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Morbid curiosity is a "seemingly paradoxical drive to engage with aversive or grotesque stimuli."

Prior research has focused on the paradox of being driven to approach rather than avoid such stimuli.

The drive may actually be motivated by "uncertainty reduction" rather than the grotesqueness of the stimulus.

You’re at it again—doomscrolling your way through breakfast. You idly pluck at your plate of scrambled eggs as one apocalyptic tableau after another slides down the screen of your phone. And the vertical parade of calamity continues unabated until your attention snags on the horrifying image of some recent act of violence—the outrage du jour—and try as you might, you simply cannot look away. As your coffee cools and your eggs turn to yellow gelatin, you realize that you’ve lost yet another round in the ongoing battle with morbid curiosity.

Having been told that such a steady diet of negativity is bad for your mental health, you’ve tried to cut back on your consumption of digital death and destruction, and on this occasion as on so many others, you push the lock button on your phone with a feeling of defeat. But before you put that phone in your pocket and scold yourself for weakness, what if I were to tell you that the morbid curiosity that you feel so guilty about might not be a personal failing after all, but rather a survival adaptation tracing all the way back to your evolutionary roots as a human being? An article published recently in Psychological Review suggests that the proverbial inability of human beings to look away from a train........

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