel like we um we sort of skipped ahead a bit. We didn't get to the foundation, the basic question that you that has been driving your research, which is why are we into this stuff? You know, from a naive psychological perspective, you might expect us to entertain ourselves with images of sunshine and rainbows and happy families and peaceful uh interactions. Um, you know, uh and yet uh if you look at the actual contents of the entertainment and the fiction that we consume, it is filled with with blood and gore and and terror.

So why would we if we have the option to entertain ourselves with any kind of imaginary world that we want, why would we pick the scariest, darkest, most awful stuff to entertain ourselves with? Why why are we into this stuff uh to begin with? Well, I think it's because um, you know, historically we've encountered it in the real world, right? And anytime you can learn about something cheaply, uh, from an sort of an ecological perspective, your mind snags that, right? It's just like the uh the drink that Dave is drinking there. It probably has a bit of a sweet taste, right? It probably tells his mind that uh it's just this is high calorie, it's good, you should consume it. Um, I think that similar thing happens with fear when we see uh something dangerous on our

screen, or even we're imagining it or reading it in a book, hearing a story from someone, our mind is getting one set of input information that says, here's some important information, you should pay attention. But the sort of breaks aren't really applied that would normally be applied because we're not getting input saying the dangerous thing is in front of us, which is how we've, which is how almost every animal ever experiences threat, right? Is in order to learn about it, you kind of have to be there because they don't have material culture that they transmit and they don't have sophisticated language that they can uh tell stories about dangerous things. And so they kind of have to learn about them firsthand.

And they do. You do see that in the animal kingdom. You see something like morbid curiosity in a lot of animals, but it's much more restricted. Like you only see it in certain circumstances, whereas in humans, we can consume it almost anytime, anywhere. So it's a it's a kind of like the candy thing, right? It's kind of like why do we like sweet things? Well, it's a cheap way to get calories. Even when we shouldn't want calories, sometimes it's a cheap way to get calories and we we latch onto that. Yeah. This might be a good place to talk about sort of uh signal detection or error management, too, right? Is that sort of something you've thought about? So, in other words, you know, if there's a really high cost or really high threat thing,

it's not always clear whether or not you're gonna learn something, but there's two types of errors to make, right? One is you sort of pursue or look into this dangerous or scary or b or high cost thing and don't don't learn anything, um, versus you you you could have, but you don't. And uh, and then you know, so for example, um, you know, I'm when I lived in Berlin, I did open water swimming, I moved here to Santa Barbara. Uh, there's the the Pacific Ocean here is a great white nursery, right? So I was like, I'm gonna look into everything I can about great white sharks, um, you know, to just settle on am I actually going to go swimming and what's my relative risk? Um is that is that thing of sort of uh you know, because the question, one

question is sort of like what lessons are people learning, if at all? And is that sort of like a klogginess of the system that all consume things that are scary just because that's just the way the system is built? Or are people actually learning lessons? I think there's a little of both. I think um, you know, most people when they go to watch a they buy a ticket to a horror movie, you don't really um think about like, oh, I'm going to learn something from this, you know. Uh some people, some people do. I've actually talked to people in studies that uh, especially with true crime, they'll say, I watched this to kind of pick up on what I would have missed, right? Uh, if this were to happen to me.

And there's some evidence that uh feeling vulnerable is correlated with um, you know, your chances of like truly feeling vulnerable and seeking out these things are correlated with your chances of being a victim of a crime or having been a victim of a crime in the past. And so I think some people do actively seek it out to learn something and they're sort of aware of that. But most people just do it because it's because it feels fun, it feels enjoyable. And then the question is: well, why does it feel fun? Why does it feel enjoyable? And one answer is is that um learning is intrinsically rewarding. Um, you know, if you're updating your model of the world and updating feeling like you're gaining valuable information on the cheap, that's intrinsically rewarding, even if we don't

consciously recognize that. Okay. So so the reason why we're into horror is because we're learning things um and we're learning things cheaply um about really important things that we should want to learn about from an evolutionary perspective. If we're gonna learn about any those are like those are like really high value things, or things of very high importance, right? Whereas you know, food is important and mating is important, um, but they're not one-offs. It's like if you make a mistake with food or make a mistake with mating, usually you can get another chance to get an apple or a mate. Uh, if you make a mistake when it comes to a dangerous predator, you may not have another shot, right?

And so they're like really high value uh targets are really high value information. And so um I think it's especially potent to us, which is probably why we see this threat bias that humans have where it kind of captures our attention above and beyond almost anything else. Yeah. Can I can I interject too? I think one thing there's and David alluded to this in an earlier episode, there's an idea that sort of there's a reason why we have episodic memory versus semantic memory. Episodic meaning for people who don't know is that there's the details of an event. So, you know, do you remember the first time you went on a Ferris wheel, for example, versus just the declarative statement? You know, I was on a Ferris wheel, but you don't remember the event.

And it seems to me, and Colton, Colton, you can tell me if this is correct, is that if I think about it, you know, hearing about, you know, oh, sharks are dangerous, like that's super boring. I don't care. I would not like choose to do that. But if if I if you told me a story about a shark encounter or a video of it, I would be really interested in watching that. And I wonder if um one of the arguments for why we have episodic representations, it's sort of like a picture's worth a thousand words, is that there's there's a lot of information, and there's also information that uh you may not already, you, I mean, we just use this colloquially, but like that you may not know what lesson to draw from this

episode. So the most economical thing to do in terms of a evolved representation is store the episode. And it's the fact that it's related to this high fitness cost thing and it's stored as an episode that there's sort of constant machinery running to sort of extract what is the inference, and with with with varying levels of certainty or uncertainty. And so maybe, and maybe it's no accident that we're really drawn to stories and episodic formats. And it's in fact that the lesson isn't super clear. And maybe if the lesson is too clear, it actually isn't that interesting. And part of what counts as interesting is it's this uh really kind of Goldilocks middle ground of it's there's enough content in specifics to possibly

extract something. But at the same time, it's not super clear what the bottom line thing is, you know, where if it's sort of super obvious, I don't know if there's been research on this, but that that seemed to be like maybe uh sort of an alien's perspective of like what's the middle ground sort of sweet spot in terms of um what makes something quote unquote interesting. Yeah. And I think you know, you hear this a lot from there's kind of this meme online of you know, horror fans. And it often it's like with you'll see the meme with like women. It's like, oh, a lot of women will turn on true crime to relax at night, right? That's turn on stories of mostly men killing mostly women to relax at night.

And I have I've had a lot of people ask me, like, how could that be? Like, why, you know, why would you do that? Um, and I don't have an empirical answer for it, but I have maybe like uh an intuition about what it might be, which is that if you watch a lot of, let's say, true crime in particular, because there tend to be um similarities between cases, right? And in true crime, people do pay attention to those. There is evidence that people find most interesting pieces of the story that tell you like how someone got away or how they didn't. Like those are the most, there's some really cool manipulation studies so those are the most interesting parts of the story to most people. Um and I think what happens probably is that if you watch a lot of those, you get really

good at guessing who the bad guy is, why he did it, what the victim um should have seen that they didn't. Um and that can be really comforting to know that uh you're guessing all these things correctly, right? That can actually probably be relaxing, even if the material itself is horrible or dangerous or violent or whatever, threatening. Um, if you're just guessing it accurately, like bam, bam, bam, one after the another, one after another, it's gonna feel a little bit relaxing. Like, why do you have to worry? You already know this, right? It's like it's like affirmation that you're prepared almost. And I think you do get that. You get that with like people who've watched a lot of horror movies too, and you, you know,

they kind of can guess what's going on, which horror movies are not, most of them are not known for being particularly complex about like what you should do and shouldn't do. Um, and it can get kind of relaxing to and almost comedic. You can kind of then lean into the comedic side of things without it feeling um too taboo, you know, because it's like, oh, well, of course that teenager died, they shouldn't have been doing that, right? Um, and you you get this kind of lax approach to to danger. And uh yeah, I think it can then become more of a thing you turn on before you go to bed. So counterintuitively, it's that you I think we have this counter this kind of cartoonish um view of things where, you know, bad stimuli equal fear.

Right. But it sounds like what you're saying is that in fact, fear, and I think people have made this argument before too, is that, or at least anecdotally, um, that fear is sort of a system for capturing more information. It's a symptom that you haven't done your homework, basically. And that, and I've heard this from people who do like rock climbing or really high stakes, life and death things, that if you actually practice and learn enough that there's still a notion of sort of how risky something is, but the fear sort of goes away. And it's so this idea is that counterintuitively, it sounds like what you're saying is by exposing yourself to these concerns, it might actually make the fear less.

Or your confidence goes up and that counteracts it. Right. Um, and you know, we can talk about this now or later, but I've I've I've then taken that exact sort of premise and then expanded this into well, then can you use horror to help you not feel so anxious or to give you tools to overcome anxiety? Right. Um and not not horror, not that horror is necessarily uniquely suited to that, though I do think it does have some benefits, certainly, over other entertainment genres. Um, but yeah, I think that you can take that exact premise and then say, okay, well, then maybe we can sort of leverage scary stories to help us in some ways. Right. I mean, how what do you see the so we obviously know that, or we're the the hypothesis

is that this it's helping us learn about dangerous things so that we could be better prepared for dealing with them, so that we could better avoid them. Um and it's not obvious in advance what types of information, what details are going to be important when it comes to a dangerous thing. So if you're if you if you see a lion uh versus a tiger, you know, knowing that tigers are stripes are striped and lions aren't, um, that information, it's a it might seem like an irrelevant detail, but it could save your life in some situations. Knowing that uh the different habits of of of the two different types of animals, where they like to congregate, whether they like to stalk their prey or whether they just kind of

you know gallivant out in the open. These each each one of these these subtle details could be a detail that that means the difference between life or death. Yeah David, can I interject? So never swim away this is just a PSA, never like panic and swim away from a great white shark. We we haven't talked about the asymmetric or of attrition, but they're asymmetric or of attrition creatures where if you don't act like prey, you just stand your ground, look at them, and stay stay facing them. If you ever see one in the water, you're more than likely going to be okay. You're bigger than their prey. So it's exactly like a bear or a mountain lion. Never run away, never to do like never splash away. Don't freak out.

That can be the difference between like activating this creature's like predation response versus it like, well, you're pretty big, you seem comfortable, I'm not gonna go after you. So exactly, yes. Like I'm not to just like to call back, like I'm not afraid of going in the water as much now, now that I know that. But that David, that's a perfect example of like I didn't know that before I moved to Santa Barbara and I did a deep dive into it. I'm not curious about great white sharks anymore. But that would be an example, David, of what you're talking about. Yeah, and there's there's a whole lot of directions I can go from that because that ties into like everything that I am working on now, and also that I've worked on in the past

with like formidability assessments. And you know, I have this again, this project I've been working on with with Edgar, uh, trying to define the horror genre almost using an evolutionary perspective, and kind of what we landed on, and we tested this empirically in a in a lot of different ways, is that you know, fear in the case of these stories, and probably in the case of many things, has to do with relative formidability asymmetries. Um, so that just such that if you um either yourself or if you're empathizing with, for example, a protagonist who is more vulnerable, less formidable than the antagonist, it's gonna produce fear, right? Like that's the thing that should produce fear, especially if that antagonist is and and

maybe only if an antagonist is malicious, right? And if they're around you, near you, pursuing you. Um, and we find that that the like that's kind of a unique narrative structure in horror um that reliably elicits everything from like higher chance of the word fear being included in the description to uh higher heart rates when you're watching the film. Um, so I think that's it's probably some of the input conditions, I guess, that like fear generally takes is how how vulnerable am I to this thing, right? Is it near me? Is it bigger than me? Is it stronger than me? Uh, does it have more resources than me? Can it outcompete me, essentially? So you can think of vulnerability kind of as a like a uh a fe a

felt um appraisal of being less formidable in an asymmetric contest. Hmm. What what you're saying suggests that there could be a Darwinian advantage to mastering your fear. So if uh if predators, either uh actual predators or social predators, um use your fear as a cue uh of the the problem ability and yeah, and you'll defer. And you'll defer to me. You're lower, you're less formidable to me. If you're afraid of me, that's a good sign that I should attack you. Right. Yeah. Uh, but if you're not afraid, then that suggests to me that you know something I don't. You might be harder to attack than I than I think, and I might leave you alone. And so it could it could suggest that if you know if you have learned a lot about a

dangerous stimulus uh and you are signaling that you're not afraid, then that could uh reduce your chances of actually being harmed. On the other hand, if you if you signal that you're very afraid, uh that could uh actually increase the chances uh that the danger will will actually manifest. Would you do you buy that logic? I I think yeah absolutely I mean that's like I think a very uh coherent way of putting a lot of the things that I've uh thought about in relation to this and like you know again I think you identified probably something that uh like an insight that can be applied broadly you know to everything from business negotiate negotiations to clinical anxiety, right? Um, this idea that uh and we talk about it all the time in in colloquial terms, right?

It's just confidence, right? It's just your your confidence um and not mistaking confidence for competence uh on your own, right? Like understanding where your position is, but maybe putting forward a fit, your best foot forward, or you know, we have all kinds of sayings for these kinds of things. Uh, but I think that's exactly right. Um, if that's true, then those things should also be true. And I don't have empirical evidence that those things are true, but uh I'm also not looked into the literature for things like again, negotiations probably is where that would be a huge um or politics, even political negotiations, wartime negotiations, you know, probably huge uh implications like that. That insight had probably a huge implications for that kind of thing.

Yeah. I mean, it would be fascinating to test that empirically, to just have, you know, the person you're negotiating with or you're playing a an economic game with have them look afraid, have a fear face versus have them not have a fear face and see how that changes people's behavior, have people rate their their physical formidability, their social formidability. You know, does the fear face uh change those inferences and those perceptions? It would be fascinating to look at. Uh just an one example of how richly predictive uh this this perspective is. Uh well. I did a study with uh with Dan Fessler a few years ago that was not originally it didn't originate from this work. I did a morbid curiosity.

It was kind of a separate question in some ways. But now that I've started doing this, I see that you know, maybe subconsciously it was kind of related to these things, or maybe I've just tied it to it after the fact. But it was a study showing that I I had this question of like, why are humans sometimes gruesomely violent? You know, like there's no reason you got to pull someone's entrails out and uh display them, right? Um you've already killed someone, you've you've you've defeated the enemy, you've the the threat is eliminated. So why are we sometimes gruesomely violent? And the kind of simple answer to that is that we're signaling something. But the question then is like, well, what are we signaling?

Right. Um, and it seems to be the case that we ran this on different vignettes that were like very, very precisely controlled and only had like minor tweaks to the wording, you know, to kind of change the conditions. Uh, it seems to be that you're signaling your formidability because uh people perceive gruesome actors to be larger, stronger. If you ask them to envision, like how big is this person? How strong is this person, how tall is this person, even? They imagine people who are gruesomely violent, who commit the same act of violence, but then just take it a little step further, you know, by doing something gross, basically. Uh, they imagine them to be bigger, stronger. And of course, that then impacts negotiations.

And so that could give insight to like, why do certain terrorist groups behave in certain kinds of ways and send videos of these like horrible acts, right? Uh, why did the state for hundreds of years do public executions in front of everyone, right? These like gruesome executions that they could have done behind closed doors, but they did them in a way that uh everyone could see, and interestingly, that everyone wanted to see. Um so I think that yeah, there's um we we're trying I think you can uh again, it just extends to so many different ways. This this idea that fear is intrinsically tied to formidability. So that that's a good segue into the question of how would you define the horror genre?

So a lot of people have thought about what horror is. Do you have a way of defining it that you think fits with your theoretical perspective that sheds light on how we can categorize something as a horror movie versus a thriller versus you know an action movie versus something else? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Actually, you know, working on this question helped me think about fear better because if you think about what a horror movie, I think everyone agrees, like, and even me to some extent agrees, like, okay, one definition of a horror film is a film that scares you. I don't think that's a great definition because it may not scare me, it might scare you, might not scare Dave. Um, a better definition might be it's a film that is intended to scare you.

Like, okay, that's kind of hard to disprove, but that's that's a decent definition, right? But then the question is, well, why does it scare you? Right. That doesn't really tell me anything about the structure of the horror film. It just says that it's meant to scare you or that it does scare you. And so I wasn't very satisfied with that definition. And I thought, surely there must be something, you know, we we all seem to, you know, I would say with like 80%, just this is just an intuition, but like, you know, roughly 80% of people would probably agree that X movie is a horror movie or Y movie is a horror movie, right? There's like when we see a horror movie, we kind of know it, like, oh, that's kind of a

horror movie, right? Um, so there must be something that we're we're latching onto that's not just fear, but some components that do produce fear in some people in certain circumstances. Um, so what I landed on is similar to what we just talked about, which is uh a horror movie or horror story, a horror narrative, is one in which you have a protagonist who is uh much less formidable than a malicious antagonist. And you don't see that in any other genre. You don't see it in action movies. And action and again, we have empirical evidence for this, uh, Edgar and I do that uh we use that huge Facebook data set that has like three and a half million people and uh has their personality traits, their big five and everything.

And we looked at like 700 different movies and rated them on this like very precise formula for if they were, you know, how how formidable the antagonist was, how formidable the protagonist was. Um, and what you find is that in horror movies, you have high formidability antagonist, low formidability protagonist. In action movies and thrillers, you have both moderately sort of equally matched, uh, moderately high formidability protagonists and antagonist, which makes sense. Thrillers are kind of a cat and mouse game where you're chasing each other back and forth. Action movies are more of a face to face um type of story where the hero and the villain are kind of equally matched, right? And that's what generates the action or the violence.

And then of course you have sci-fi and fantasy. Those are a bit lower. The tricky part comes when you know you get what about sci-fi horror, like the movie Alien? Well, there's uh some evidence that uh when when horror when when films take on two genres and one of those is the horror genre, they tend to like lean into that aspect of it. So if it's a horror sci-fi, it tends to be a horror movie with sci-fi elements or a horror movie with fantasy elements. Um, and so again, I think the thing that they're probably leaning on is strong uh antagonist, relatively weaker protagonist. And what's interesting is that, and the reason that I started thinking about them this way is that pretty much maps onto a prey animal's experience in the wild.

Predators are almost always, certainly mammalian predators. Less true in some cases if you use venom or other things, but um I think you could make an argument that venom increases your formidability. But uh it's certainly true that for most prey mammals, uh, their predator is larger, stronger, faster, more formidable generally, has better weaponry. Um, and of course, there's an arms race where the prey animal typically um, in like 95% of cases, gets faster or better at hiding. So it's better at escaping. It never confronts, you don't see, you don't often see gazelles unless they're trapped, you know, confront a cheetah or a zebra, confront a lion, unless they're truly trapped. And that's exactly what you find in horror movies.

The protagonist always is fleeing until they get trapped, and then they usually get lucky, or they maybe find some weakness that they didn't see before, sort of a David and Goliath kind of thing. Um but typically they're running away until they're trapped. And that that like to me, that just jumped out as like, well, that's just predator prey interactions. Yeah. My one my favorite movie uh that I've watched more times than any other movie is uh is the original Jurassic Park movie. It's just like a beautiful movie. And I love about that that I don't think of that as a canonical horror movie, but it really is in this sense of it's this thing of it's beautiful, it's uh you know, it's it's all the

kind of like, well, there's this incredible thing that like dinosaurs finally exist. And I mean, for me, it was like I was a boy, I had never seen a real life dinosaur till I saw this. It was like perfect. I was just like, mwah, like so. It was just perfect timing for me. But um, but yeah, no, this thing of like there's this thing, it seems better than you could imagine, and it turns out to be a horror. I just that's such a wonderful sort of uh uh arc. I think it's like one of the most perfect movies, and it is it's among other genres a horror movie for sure. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and one of the, you know, for this formula we created to measure this thing, we called it the protagonist vulnerability index.

So basically, how vulnerable is the protagonist? In the case of Jurassic Park, you have an incredibly vulnerable or an incredibly formidable antagonist in like, let's say, the T-Rex. But uh one of the variables in our formula is threat presence. So how for what percentage of the narrative is the antagonist uh actively chasing or a danger to the protagonist? Well, in Jurassic Park, they're behind a fence for a long time. So it doesn't matter. It's not just high formidability that triggers fear, it's an asymmetry and formidability, right? And part of that calculation is is that highly formidable antagonist pursuing you? Or are they in a place where they can pursue you? And for the first part of Jurassic Park, they're not, right?

They're things we can look at. It's the same reason we go to a zoo and we'll look at a lion. But if I ask you if you want to get in the lion pit, most people should say no, right? Um, so I think yeah, there's this contextual difference of like uh a dangerous thing is only dangerous if it can get you, you know, which is kind of an obvious statement, but it's really important when it comes to these like definitions of these kinds of things, I guess. Yeah. I will say that um when I when I was reading about your way of defining horror, um it helped me reconceptualize uh one of my favorite movies, which is uh Terminator two Judgment Day. Yeah, clear uh and uh so one wonderful movie. Uh and uh I had always thought of it as an action movie and as like the greatest action

movie of all time. Right. But a r after reading your your thing about uh horror, it made me realize that actually Terminator 2 is better conceptualized as a horror movie. Because if you think about it, the antagonist is a more advanced uh Terminator model. And uh and he's chasing a a less advanced Terminator model who is way, you know, way less formidable. Um and and most of the movie is just involves this like incredibly sophisticated, like m liquid metal, shape-shifting antagonist that's way more formidable than Arnold Schwarzenegger and is just chasing them for most of the movie. And so really, when you when you think about it in those terms, uh it's better conceptualized as a horror movie.

And like the antagonist is really scary to have this metallic shapeshifter who can take the form of anyone, like that's that's a really powerful ability. And like ev like there's so many moments of the movie where you think he's dead and he just he just gets up again. He's just like invincible. You can shoot him and it just goes right through him and he just like melds back into shape. You know, he blows up and he survives like it's it's it really is a horror movie. Um and so that was a pretty cool realization to me. Yeah and it shows up you know it shows up in our data set like that. It shows up as it's like right at the cusp. It's like it's like a at the low end of the horror movies. And we didn't have you know any reason to have a specific cutoff because it gives you a

number right this formula gives you like any not formula, gives you a number at the end, right? Um, and there's kind of a gradient. And if you, you know, have a big Excel sheet and you've got like uh IMDB rated genres on this column and PDI or protagonist vulnerability addicts on this column, you'll see that the first like hundred are just horror, horror, horror, horror. And then you get the like horror sci-fi mixes, horror fantasy mixes, and then you get into like horror action and horror thriller. And uh Predator was like ranked right with like the bottom part of the horror movies, which which intuitively again makes sense when you watch the movie. You're like, man, this is a little scary in some ways, right?

Like it's kind of that's kind of a scary story. Um, there were a few others like that too. And uh like the movie Predator, which uh obviously, if you've seen it, is um about this alien creature that preys upon or hunts for sport humans, right? And the reason that's that it's not rated higher or the reason also that it doesn't feel as scary, I think, as some other horror movies, despite that, is that it's a predator who's trying to find the top prey, the best prey it can, the most formidable prey it can, which is like typically these elite group of military uh a military troop that's like an elite group, like the Green Berets or something. It's a predator with principles, right? It's a predator with principles.

It's a fair fighting yeah, it's a fair fighting predator. Um, but that's what it's looking for. It's like the what's that uh old uh it's the most dangerous game, like where you're hunting. Oh yeah, you know, it's similar to that where it's like you are, you know, the the antagonist is more powerful they are, they have better weaponry, they're faster, more elusive, but they're outnumbered. They're facing a group of things, right? And and there's good evidence that alliances increase not just obviously like how strong you are, but also how strong you're perceived to be. Um and they're like when it comes to humans, like kind of the top humans, like highly trained humans with weapons, with things that increase their formidability.

Um, and so that makes it feel kind of like an action movie too, similar with with Terminator, uh, to some extent. But I would say Predators is an even better example of man, this feels like an action movie, but it feels like it should be a horror movie because this is a really big, bad guy who's literally he is a predator, right? That's the name of the movie. Why is this not a horror movie? Uh and the answer is: well, he's fighting people who are at least when they're grouped together, pretty formidable to him, right? If he was if he was uh if he was hunting a cheerleading squad, it would be um. If he was hunting the summer camp. If you if you put him if you put him at uh Camp Crystal Lake, put him at uh you know a teen

summer camp, it becomes a horror movie. Yeah. Yeah. David's like, I'm gonna what's the term for uh writing the screenplay and uh green what what's the LA lingo for that? Oh I'm gonna I'm gonna write it on I'm gonna write it on but it's that's a good way to play with those ideas and think about them. Okay, like well if uh Leatherface and Texas Chainsaw Massacre was four feet tall would that be a horror movie? Well maybe not, right? Uh or if Jason, if you put him against a bunch of from Friday the thirteenth, if you put him against a bunch of Green Berets, is that a horror movie? No, it's maybe more of an action movie. Yeah. And if you see that in some of those sequels, you see like where they get in these new

contexts where it does shift to more of an action film. Right. I mean, z zombie movies are a good example of like playing with this border between action and horror. Because sometimes like the protagonists have like shotguns and weapons, and they're just blowing up the zombies, and then it feels like more of an action movie because they're more equally matched. Right. But you know, if if again, if it's the cheerleading squad that's being hunted by zombies, it becomes more of a straightforward horror movie. Um so what do you think is going on with with zombie movies. Yeah, what is going on with zombies? Yeah, yeah. What's that architect? Yeah, what is a zombie? Yeah. That's a great I think I just watched 28 years later, like this past week, which great

movie. Definitely leans more action than than horror in some ways. There's like some distinct horror elements and then some action elements. Like very distinct, like, oh my god, this is definitely a horror movie, and then some like a lot of action elements. Um, I think zombie movies are crowd pleasers. So, like some of the biggest uh horror film hits are zombie movies. World War Z is a great example, one of the highest grossing movies of all time, certainly one of the highest grossing horror movies of all time. Um, The Walking Dead, you know, probably one of the most watched TV shows of all time. Uh and yeah, the question is why? Because you would think they would actually be more aversive because they're gross.

Like zombies, zombie movies are some of the grossest horror movies. They love doing like up close shots of you know their arms falling off or biting their necks and ripping their flesh out, right? Um I think there's two reasons that zombie movies are so popular. I think one is the thing that David just said. Most of them start out kind of scary. It's like nobody knows what's going on and they're incredibly underprepared, and the the zombies are overwhelming them. Oh, like more a more formidable group than the human group. Over time, the human group gets weapons, gets better defenses. They do what humans do, right? They kind of learn and adapt. And it becomes more of a almost like an action drama or something, or a thriller, more of a

thriller, kind of like a group-based thriller. I think that's one reason. I think the other reason is that zombies actually tap into uh we haven't really talked about the morbid curiosity scale much yet, but I created this scale to measure trait morbid curiosity. And there are four domains to it, right? So there's uh a domain about violence. So kind of your interest in, let's say, like MMA would be a good example of a high violence score on the morbid curiosity scale. There's one about body violations. Um, that would be an interest in like medical oddities or surgeries or uh injuries or things like that. There's one about uh the minds of dangerous people. So sort of understanding uh and predicting people who act like predators, people who have

who hide their intentions, who are um uh trying to harm you without letting you know it. Um, and then there is supernatural, which is kind of this uh it's it's got a lot of layers to it. But the simple way to say it is that uh dangers that aren't incredibly clear to us yet, or we don't have good access to understand how dangerous they are aliens, ghosts, demons, whatever. Like we get a sense they're dangerous because they're hiding from us and they have these incredible technologies or abilities to slip into other worlds. Um, but because they're not right in front of us, we can't study them well, we can't understand them well. So you have those four categories, and they tend to correlate pretty highly, but there are

some distinctions between them. Uh, And they do load onto this kind of single factor of morbid curiosity. Now, if you look at zombie movies, zombies are human-like, seem to have intentions. Certainly they're hungry. So they kind of tap into that minds of dangerous people thing. Like, is this person like, do they have intentions or not? They tap into the violence part because, of course, when a zombie catches you, it enacts incredible violence upon you. The outcome of that violence is body violation because they're kind of rotting, their flesh is falling off. And then if they catch you, your flesh is falling off. Uh, and they tap into the supernatural a little bit because it's not clear why they're

doing what they're doing, why they're zombies, are they humans? Are they something else? Will they change? We don't know enough about them. And so they sort of uh there's something for everyone. Like, no matter where your morbid curiosity kind of falls, zombie movies have something for you. Um, so I think that combined with the sort of transition they take from early horror, which captures your attention, to more of an action thriller, which maybe sustains your attention a little better. Um, makes them really good for things like TV shows. That's why The Walking Dead had like 11 seasons and five spinoffs or whatever. You know, uh, there's an infinite number of stories you can tell about that and you can

kind of just keep iterating on that. Yeah, totally. And there's also the contagion element, which also gives gives rise to all sorts of subplots and conflicts, you know, where if someone is infected, they're going to turn into a zombie, you know, all that yeah, all that stuff, um which might tap into our disgust. Yeah. Exactly. And I think infection too, certainly historically, like pre-germ theory of disease, um most diseases, infections were given a supernatural explanation, right? It's something that we couldn't explain. Like, why is this person getting sick? Why are they getting uh you know open source all over their body? Why are they acting insane? All of these things that we now attribute to diseases or uh of various kinds, infectious or

otherwise, um, we used to attribute to supernatural causes. I have a quote in my book uh about an anthropologist who goes to this tribe that has a really bad guinea word problem. And so she encourages them to like boil their water so that they can kill the worms. And they kind of laugh at her and they're like, Well, that doesn't stop the witches who are putting the worms there. That doesn't stop the witches from from causing these problems. Um, so I think that infection, even when we understand scientifically what it is, like, oh, I'm sick, I have whatever a virus or a bacterial infection. uh, it probably taps into something about like an unknown danger. And that's kind of a taps into that supernatural element as well.

Yeah, I think that supernatural category is uh, I mean, I don't know if the best way to characterize it is supernatural or scientific, and and like I'm I'm I know you're not saying that, but even like for for the listeners, in the sense of, you know, from the evolved psychology perspective, and I think Rob Boyd used to say this all the time: is like all of life is like very causally opaque. This is also a John Tube point. And so to the extent that there are sort of like known co-relationships, like you don't know why we put this in the food and this is what we do, but we just do it, you know? And so there's sort of you can imagine there's selection for this placeholder of like very opaque causality, and we can kind of laugh at people.

I like we had this episode with Brenda Bowser uh where somebody was killed. It was like a for real like murder where there was like blood on the walls. And David, do you remember what the um what was the attribution? Oh how how could I forget? Yeah. Yeah. So they they attributed the murder to to a phantasm. Phantasm. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And so like this idea, and I mean Brenda's idea was sort of that was what they attributed to, to sort of uh and maybe self-consciously or not, but it doesn't really matter, to sort of quell the repercussions, the social repercussions of who did it. It was a way to sort of, you know, stick this, this, to end the end the conflict there. But I think for everything of like, you know, why is there disease or anything, um, yeah,

this idea of sort sort of spirituality, like this placeholder, whatever you want to call that. I assume that's also what we all are doing with science, too. Like whatever we think, you know, whatever forces are, like these occult forces that Newton discovered, right? Like this just this just slots into that evolves entry of like the world is causally opaque, and I'm just gonna like, okay, tentative thing, and I'm just gonna stick some story onto it. That's sort of it's the ontology. Uh well, and uh Aaron, I think it's Aaron Leitner and N. Hagen, they uh published a paper a year or two ago that I think is probably the best uh sort of EV psych approach to why do we believe in the supernatural that I've seen in their

explanation is that it gives us a starting point to kind of ratchet from and then produce decisions from to explore identity, to explore space, you know, uh from. Because otherwise, you know, if I ask, well, why did this happen? I have an infinite number of answers. There's an infinite number of places I can start. Uh but if but if I just have a few assumptions, you know, that an agent caused it, that radically constrains the number of possibilities of what happened and how do I deal with it, how do I avoid it, how do I whatever? How do I do anything about it? Um and so even though that's wrong a lot, it's right enough and it's better than not having any starting point. Yeah. Um I think the starting point we have is, you know, well, maybe someone did it.

Well, if someone did it and they weren't here, they must have powers of some kind. If they have those kind of powers, they must be pretty strong. I should probably be afraid of them or try to, you know, get away from them or deal with them or collect allies to deal with them. Yeah. To not go too far afield of zombies, and then we can go on to something else. But uh, I was also wondering if, because when David was asking that, I had the same question about what's up with zombies and this idea of contagion, where in addition to sort of the deep structure grammar of there's these things about body violations and about, you know, formidability, I wonder what you think about sort of these like archetype things

where, you know, clearly like people, you know, and Ed Hagen, you know, again to Ed Hagen, you know, there's this long history of sort of zoonotic uh infection in people. Um, and a reliably occurring thing is like just differences in people's sort of state, you know, like am I been poisoned? Am I sick? Um, the the sort of like these sort of archetypes, like I think it's an easy thing to think. And I imagine many evolutionary psychologists when watching a zombie movie have thought, gee, I wonder if that's because a reliable part of our history has been like people acting weirdly when they're infected. Do you buy that or is that too facile? Or what do you think? No, no, no, no. I think that's um I would be surprised if that does not contribute to it, right?

I think that plays into that again, kind of the the minds of dangerous people aspect of like, well, what's going on with these people? Are they sick? Are they like just violent and and awful? Like what's and I think you see that explicitly made in a lot of zombie movies and TV shows where it's like, um, well, I think we can find a cure and bring them back, right? I think that they're still human underneath. I think that um maybe if we just do X, Y, or Z, we can get them back. And I think that plays into that intuition that you just mentioned. Um, that, you know, we've had to deal with people who kind of looked and maybe acted like zombies uh because they were uh sick and drinking lead polluted water and uh all kinds of

other nasty things that made them crazy. Right. Uh that was probably not an unusual thing for most of human history. Or we ran into other uh species of hominids that didn't speak our language and were acted differently from us and um maybe looked like monsters of certain kinds, like Bigfoot or Yetis or other kinds of things like that. One of my favorite um things that I've seen, which I don't know if I believe it or not, but it certainly makes for a good story, is that uh, you know, the existence of the uncanny the uncanny valley. So this idea that as things become more human looking, um, we like them until they get about 70 or 80% human looking, and it takes a huge dip and we don't like them at all.

And then when they get like 95% human looking, we start to like them again. Um, one of my favorite things I've seen is that, well, that uh the reason that we find that creepier, the fact that we find that creepier, a bit scary, suggests that we had something to be scared of in the past for things that looked kind of human but weren't. Um so other other hominid species, right? Was I think what they were hinting at, like Neanderthals that were violent or dangerous towards us, or uh Denizovens, or any other number of, you know, now they've discovered like four or five different hominid species that existed alongside Homo sapiens. Um and, you know, while I don't think there's any evidence for that claim, it certainly

like seems plausible to me that that's one reason why we might have this like strange uncanny valley uh response to things that look and act pretty human, but there's just like something off about them. Yeah. Similar with zombies, right? I think a a big explanation that, you know, before I started doing work that I'm doing now that I ran into for why we like zombies or why we find them scary, rather, is that well, they trigger our uncanny valley response. But then, you know, you just the question to ask is, well, what does that even mean? What why? You know? Yeah. Yeah. Um, this definition of horror too, it strikes me as, you know, there's a population of people for whom almost everything is horror than, and that is children.

Uh uh, right. Because I mean, the world is much more formidable than you. Everyone is more formidable. And I was also thinking about, you know, like a lot of Disney stories are horror, right? If you kind of take this definition. Um and so I has that been part of the and I you know there's a lot to ask about kids and development of this, but has that been part of the research on like or is that sort of a a blind spot so far? Not in yours, I'm saying, but just sort of generally, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's definitely not a part of my research because uh it's much more, you know, it takes special training to work with kids and thinking a certain kind of way and designing experiments in a certain kind of way.

And it's something that I'm not an expert at when it comes to those kinds of things. But that it's more difficult IRB-wise. There's just a lot of reasons of why working with kids is uh is difficult. Um but that being said, uh some of my colleagues at the recreational fear lag are uh developmental psychologists and they have done these kinds of studies with kids, specifically looking at things like um what kinds of stories do daycares or or kindergartens um teachers tell the students, right? A lot of times they're scary stories, and a lot of times they're scary stories because that's what the kids request. Uh there was this paper that just came out by them that I haven't actually read yet, but it

looked at different types of fear, uh fearful, playful activities that kids um engage in. And it turns out they engage, I mean I kind of skimmed it, they engage in a lot of different scary activities. And they don't look scary to us because we're adults. Like you just said, the world is uh much, much more of a horror story to kids because everything is more formidable to them. So when we watch kids, you know, play even pretend games like tag or hide and seek or whatever, that doesn't look scary to us, but to a kid, hide and seek it, hide and seek and tag are just predator prey games, right? It's like somebody is it and they're trying to get you and they're either chasing you or they're looking for you and you're hiding.

Yeah. Um and I think that kids, you know, I I give a story in my book of a time when I I had this job as a mad scientist where I would do like summer camps, like science summer camps. I was like a knockoff. I was like a knockoff Bill and I. Like you can't afford Bill and I. So you get this company. I'm imagining like blood, blood-splattered lab coat. I wish. I wish. It was more tame than that. It was just like you, you know, you teach the kids a wide variety of topics. Um, you know, everything from forensics and entomology to chemistry and you know, biology, everything you could do that was interesting enough to keep kids' attention from ages like four to 10. Yeah. And one of the things I found being I was at the time I was, you know, in my 20s, didn't

have kids, I never taught kids. It's a different skill set, like I mentioned. One of the things I quickly learned is that you have to take a lot of breaks. Like you gotta give them time to run around and and and be kids. And they want to play games and they want to do things that are interactive. And um, I started playing the game Mafia with them, uh, which is like the game werewolf. If you've if you're familiar with that, I'm sure David, you certainly are. Um and so the idea is that you know, there's this town, and there are these two, usually two killers, and like a sheriff and a doctor, and the rest of the people are just townspeople. And the kids kind of put their heads down and they go to sleep at night, and I play the

part of the narrator and I narrate the story of what happens. Like, oh, the in this case, the mafia members come out and they killed a member of the community last night. You know, you have to find out who they are and uh and get justice and you hang them. It's like kind of a violent game, but I I I kept it very tame because I had like again five to ten year olds. I didn't want them going home to their parents and saying, Oh, I killed my best friend at set mad science camp today. You know, if they were German kids, they would have been perfectly fine. This is a very cultural specific. It turns out like yeah. Yeah, it well, so what I found was that in one of those papers I mentioned, Uh, that's one

of the games that uh kids in Denmark love to play, like little kids love to play that game. Yeah. And I quickly discovered that American kids also love that game when you give them the opportunity. And what was even better is that, you know, when they got good at it and they started understanding the rules, I would let one of them be the narrator so that I didn't have to do it. And because they wanted to play the part of Storyteller. But when they were the storyteller, it was like the worst gruesome horror story of all time. Mine, mine was super tame. It would just be, you know, the mafia came to town and they they killed a person. You need to figure out who did it, right? Try to keep it like as vanilla as possible because they were like young kids and not my

kids. And then when they became the narrators, it was just like, oh, they they had a knife and they shoved it in his stomach and they pulled it all the way up to his head and then they pulled his heart, you know, just like these gruesome, awful things. Um, so they love, I think kids love exploring those kind of topics in a safe way, right? That's one way for them to kind of play with those ideas and play with like imagine those scenarios and what that would be like and then learn how to kind of navigate like a horror story, but in a but in a in a way that's not in their face. It's not a film, right? Like film is very real, looks very real. Right. And if you're doing play pretend with your friends and like you're telling the story and

there's no visuals, it's much easier to take a step back and kind of navigate that. Right. It's it's sort of sort of a callback to this point we made earlier, which is sort of by it's the people who feel better after they listen to true crime. It's that maybe this cartoonish view of like we're protecting kids by keeping all these things away from them. By inhibiting that natural curiosity, it might actually backfire. And that uh letting kids actually sort of in a in a in their own sort of titration uh of this stuff sort of d interact with this stuff. And it's funny too because, you know, like Germany sort of famously is sort of like I bought a um when I was living in Germany I bought a brother's grim uh German language like,

you know, kids book. And, you know, even if you read these German fairy tales and Germans will say this all the time, the English translations of them are still quite bad, but they're often already filtered toned down toned down way toned down i mean it's incredible um you know like just sort of like you know like cannibalism and like death and like all of these like really and i and i it's kind of a funny thing and everybody laughs about it germans laugh about it americans laugh about it but i do wonder if you know there's there's all this data that like especially american kids are super anxious super scared. And there's also concomitant with that is like just this quote unquote helicopter parenting, or just like really trying to, you know.

And I wonder if to some degree, you know, it's kind of like this uh where it's almost like we have this like hygiene of like we're just trying to keep super clean and it sort of backfires. I wonder if the same thing with sort of like bad things or like scary things. I wonder if a similar thing happens. Yeah, I mean, I would uh I feel pretty confident in saying that it's it's not good to prevent kids from experiencing fear in a safe way. Because then how are they ever going to learn how to deal with that emotion when they're teenagers or adults? Right. Right. Uh in fact, they're going to think that they should avoid it and they're going to become avoidant, which is not a great coping style. Um and I when I was so I was in Germany, last time I was in Germany, it was like a year ago

or two years ago. And I went to the Black Forest where all the Grimm's fairy tales are supposedly take place, right? It's like, man, I can, I can understand why they take place here. It's a frightening, like, it's a very cool place to be. Man, it's like very scary. I can imagine, you know, being there after dark. It just would be all sorts of horrible things I can imagine coming out of like the bowels of that forest. Yeah. Um, but yeah, I think I think it's uh I I have talked about this um more in my book, but less so in my research, because again, I don't really study kids myself, but other people do with respect to this. And uh I think there's good evidence that you know, preventing kids from engaging in

thrilling play um seems to correlate with higher uh anxiety problems in uh when they're teenagers and adults, like higher incidence of of anxiety disorders. Uh and it makes sense, right? Like if you don't learn how to deal with an emotion, you're not gonna get good at dealing with that emotion, right? Um, and I think that's one thing that horror fans do well, right? They uh they consistently confront feeling afraid and feeling anxious. And uh I think there's some evidence that it actually helps them deal with anxiety. There was a study that I believe it's a preprint right now, but it's with true crime. And it was a diary study um looking at people who were true crime fans and like when did they watch their last true crime show?

How were they feeling that day when they watched it, and the and the day after? And there was pretty good evidence that having watched a true crime show on day X would uh was correlated with lower anxiety on day X plus one. And that feeling anxious was correlated with watching true crime on day X, uh, which is stuff that I've hinted at before. I have a big theoretical paper kind of laying out some of the reasons why this might be with scary narratives generally, like why one, why anxious people seem to be drawn to them sometimes, because that seems like the last thing they should be drawn to. And two, can it actually be useful or can we leverage it to be useful for some people? Um, and the simple answer is that like, well, they seem to be drawn to it because anxiety

ups your vigilance. And if you're upping your vigilance, that's gonna up your vigilance for scary stories too. So you're gonna be kind of interested and drawn to that. Um, and then the answer for why it might be helpful in the moment is that if you're feeling particularly with generalized anxiety, you don't have a source of your anxiety, you're just feeling anxious, right? It's like really destructive form of anxiety because there's not a lot you can do about it. You can't like change the thing that's making you feel anxious because you don't know what it is. So you get in these big rumination cycles. And then, you know, common advice like, oh, try relaxing. Doesn't really work for those people because threat tends to have a premium on your

attention and on your cognitive resources. And so when you try to relax, it's just like pretty futile, right? Um, but what you can do is maybe fight fire with fire a little bit. Go turn on a scary story that will capture your attention or at least compete with your attention, compete with ruminating anxious thoughts for your attention. And then it draws you in if it's a compelling story, if it's a well-written story, well-told story, it'll draw you in. And it'll kind of you can't really like worry about you can't actively worry about two things at once. Like you can try this, right? Like try like worrying about two different things. You can shift between them, but you can't like hold two of them in your mind at the same

time and worry about them. So if you get sucked into this story, you know, you have 90 minutes of like a semi-controlled anxiety, semi-controlled fear. You can pause it, you can watch it with lights on, watch it with a friend. There's a lot of things you can do to kind of tone down and control the source of the anxiety. And then after 90 minutes, the thing that was causing your anxiety now is gone, right? It goes away. The film ends. And it kind of uh gives you an off-ramp for those rumination cycles and allows your parasympathetic nervous system to activate like it should when a threat goes away, which then physiologically calms you down, right? Um, that's all in the short term. In the long term, we've kind of talked about this.

Uh, it can give you tools for learning how to deal with anxiety because when you're watching a scary movie um or going to a haunted house or playing a scary game, most people are actually not trying to make it as scary as possible. Like we found this in haunted even in haunted house studies that I've done where we go to a haunted attraction in Halloween. Um, most people are trying to hit like a sweet spot where like it's is really scary, but it's not too much for them to handle. Well, by definition, to do that, you have to regulate how afraid you are, right? You have to regulate how anxious you're feeling in order to hit that sweet spot. Um, and by doing that, you are inherently like just practicing or implicitly practicing

cognitive uh reappraisal skills, emotion regulation skills, things that you can apply when you're feeling afraid or anxious because of something else that's happening in the world. And so if you can, if you can train yourself to think about those things and what you're doing to calm yourself down, what you're doing to achieve that sweet spot, uh, you might be able to recognize some of these tools and then apply them in your life outside of horror movies. Yeah. I like that. So Pascal Boyer and Leonard who passed away, Michael Monkruff's advisor, um, they had this great paper about sort of anxiety and OCD. And we won't go into all those details we should have Pascal on, but this thing about like

fear, uh the emotional fear is sort of like, you know, there's a situation that needs to be reacted to. What anxiety is, is harder. And their argument is this is one of the reasons why there's more anxiety disorders than fear disorders. There is, there are obviously phobias, but but there's more anxiety disorders. And the idea is that it's sort of the design underlying anxiety is there might be something, and there might be something you can do about it. But it's just more opaque and more indirect. And so it's really interesting how, yeah, if there is this anxiety disorder or you're feeling anxiety, it's basically your evolved system telling you there's things to worry about and there might be things I need to do and I don't know what to do or I don't know

what's cause what might be the danger. And so if you give people fear um or or this sort of like as you put it this very titrated controlled thing it engages this precautionary system that sort of is getting the cues that it's doing something right to against the dangers and the fears. So that's really interesting. It really suggests that, you know, we don't always talk about implications on this podcast. And we've had gotten reviews of people wanting implications, but this really suggests that with anxiety, with fear, um, with people sort of feeling uh um like underpowered, right? Or just sort of like possibly victims, we we often have this idea that like to protect them as parents or as society, we want to which is a good impulse to have.

It's a noble impulse to have. Yeah, they're right. Yeah, exactly. Like you can see the intentions are well, but it might be that exactly harming them by keeping them away from their own interest in things that might seem scary or morbid or or whatever. Yeah. Yeah. And I didn't, you know, I didn't go into this trying to, I'm not a clinical psychologist. I didn't go into this like trying to find a practical implication of very much an impractical theoretical like love just to play with ideas person. Um but it but it it just came about as I started studying this. I was like, man, this could I well to be honest, like how part of the reason it came about is because I would interview horror fans. I would read through, you know, threads where they had written about like why they like

horror and what it does for them. And this kept coming up over and over and over again that, like, well, when I'm anxious, I seek out horror movies and it helps me. And you read that once or twice, and you're like, okay, you know, there's natural variation in people that's bound to happen in someone, probably. Um, but you see it like a lot. No. So it's almost like self-medication, like in the same way if you go to an AA meeting, there's a lot of people with anxiety disorders that are undiagnosed, and maybe the same thing for horror movies, although they're doing much better than ethanol soaked people because they're just, you know, watching fiction. Yeah. Yeah. It's like popping an advil when you get a headache, you know?

It's um and so I thought, okay, well, like this is there's like way too many people saying this for this to be just natural variation in whatever trait, right? Like this seems like there's something going on here. And and most people didn't consciously understand that. Some some did, but most people didn't consciously understand that. And then I came across this paper. Um, it's really one of the only ones I've seen that was like this, but it was a paper published in I want to say like 2006 or seven. And these researchers, they were media psychology researchers, and they set up a booth outside of a blockbuster uh for those young people who are in the world. For those who know, yeah, that was back in the day when you put cassette tapes in.

This is uh and you had to go to a store to get movies. So yeah, this is a uh brick and mortar Netflix store. Yeah. Um yeah, they set up a booth outside of a blockbuster. And when people came into the store, they would ask them how they're feeling. You know, they want to know basically they wanted to know how does your current mood impact the kind of movie you're gonna rent, right? And so they would give them these mood questionnaires. They would go in, they would rent the movie. When they came out, they would say, hey, can you show us what movie you rented? And they went in expecting that people would try to, if they were feeling like sad, they would try to find a happy movie to regulate their mood.

They're feeling anxious, they would again try to find kind of a happy movie. If they were feeling um, I think what was it was like if they were feeling uh joyous, they would try to find like find a comedy movie. I didn't really follow their hypotheses very well because it's not the framework that I used. Um, but the important point here is that they they predicted that people who were feeling anxious when they went in uh would seek out something like a happy movie or a comedy to try to relieve that anxiety, which is advice that you give to people when they're anxious, like, oh, go escape into a film, like go watch a happy movie, go watch a comedy. Um, and what they found was the exact opposite.

People who were anxious going in were the only people who are more likely to rent horror movies. Um, and at first I was like, well, maybe you know they were anxious because they knew they were gonna rent a horror movie. Like maybe that's I was trying to like, you know, steel man out a little bit. I was like, well, maybe they were anxious because they uh knew they were gonna rent a horror movie, and that made them feel anxious about how scared they were gonna be. But then I thought, well, that would make that person a very clinically anxious person if they were already anxious before they even rented the movie, like they must have very high trait anxiety, right? Like if you're already feeling anxious before you rent it.

Um, so in either case, it seems that feeling anxious or a tendency for anxiety does tend to correlate with an interest in watching something that makes you feel anxious. Um, so that kind of led me down this path of like, okay, well, maybe there's something going on here. Maybe there's some kind of mechanism that's being triggered in anxious people that makes them one seek out things that are scary or safe, scary or scary play, and two can actually help them calm down. Yeah, it's such a a beautiful example of how taking an evolutionary functional perspective uh can bring new insights and practical insights as well. Because if you're just thinking about anxiety as just this mental substance of badness and

we just have to get rid of the badness, well then you're gonna fail to understand what anxiety is and how to treat it clinically. But if you understand that anxiety exists for a reason, it has a Darwinian function, uh it's a mechanism uh that that is there because it helped our ancestors survive and reproduce in some way, well then you you you start to think about what why is it there? What is it doing? Uh and and the answer is well it's it's there to help uh help us think about and learn about and manage and navigate dangerous threatening things. And the way to give the anxiety what it wants is to give us uh you know lessons and knowledge about dangerous things. Like that's ultimately what it's motivating us to do.

It's motivating us to figure out what's dangerous, what's threatening, learn about it, master it, navigate it, and deal with it. And if you're preventing the anxiety from doing that, well the anxiety is never going to go away. The way to feed it is to actually it's going to grow. Exactly. Until you start. Yeah. Yeah. Rosemary's Baby is one of the super scary movies. And one of the things that makes it so scary is when she's saying like there's this horrible thing happening. Everyone's like, no, no, no. It's all fine. Don't worry about it. And it's like, you know, like if you know there's a threat and somebody is telling you, like, and everyone around you is like, let's let's just like relax. That's a horror movie, right?

Like, exactly. So, no, I love that idea that like the autonomy of um power over things that scare you is is the way around anxiety is a great point, David. Yeah, and I think that goes back to when we were talking about like what makes a horror movie. Well, in Rosemary's baby, there's no big scary antagonist. So, how could it be a horror? Well, like she's very vulnerable because she's obviously experiencing an entirely different reality, right? So again, I think our mind's intuition is to say something supernatural, something we can't access is causing this disturbance, like in our world and in my reality. And I think that again maps onto things like diseases that cause us to not think clearly,

or to score schizophrenia, or things like where our perception of the world is just completely shifted and doesn't match what everyone is telling us. Yeah. And it's sort of a mature view of the world. Like even, I mean, Francis Steen, uh, who I'm not sure what we have to look up, where Francis Steen is, but he had this thing. I remember he would talk, he gave a talk when I was a grad student at UCSB, where he talked about how if you think about what you do when you play with your kid, most of it is predation. So like if you tickle your child, I even I'm so acutely aware of this. And this is like this is like real-time prediction of like what would be the most vulnerable parts of my child, and like you know, it's like belly and like like and that is

like my son laughs hysterically, right? And it's like it's play around like sort of like preventing predation or like you know, like chasing after a kid. Like what what adults naturally do is pretend it's ratcheted down predation. And that's like what what like a human universal of sort of like adult child play that involves like huge laughter. So I think it's a very mature view of the world to sort of be like danger and hazards and like really the the the morbid part of life is really also part of like the hilarity and joy of life too. It's like you don't have to choose between them. And it's okay to give people who are anxious or scared or feel underpowered like fiction or like or give them like stories that might feel unsafe.

Like I think this this notion that we need to keep people safe from the bad things in life, it really sounds like what you're saying is that that's super counterproductive or maybe counterproductive. Yeah, there's a good uh Neil Gaiman quote. And I don't know if he and I'll probably butcher it a little bit because I don't have it in front of me, but I I think he pulled it from somewhere else too. Anyway, the idea it was something along the lines of um, you know, stories aren't great because they tell kids dragons exist, they're great because they tell them how to slay the dragon, right? Right like horror stories aren't great because they tell you they it's not aren't great because they tell you how awful things they can can be.

They're you know good because they tell you how to overcome those awful things. Or in the case of many horror stories, what to avoid to uh what to not do to avoid succumbing to those awful things. Yeah. So you you have some really interesting empirical evidence for for this hypothesis that that horror helps us deal with awful things. So um I'm thinking of your paper about um pandemics. And so this was uh uh during the COVID pandemic, um you looked at whether people had watched horror movies about pandemics and you looked to see whether whether people who had watched those horror movies about pandemics how they uh fared during the pandemic compared to people who had not consumed those those movies.

So what what did you find there? Yeah I mean uh that came in part I was bummed because when the pandemic hit like everyone else all my in person stuff had to stop and I had this really great study with like a cabinet of morbid curiosities I devised and it was an eye tracking study. It was like the study I was most excited about in my PhD. And I got, you know, essentially canceled because of that. Um, but it ended up being uh, you know, good a good thing in some ways because I got this idea about, well, if I'm in a pandemic, it's kind of a scary thing. Everybody's experiencing it. I wonder if that's related to morbid curiosity and uh and coping and sort of scary play. And so I ran this like very simple study.

It was not, you know, the study that I was doing was like comp it was like methodologically complex. It had a lot of moving parts. It was interesting. This was just like an online study with people who are experiencing a thing in the world and measuring their psychological resilience and some of their traits. It was like a very straightforward study. But it's what I could do during the pandemic, especially in those early months of like April and May of 2020. And um yeah, I found that people who were horror fans, even after controlling four big five personality traits, income, gender, age, uh, they were more likely to be um have to to report higher psychological resilience to uh the early months of the pandemic

when when things were very unknown and the world actually was like pretty scary. Like in in April, when they were like, hey, we have a global pandemic for the first time in a long time, probably in anyone's lifetime that's living. Um, horror fans were doing a little better than other people. Uh, we also found that people who had seen just one pandemic movie didn't have to have watched a hundred or five of them or whatever. If you had just seen one pandemic movie, you were more likely to be more resilient, uh, psychologically resilient, sort of exhibit signs of psychological resilience to the to the pandemic. Um and then of course people who scored high and treat warm curiosity, again, controlling

for things like extroversion, conscientiousness, even neuroticism, um, income, age, gender, uh, they were more likely to be to experience positive resilience in the face of the pandemic. That's awesome. So what so let's I I want to unpack what what you mean by psychological resilience. So what what what is that? How did you measure it? Yeah, there's there's a lot of ways to measure that. And I, you know, um it's hard to do with a short questionnaire, regardless of how you do it, right? Um, but there were a ton of uh resilience scales, even even to like uh disasters. There were like disaster resilience scales that were out there. The problem is a lot of those are a lot of disasters are one time events, a tornado, a

hurricane, a fire, an earthquake, um, you know, a mass shooting, whatever it might be. They're like these one time events. And it's like, how are you coping with this a week later, a month later, a year later? With the pandemic, it was like this ongoing thing that, you know, we were getting new information every day, but it was becoming more confusing by the day. Um, so there wasn't a good scale that captured that. And so we took, we took kind of the good items, the items that worked from these validated resilience scales of, you know, are you losing sleep uh more than usual? Are you feeling more anxious than usual? Are you feeling more depressed than usual? Um, how how are you feeling about the future?

Are you feeling positive about your, you capabilities of uh succeeding in the future? Uh, we took some of those items that were good and we added a few more or changed the wording a little bit if it was if it seemed like it was uh too pinpointed to a one-time event to make it like in the past week, how have you felt right? And then we ran a study in April and we ran one again a month later with the same participants in uh in May, and um found that again, people who were horror fans or more really curious were not losing as much sleep, not feeling as anxious, not feeling as depressed, feeling optimistic about the future. Um, just generally having, I guess, like, I don't want to say a positive attitude about it,

but they were just like less um affected by things that everyone was being affected by with the pandemic that made their life miserable, like being being locked in your apartment or your house for weeks at a time and not know what's not knowing what's going on in general, uh, the kind of anxiety that that induces. Hmm. Interesting. I mean, do you think what's going on there is that um people who have thought about or or consumed fiction about pandemics, they have a greater sense of like number one, what it is, how bad is it, how to deal with it, what they should be doing. And that knowledge um makes them feel better about it, that they can better navigate it. If if things got worse, they would know what to do.

Whereas if you if you know nothing about what's going on, um you just kind of default to panic and you're just trying to and and you you get into this generalized anxiety state where something bad is happening and you don't understand it and you don't know what to do about it. And you're just trying to grope at something, anything you could learn or something, anything you could do. But but presumably the people who have practiced uh thinking about these things in a safe context, they will will have already learned things and already know something about what they could be doing. Uh and that and that makes them manage the situation better. I think that's exactly right. I think there I think there are two things going on.

I think that's one of the main ones, right? And that's such a simple thing that you could come up with without doing a study. So like intuition, you could say, like, oh yeah, well, knowing what a pandemic is like helps you deal with the pandemic. But it's like, that's actually a really important insight if it's like, well, they watched the movie Contagion and now they feel better about a real thing that's happening. Like that's an important insight for uh this idea that that scary stories can actually help us deal with things in the real world, right? Um, and one that hadn't been shown in any kind of way that I could find. I think the other thing that was going on is what we talked about a moment ago of uh

particularly with with horror fans, um, they or morbidly curious people, they uh have practiced, implicitly practiced feeling anxious and feeling afraid in a lot of different scenarios. And so they might be a little bit better at just regulating, they might be feeling those feelings of anxiety, but they might be a little better at regulating them than the average person or than someone who's not morbidly curious at all or does never watches horror movies. Yeah, can we translate for one of the things and we do, because we're evolutionary psychologists, is sort of translating these intuitive constructs into sort of software level descriptions. This is this is a hard ass, but like when when we're talking about emotion regulation or of

able to regulate, um, do you have a thought or either of you? I mean, I I have thoughts too, but like can we think about sort of what what that what does that mean, sort of in terms of like the underlying software? I think um off the cuff, I would say like let's just look at anxiety, because that's normally what we're talking about with these kinds of things. Though there's a lot of different emotions you could regulate. That's typically the one that if you go to therapy, you're trying to regulate. Um a lot of what that is, is uh like mechanistically, there's um thinking about uh re reappraising the situation, right? So I guess at a software level, like taking a second pass using a different algorithm and

seeing if uh if what you're really experiencing is really what as bad as you think it is. There's um sort of mistaking facts for feelings is something that a lot of anxious people do where they say, like, if it feels this bad, it must be that bad. And so reevaluating that and saying, like, well, just because it feels this bad, like I'm watching a scary movie and I'm feeling really terrified, but nothing bad is happening. So again, kind of a reevaluation of of what's going on. Um, and then there's kind of just a dampening of feelings of anxiety. And I don't know what that would look like from uh like a software analogy, but kind of uh I guess requiring a larger input, maybe. Um, though I think that's that's it's not quite right, but something like that, where it's

like, you know, you're essentially you're receiving the input, um, but there's kind of a filter you're passing it through saying, like, you know, for every two bits I get, only give me one bit of information or something, um, where you're dampening that signal because you know consciously that it's not as bad. You're mistaking your facts for feelings or feelings for facts. Um, but I'd I'd be curious to hear what you think. Because I I hadn't thought about that about emotion regulation from that sort of software perspective. Yeah. What do you think, David? So that's interesting. So the way I'm starting to think of it now, just in this moment talking to you, is that um there when you're stressed or anxious, um, your your body starts producing

cortisol, which you know fills you with energy, you know. Uh um so it it's uh it's it's preparing you to deal with with with with whatever physiologically demanding threat is in front of you. But there is a kind of computational problem where there where where you have to figure out, well, how much energy do I need? How bad is this threat? How much cortisol should I release? Uh and there's a lot that's an inherently computational problem. You have to learn things uh uh about your environment, you have to process all all the different cues, you have to reason about uh the the different cues. Uh and and so there are many ways that you could get that problem wrong. You could produce too much cortisol and and mobilize too much energy, which is wasting a

really metabolically critical resource, or you could not burn enough energy uh when when you really need it to deal with this situation. And so you could think of emotion regulas regulation as just trying to get the balance right. So you're learning about what the threat is, how bad it, how bad it is, how much energy you need to deal with it, you know, what are the the types of things you need to uh what what are the cognitive uh uh um processes that need to be activated to deal with this threat. Um and and that's sort of what I think of. So the the more frequently you deal with the threat, the more you learn about it, the more you de the more you understand like, you know, how bad is it? How much energy do I need to burn?

What do I need to be thinking about? What are the steps I need to be taking? Um that that's sort of how I'm starting to think of it right now. Do you do you buy that? Uh yeah. I mean, I think that's essentially right, right? It's kind of this again, I think there's the you know, you can receive as input, uh, physiological signals and and and perceptions of things. Uh, but there's also this like you, you know, humans are really good at receiving as input their own imaginations and imagining, like, well, wait a minute, what about this? Like like counterexamples, then that can serve as its own input into these to to put the brakes on these kind of things, put the brakes on the cortisol production, on your

adrenaline production, on your general sympathetic arousal. Um so probably what it is is this kind of top down, like second, second screening or second viewing of what's going on, and then receiving input from that, almost like running two experiments, like the experiment of how I'm feeling, like, well, I'm feeling this way. So that's some input that something is wrong. But then you can kind of run this other imaginary experiment of like, well, I'm also sitting on my couch and that thing's on a TV, and that's getting its own input into those same mechanisms, that the same threat management mechanisms that's probably dampening some of that. And I think you can learn to exercise a little bit of, I guess, control uh over flipping

that a second screening on or off. Yeah. Here's here's another hypothesis. I'm curious what you think about this. Um, could it be that uh with with anxiety um and fear that there is a vulnerability for positive feedback loops to to start happening. So, like when you put a microphone in front of a speaker, you get that shrill, piercing sound because the sound comes out of the speaker and goes into the microphone, which gets amplified, which goes back into the microphone, which gets amplified again until the sound grows to this horrible shrieking sound. But uh it could be that there are similar kinds of feedback processes to the inputs and outputs of an emotion. So the outputs of an emotion could be in some circumstances perceived as an input to that

same emotion. So one of the outputs of fear is physiological arousal, but physiological arousal could also be an input to fear. It could be a cue that, you know, um uh something wrong is happening with your body. You know, a lot of symptoms of you know pathogens or illness or poisoning can cause physiological arousals. You know, feeling feverish, you know, the uh is is, you know, one example of how uh you uh physiological arousal could be um uh a cue of danger itself. You mentioned how people mistake facts for feelings where they use their physiological arousal as a cue that something is really dangerous in the environment, which could then increase the physiological arousal, which could increase the cue that something dangerous

is happening and you could get into a kind of feedback loop there. And so it could be that because the inputs to our emotions are so complex and contextualized, that the input can often become the output, which becomes the input, which becomes the output. And what it means to regulate an emotion is to figure out when you're getting into those kinds of feedback loops uh and and avoid getting into them so that you can uh uh harness the emotion more effectively and and practically. Does that do you buy that? Yeah, I think so. I mean, I think that uh that seems essentially correct. I think there are a lot of reasons why, like you said, input uh outputs of something like fear, the common outputs of it, the physiological outputs, um, the c even the cognitive

outputs, uh, should serve as inputs for fear, right? Because our bodies are quicker to detect uh our bodies and minds are are quickly detect things sometimes before our conscious awareness grabs onto them. You know, you think about uh just like those studies with like millisecond reactions to whatever angry faces or snakes or all kinds of other things. Um we react very quickly and and subconsciously to threats. And then if that gets ratcheted, if that turns on the threat management, the vigilance, um, before we can really catch it, then that serves as its own input like, hey, something is wrong, but I don't see what it is yet. Let me turn up my vigilance more, let me turn up my uh my fear more.

And you just get in this like cycle, like you said, of uh, well, if if I'm being activated this much, something must be wrong. And it's really hard to kind of push the brakes on that or provide a secondary input that would downregulate that. Yeah. Just to sort of resummarize, I think what what we're all saying, or what you guys are saying, is that, and this is sort of the way I think about it, is you know, because we're so we have such a complicated cognitive architecture, one of the problems is this sort of problem of like relevance of sort of like of all the machinery, which machinery should be used for any particular task or event. And one of the problems is not often too little, but too many systems.

So, for example, I'm sure both of you have had this experience of like if you're performing, you get really nervous and scared and you do worse, right? Because I'm not just thinking about catching the ball or like singing the song. I'm worried about what people are going to think about me. I'm noticing the people's reaction. If I'm teaching it, I'm noticing the students' reaction. And so a lot of sort of like getting better at things is sort of running through this system of there's a system that's sort of like corraling different cognitive systems for this task. And then it's sort of this sampling of like, if we, if we were, if we take the system out, do we do better or worse? You know, and I think some of fear and some of what we're talking about is um

what a emotional regulation is is that process right where it's sort of like you in this also people talk about this in in real context of if you automate things so you know people who respond to really life or death situations like a lifeguard or police officer or the military or like um or even like you know I used to wrestle you know like you would just do these things where a lot of times if somebody is like in a situation where there's a natural disaster or somebody shooting at you, people don't respond well. And the reason why is because it's quote unquote taking them a long time to process what's happening and what to do about it. And so what you want to do is practice or train ahead of time to automate these are the

systems, this is the set of algorithms to turn on in this situation. And what anxiety is, or what emotional regulation is, is that system or that procedure for sort of figuring out which cocktail or which combination of systems are the sweet spot for this kind of situation. And the thing about worrying about the crowd when you're singing or trying to catch the ball is you're too nervous, right? And that's like, and then so like what that regulation system is doing is snipping out uh worrying about that. And then it becomes automated. That uh that extra like corraling system sort of turns off or gets good at it. And then it's like we're good enough at this. That's that I think that's maybe a way of summarizing what we're talking about in software

level terms. Yeah. And I think that goes back to what I'd mentioned earlier about it's really hard to actively worry about two things at once. Right. And so you're either worrying about what people are thinking about you when you're performing, or you're worrying about like what you need to be doing to perform well. Right. Right. And if you're if you're doing the former, you're probably going to mess up. You're not going to perform as well as you as you should be doing because you can't focus on that because you're too consumed by the worry of what people are going to think, or what happens if you fail, or what happens if you forget to do something. That's right. Yeah. No, I think that description of sort of like I'm distracted or I'm worried about something

else is the experience of that software system not being calibrated right yet. Yeah. Yeah. You're learning what to worry about and how worried you should be about it. I think is one way to do that. And I think playing with fearful things and putting yourself in in situations where you're you're getting inputs that you're worried, whether that's like spinning around in circles quickly or climbing a tree as a kid or playing tag or being chased by someone or watching a scary movie or going through a haunted house, there are a lot of different ways to get that feeling. I think that they work particularly well when they're embedded in a story because we tend to be kind of narrative creatures first.

Like every other creature on earth experiences things first person. And so our minds, I think, are, and I think Steen might have actually been the person who said this. I think it was a Steen and Owens paper that our minds are are just phylogenetically, I mean, we are really good at um figuring things out when they're in a first person narrative, which is probably why stories are compelling and why we can learn really well from stories and don't learn very well from facts. Because every other piece of machinery in the human brain for millions of years is adapted to learning things first person. Right. And so when you tell a really good first person story and you embed lessons in it, we learn it really easily and really quickly.

And we don't even feel like we're learning. It just is enjoyable. Right. I think that's why uh horror is somewhat uniquely suited for teaching us how to feel afraid and feel anxious and overcome those feelings. Yeah. It's almost like, you know, we we tend to think of learning as as solely about learning a list of facts, but there's another, perhaps even more important kind of learning, which is how to uh regulate and organize and arrange your emotions, right? Because that's because there's no way that natural c selection can know in advance like the exact right configuration of all of your cognitive and physiological and motivational states, uh, you know, that is that is correct for the situation you're in.

You have to learn. You have to learn about the situation and and and and sort of take stuff out, sample different parts of it, as Dave said. Uh, and so emotions themselves, we like to think of it as sort of the opposite of reason and learning. But I think emotions also need to need practical experience. You need to learn how to deal with them and how to organize them uh in response to uh particular context, uh, which I think is is a really important lesson from your work. Yeah, well, and and I think that's a general lesson, probably, from evolutionary psychology, just that uh emotions are many times ecologically rational. And if you can understand that ecological ecological rationality, you understand when it

goes wrong or when it misfires, when it shouldn't, especially, you know, we're living, it's not that's not a not not my idea, obviously, but we're living in a very different world than what our ancestors lived in for most of their history, right? And so um there are going to be some mismatches when it comes to, in particular, uh, you know, these uh emotion systems that evolved under um fairly similar circumstances for you know tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands or even millions of years. Yeah. And people often talk about it's scary to confront your emotions. And I wonder if it's the same underlying logic, right? Where it's it's a similar thing where it's sort of like um in in the same way, maybe we

shouldn't let kids avoid all risk or scary things. You know, maybe one point is that um, you know, uh be let let like feel emotions and sort of uh don't run away from that that feeling, right? Yeah. And I think um there's this common, I don't know if it's like actually what therapists tell people or if it's what you know people on social media say therapists say. Um but you know, you should you should feel your feelings and you should um but but there's there's a pretty big leap from you should feel your feelings and understand what they are from that to that means they are okay, right? Because then you fall into that trap of mistaking feelings for facts. And it's like, because I felt this, I am justified in behaving this way or feeling this way

or reacting in this way. And it's like, that's not quite what that should mean. What it should mean is that you should feel the feeling, understand what it is, try to understand why it happened and like, and then the next and crucial step is kind of what we talked about here with their emotion regulation. is that how I should be feeling? Is that the best response I could have? And if not, how can I change that? How what parts can I take in and out or turn on and off to kind of adjust that? Yeah. Are there people, do you know, are there people sort of in evolutionary psychiatry? Um, uh, where so I mean, I think knowing about what the function of emotions are is a way to sort of distance the emotion from your own experience.

And then it, or at least it gives you something of like, so for example, we talked about what anxiety, what the function of anxiety is, and maybe even knowing that information the next time, like, you know, or like when I feel anxiety, like knowing that I know that, it gives me something to think about. It's like, what is that thing out in the world that my brain is sort of latching onto? It's a way to sort of like step back from just experiencing the emotion to sort of, you know, it's sort of, you know, cognitive behavioral therapy, but thinking about like what what it, you know, but it but it's a way to sort of armchair cognitive behavioral therapy yourself is to just have some functional theory of an emotion.

I wonder, have people looked at that? I mean, maybe I I'm not too sure. I think um, you know, one that would work really well. Like Aaron Sell has done an excellent job of like decomposing anger and we talked about it in Uber. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. And I think that would be a great first place to start with that because I think, you know, because of him, like yeah, that's helped me like think about anger in an entirely different way. And I I think probably it would I could imagine that being useful in a therapeutic context, you know? Yeah. Um, just again understanding that and then being able to kind of think about because then you can think about, you can take that second perspective. You can provide the new inputs and say, well, I'm feeling this way probably because X, Y,

Z, but really their behaviors were ABC. And so I shouldn't be feeling this way. Yeah. Um, and you can kind of begin to, I think, regulate those kinds of emotions. Yeah. One one easy question that probably a lot of you get asked a lot is like, how does somebody start studying morbid curiosity? Were you attacked by a clown as a child? Or or is No, no. I mean, I I've always kind of liked scary things, but I it's not like I went to school and I thought, okay, I'm gonna study, you know, why I'm interested in this and why why we love horror movies. When I when I was in grad school, I like most young fresh grad students, I was just interested in like everything. And and I still kind of am to some extent, but you know, you kind of have to pick a thing

and uh and study it a little more deeply. And so I at first I got interested in why people were interested in violence. So why why do we have like in almost every society across the world throughout time, violence is mostly punished and abhorred, but there are certain cases where it's where it's okay and where it's celebrated. And so that was really interesting to me, like how we make this distinction between violence that's okay and violence that's not okay, because it seems like such a a thing that like should be so black and white, you know. Um, like if anything is black and white, like incredible violence or murdering someone, that that that should be it, right? But it's like, well, it depends.

If it's in a Coliseum in front of 80,000 cheering Romans, maybe it's okay. So I was interested in why how we made those distinctions. And I did this eye tracking study to kind of see do people like look at the scenes differently? Do they describe them differently if it's violent or not violent or they're not sure? Um and then I started thinking, well, you know, it's kind of weird that we sometimes enjoy violence. It's we kind of scare our and violence can be scary. And like, well, we also kind of scare ourselves sometimes for fun. And then I was like, well, I do that too, right? Like, I also like scary things. Um, and so I started looking through the literature and I didn't really find any explanations for why we do that.

Uh Matthias Clayson was the only one who'd really done any work on this. This was in like 2016 or so, 2017 maybe. Um yeah, I think Paul Bloom had some sort of like ideas, but I don't think he did much of the work. Yeah, I don't think there was no and there really wasn't much written about it even. I mean, you know, Pinker had like a line or two in his book on it or something, you know, on the blank slate, I think, or maybe the blank slate or maybe one of his other one of his other how the mind works or something. It may have been how the mind works. Yeah. And Paul Duman has some stuff like on his his psych book, which I use for my intro psych class, which is a great book, psych. It's like but uh but yeah.

But that came out that came out much later. Very recently, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That came out like in the last two years, I think. This would have been like, you know, almost ten years ago now. No, for sure. Yeah, yeah. Um and there's nobody was doing it except this Danish literature scholar. And so I reached out to him and I because he was interested in like horror literature and like what makes horror literature horror literature. And um I reached out to him. I said, Hey, you're the only person I can find that is doing anything like this. Do you want to chat sometime? And so he's like, Yeah, well, in fact, I'm doing a haunted house study here in Denmark. Why don't you come over and and do it with me this fall.

And I was like, okay. So I went to Denmark and I stayed there for about a month. And uh it was the start of a very long and fruitful collaboration with him. And this is before he'd even started the recreational fear lab, sort of properly. And um, yeah, so that's kind of how I got into it. And then, you know, I was talking to my advisor one day. I think I was probably a second year or something, and I was getting ready to sit down and sort of think about what I was going to do for my dissertation proposal. And I said, well, you know, Dario, I've got this project on violence. And I've got this project with the haunted house and fear and like why people are interested in scary things and violence.

And he was like, well, it sounds kind of like morbid curiosity. And I was like, well, yeah, I guess that's right. And then I started looking up morbid curiosity and I was like, well, nobody's really done anything with this. Like there's no, there are no pay psychological papers on this. There was like one paper from the 80s that took a very narrow conception of what it might be. And then nobody ever validated the scale and it was barely cited. So I was like, nobody has really tackled this. And it's related to a lot of different things that I was doing. Um, I had that paper I mentioned earlier with Anne Fessler about gruesomeness. We had just kind of started that, like, why are people sometimes gruesomely violent?

And so I just had all these topics that eventually became fitted to that broader concept. And it just ended up being then, you know, okay, well, I'll try to figure out what this if these are related in some kind of way. That's awesome. It's a great example of how an evolutionary perspective uh allows you to ask good questions uh and and discover low-hanging fruit that no one else has plucked. Like it's kind of crazy to me. You know, that you know, psychology has been around for what, more than a century now? Uh and uh and nobody uh has really looked at this huge aspect of the human experience, which is our fascination with the macabra and with darkness and violence. Like, that's crazy to me. Like it was crazy to me.

I thought I was wrong. I thought I was like, Am I missing an entire portion of the literature that I'm just not, you know, seeing somewhere? But it was just that it was one of those things people just took for granted, I guess, or like, I don't know, one of those things it's like it's so obvious, let's not look into it, which tend to be the most fruitful areas for especially evolutionary psychology. Um, and and I get now, I mean, emails all the time from from like undergrads and now graduate students who are like, Well, I think I'm gonna do my thesis on this. I'm like, please do. There's like so much low-hanging fruit. Like, I can't I can't do it all myself at all. Like, there's so much just like simple questions, simple studies you could do that would be

really impactful and really interesting. Um even with true crime, it was like I was blown away that like there was only like one empirical side paper on true crime when I started studying this. Right. It was like from 2013. It was one. It was really good, but there was only one. And it's like that is such a phenomenal. Like hundreds of millions of dollars are spent on this. And and hundreds of millions of people consume it. And like we don't understand why. You know. And I think it's just because people have these intuitions, like, oh, they do it because they glorify because they like to glorify violence or what the things that just are like a made-up, like made-up explanations that nobody has ever tested.

Um, and it turns out when you start thinking about it a little more clearly and testing some of these ideas, you can come up with some really fascinating explanations that then can lead to, you know, uh a bunch of other insights. Right. Respect the phenomenon. Yeah. Totally. I mean, it's it's a it's you know, uh it it's a you know, it echoes what I said in uh an earlier episode we did on how to do good evolutionary psychology. I think that might have been it, where um, you know, a common criticism you hear about evolutionary psychology is that it tells just so stories and that they're untestable and there's no way to, you know, uh make predictions with an evolutionary perspective. And my experience actually being in the field and doing evolutionary psychology research is

that I have the exact opposite problem, is that it makes too many predictions. And there are too many ways to test this. And I just there aren't enough hours in the day. I wish I had a whole army of researchers to go out and test these predictions, just so fruitful and so rich. And uh that that to me is more of the problem is that we just don't have enough resources to go out and test all these ideas. Um do you have you had a similar experience, Colton? Having it right now. I mean it's just like anyone uh anyone listening to this that wants to throw funding my way, I will uh do t I will I will multiply by five the number of experiments I'm currently running. Um yeah it's it's really just a time and money thing.

It's not even I mean there's just so much interesting stuff or like you know finding people it's more fun to to do studies with in my opinion with other people it's like finding people who are also interested in this and um yeah I I've just it's it's really more of at least in in my narrow area that I work in uh at least that I primarily work in uh it's mostly just a time and resources thing not a not a failure of predictions not a failure of um not being able to come up with experiments to test it, you know. Um yeah. Yeah. The so uh the behavioral or the what what is the recreational the what is the recreational fear lab yeah the recreational fear okay you have to explain so that I'm can you explain

that and then that's a lead into if people are interested in like your work what sure where can they come across this stuff and what what exists and are I know there's some uh things or events that are maybe planned too so can you talk a little bit about this yeah Yeah. So I mean, like I said, I I got hooked up with Matthias Clazen, who now is uh director of the Recreational Fear Lab. Um great name Recreational Fear Lab. So how can you not be curious about a lab called a Recreational Fear Lab? If you had just wear that as a t shirt, people will be like, What is that? Yeah. I think they do have T shirts. You might uh I I know I know I certainly have a hoodie with it on there, so I'm pretty sure

they have t shirts. Um, yeah, so it's a it's a lab that Matias started to study in in Aarhus, Denmark, to uh study why and how we engage with scary play. And um, I've collaborated with them a lot over the years, more so in my PhD. I used to, I would go there, you know, for several weeks at a time, usually in October and do haunt studies in haunted houses. They were kind of these like ways for us to do field experiments on fear that in ways that you can't induce in the lab, ethically or even like practically. Um, and for us to get like really cool uh data, everything from physiology to eye tracking to hormones to whatever. Um so I worked with them for a long time. Um you know still am close with them but I'm not like officially uh affiliated with their

lab. Um but yeah what were what were the other questions? I'm sorry I forgot oh just so where can they find my work? Yeah yeah yeah yeah um I mean my so my website if you just type in www.colton scrivener.com I've got all of my publications. As soon as they are available, I put them up as a PDF there. Um, there's a link to my Substack, so morbidly curious thoughts. This is kind of where I usually so I actually, this paper I mentioned earlier with Edgar about formidability and horror, the horror genre started as a Substack post that I posted a while back. And Edgar read it. He's like, hey, we should do a study on this. And I was like, I would love to, you know. Uh and it ended up being like one of my favorite papers that I've ever worked on because it

just came from this this idea that I had that I got to write about. So on my sub stack, I write about things like that that like, oh, this is like kind of an interesting, cool idea or something I've been thinking about, but it's not something usually that I've published about. Or if I have, I take the thing I published about and I kind of expand it and and think about it a little more freely than you can in in an academic paper. Um, and then of course I have a book out on October 7th today, um, called Morbidly Curious, Scientist Explains Why We Can't Look Away. And it is uh a very it's it's an interesting book because it's it's very much a popular science book. You can read it without having any kind of special degree or anything like that.

Um, but there's a lot of stuff in it that even people who study topics very similar to mine will have not seen before because I I was able to treat it as kind of an exploration, almost like my sub stack, like an exploration of lots of ideas that I've been thinking about and tying all those ideas, many of them that are not in academic papers yet, um, tying them together to this sort of more general core theory of of why we're intrigued by the macabre. Um so there's a lot of like new stuff in there if you're a scientist, but also uh very should be very easily accessible to to anyone. Um but yeah, cool. It's uh it's a it's a wonderful book. I was fortunate enough to um read an advanced copy of it.

Um it's really readable, enjoyable, lots of fun examples from pop culture and also lots of really good science as well. So I I recommend everyone who's listening to to pick up a copy. Thank you. That means a lot. It was uh first it was it was it was weird getting I never thought, not that I never thought I'd write a book, but I certainly didn't think I'd write one this soon, you know. Um and I was kind of scared at first to do it because it was like again, a lot of these ideas I had not published on yet. And you're kind of taught in science, like if you if there's not, you know, published papers for this, you can't talk about it. Um, it was cool to kind of like mix like here's like what I have empirical evidence for,

and then here's all these fun ideas that I'm I'm pretty sure about, but I haven't done the studies yet. Again, because not because of a lack of uh ability to come up with experiments or or have testable predictions, but just time and resources. And uh yeah, if you do read it and there's fun ideas in there, please do those studies. Yeah. Please feel free. We we've talked to a lot of uh evolutionary behavioral scientists, and I think almost every single one, um, with there are exceptions, but almost every single one sort of found it by reading a book. Like it wasn't by reading, like almost always like a book. Like there's something about books that I think, you know, it really like it changes people's lives.

So, you know, like there's just something about like the whole package of ideas that really gets people. And I've heard that um, you know, many people talk about it was a book that really changed the course of my life. So yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, uh I, you know, I I read when I was uh an undergraduate why zebras don't get ulcers. And that was like my book where it just opened my eyes by Rob Robert Sapolski. Yeah. Just opened my eyes to this like new way to think about human existence just generally. Right. Um, and so that was like super influential. And I came from again, like you said, a book where he, you know, talked about he's he certainly cites the sources. He has a lot of sources he cites, but he, you know, takes some some creative liberty to

think about new ideas in it. And I think those are some of the more enriching, interesting places because you really have freedom as a as an author to I guess think out loud in some ways. Yeah. Or think think along with your audio, with your audience, with your readers. Yeah. That you just don't get to do in in academic papers, or it's or it's relegated to like one sentence in the discussion. Right. Thanks to reviewer two. I can speculate about this at a footnote. Yeah, it's at a footnote. That's more likely. Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, is there anything we should have asked you? Um should have asked me. I don't know. I mean, uh, I think you asked me this is one of the more uh fun conversations that I've

had, I think, because both of you are evolutionary psychologists and I don't often uh do I do I do lots of podcasts, but I don't often do podcasts with evolutionary psychologists uh in discussion. And so um it was really fun to like break some of these ideas down in ways that you know I just haven't been able to do with with other other Yeah, I appreciate that. I mean, that's one of the reasons why we're doing it. Just, you know, it's just it's that's kind of what we're doing, you know, it's just get people a a a sense of what it's like if we were just all chatting together about what we do, you know. Like that's yeah. And I think I think evolutionary psychology is especially interesting in that way because

it's like sitting around with an engineer and having them think about like exactly how do we take this apart and like how do you know this works this way? Yeah. And we do the same thing but with the mind, right? And so it's like a very different way to sit around and just chat. It's very conducive to interesting discussions, I think, and generative, as David mentioned earlier. Like super can be super generative if you do it correctly and carefully and thoughtfully. Yeah. And it's just super cool. Uh I love that you're doing. I think like, you know, David's doing stuff about humor. We we had recorded recently the his about humor. I love that. You know, I I I study groups in conflict. You know, David does that too.

But like I think it's it's really important to stick to like foraging and mating and you know, survival. And even like I think there's still low-hanging fruit for even like stuff like parenting. But I also really like that there's good quality work getting into these more sort of more strange uh and less straightforward areas. Yeah. Um, and I'm really happy just as sort of like a watching the field grow that these things like humor or horror. Um, it's not just sort of like as we said, like bad or joking, like you know, ridiculous bad, just so stories, but it's actually starting to get empirical teeth and like sophisticated cognitive science basically of these things. And I just love that. Um, I'm always happy when somebody is like biting off like the serious cognitive science of

like a new area. And it's it's so thank you for doing that with this. Yeah. No, I mean, just you know, honestly, just kind of following what interested me, um, which is not always good advice, but I got lucky and it ended up being good advice for me. And uh, I think I'm I'm pretty fortunate that I'm I study I study something that um pretty much everyone has an opinion on and has experienced. And like it's easy for me to talk to someone at a as easy for me to talk to you guys, like you know, high-quality evolutionary psychologists in the field about this topic as it is for me to talk about like some stranger at a bar about this topic. And it's like everyone has experienced feeling morbidly curious at one time or another.

Everyone either usually loves or hates horror movies. Um, and so they have a lot of thoughts about why that is and uh have experiences with it. And so it's very easy to connect like this topic with just like grounded real things that people experience. And I think it's easy for like us to sit around and think about certain topics that are super interesting, but maybe don't feel relevant on their face to the average person. But I think I'm I'm lucky that I think my topic is not so much like that. Um, so it's super fun to to study because people I think can can access it quickly and have um, you know, uh in some in some cases, very generative thoughts about it. Like I said, the uh the whole idea about horror maybe being beneficial came from just

regular people, like non-scientists, talking about how they engage with it and what it does. Like that's where that idea came from. Yeah. Yeah. It's not, I mean, one of the themes of this podcast has been respecting people and not just sort of patronizing toward it in something like consuming horror, people who are anxious. It's really easy to just sort of or glorifying violence, right? It's just really easy to just sort of judge that and sort of treat it as like not worth our attention. Um, and I think that's exactly right. That that's exactly the wrong way to think about it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I I I will say your your work has uh shaped my life uh personally in terms of my relationship with my daughter, who as I mentioned at the beginning of the episode is very

morbidly curious. Um I I had an experience um a few nights ago where I I wanted to uh I was gonna watch James and the giant peach with her. So I I went into you know the Apple TV and typed in J A. And then the poster for Jaws came up with like the picture of of like the shark's mouth open. Yeah. And as soon as my daughter saw that, she's oh, I want to watch the shark movie. We watched the shark movie instead. And I had this like inner so she my daughter's three, she's three years old. And so I had this inner debate with myself, like, oh, is that shit? Should I watch Jaws? Like, is that gonna be too much for her? And then I had my inner Colton Scrivener telling me, Hey, you know what? This is actually a normal, healthy part of development that she's curious about this.

Um, let's give it a try. If it's too much, we can always turn it off. And I ended up and I ended up watching Jaws with her. And she was she's so into it. She loved it. And I it was funny. I was actually more scared than she was. She was just more kind of like riveted and curious. She was like asking all these questions about it. Um, and uh it was just like a really cool bonding experience. Um and I I appreciate you, you know, um allowing that to happen with me. And I'm sure I'll continue to enjoy, you know, horror movies with her and morbid curiosity with her as she grows up. Um and it's that's just been a really cool and special way that your work has affected my life. So I appreciate that actually means a lot.

That's uh that's good to hear and that means a lot. And I think like it would have been a different experience if she had come across it herself and watched it and might have been afraid and not been able to like have you next. Like having her father next to her is a very comfort. That's a comforting thing for a primate, right? Yeah. Uh and so I think it it also allows them you to tackle things that are maybe would it would have been a little more a little too scary for you initially, but now because you feel like you're in a secure spot, you can actually engage with them. Yeah. And maybe things that would have scared her, she's more willing to go to you with them. Yeah. As opposed to yeah, exactly.

Exactly. Yeah. Cool. I love that. Yeah. Awesome. Well, uh well, Colton, thank you so much for being with us. Uh really uh it's it's really just a fun, fun topic. And um I hope everybody has a good Halloween season here in October. Yeah. Thanks for having me on. It was a blast. Work on your costumes. If you're gonna make them. Uh uh, I've uh uh as a parent like spent a lot of time like last minute like creating a costume. Um so you know if you're gonna make it start now. That's my PSA. David. Well, we can end there. Okay, yeah. Thank you so much. This was fantastic. Yeah, this is super fun, really. Like one of the more fun uh discussions I've had with it. So cool. That's awesome. Yeah, no, we have we have a lot of fun uh typing.

So David, we just uh spent another couple hours together with a guest and uh that was a really fun episode. Um and I'm looking forward to the next one. I don't even know what the next one's gonna be because we haven't done it yet. Yeah, I don't know either. Could be could be Jordan Peterson. Could be uh Don't David, don't debase yourself like that. Come on. No, it could be could be Lita Cosby. Or could it could be a solo episode. Who knows? Yeah. Maybe just you and me. Yeah. That that could be scary. Yeah, that would be uh uh it would take the the frights to a whole another level. Yeah. Um anyway, but uh but thank you for listening. And David, what can people do to support the podcast um materially or

existentially? Um well, they can write us a kind review. Uh they can support us on Patreon, they can say, hey, this podcast is awesome on social media, but only if you truly believe that the podcast is awesome. We don't want you to lie on our behalf. So maybe that's the existentially relevant thing they can do is you can uh you think about whether you actually do like this podcast and whether it's serving a uh a greater purpose. And if so, uh maybe think about what your role to play is in that existential project of spreading knowledge and wisdom about humanity. This is a really grand uh outro. I like this. I feel like we should have some background music. Maybe if you write some inspiring orchestra music.

Yeah, should we play John Williams in the in the background of this part? Yeah. Um, but uh, but yeah, but thank you for listening. And yeah, please uh keep listening and uh please like and subscribe and uh and tell a friend or an enemy or a neutral third party. Or just randomly talk, shout at somebody in the street, just say Yeah, maybe if you if you don't like it, that's something you could do. Maybe tell your enemy to listen to it and then it's really great because then you'll waste your enemy's time. So that way every everybody wins. It's like trans. Oh that's interesting. Okay we might have to sketch that out later a little later date. Okay uh thanks again uh take care everybody see you next week yep