Evolutionary psychology explains true crime fascination as a species survival response.

Criminal cases teach us how to identify and manage predatory threats.

Yet the theory fails to address why the most successful predators still thwart our efforts.

Werewolf is a multi-player “social deduction” game that pits an informed minority of predators (werewolves) against an uninformed majority (villagers). The purpose is to uncover hidden roles through dialogue, reasoning, and detection. The “good” team must identify and eliminate those who intend them harm, while the “bad” team aims to stay hidden so they can pick off the villagers. The werewolves’ best strategy involves deceptive bonding with villagers to deflect objective analysis.

And that’s how successful predators operate in real life: they blend in, befriend, and deceive so no one suspects what they intend.

Dr. Coltan Scrivner, an expert on the psychology of horror, discusses this game in his intriguing new book, Morbid Curiosity. He argues that interest in what’s scary and macabre is good for us because it helps us to identify threats and practice an effective response to them. He defines morbid curiosity as “that peculiar feeling of fascination that motivates us to face fear, disgust, and the unknown,” then supports his stance via the logic of evolutionary psychology. However, one part seems incomplete.

Scrivner says that bad hooks us more forcefully than good. “Negative events capture our attention faster, increase our arousal more, provoke stronger responses, and are remembered with ease compared to positive or neutral events.” And within bad stuff like true crime and gory horror scenarios, threat grabs the most attention. “Threat-related information is seen as more important than other kinds of information, and people who spread threatening information are seen as more reliable and trustworthy.” (Politicians and influencers seem to think so, anyway.)

This response is biological. Thanks to the amygdala, our immediate instinct is to assess threats. They make us alert, especially if they're life-threatening. “Our estimation of a threat’s power and danger is directly related to the amount of damage it can do to the body,” Scrivner asserts. “This is a key reason why bodily injuries demand our attention and arouse our morbid curiosity.” Of all the threats, among the worst is a predator. But we’re not entirely helpless. We prepare for it by learning about it. Our curiosity is what saves us.

Prepared learning psychology holds that organisms more easily learn associations related to their survival than any other. Thus, we share common fears like snakes, heights, and noises in the night. Stories that exploit these fears often draw a large audience. True crime thrives on tales about predators: a stranger with evil intent enters the house or follows us or captures us. Or a familiar loved one transforms into a malignant stranger. Scrivner says that our ancestors learned about threat signals that they could see and react to. They avoided or subdued these people.

I was more interested in what he'd say about the “werewolves”—those who bond with us while planning to harm us. Scrivner guides us there by showing how we evolved from reactive aggression to the more cold-blooded proactive aggression. He uses covert serial killers Ted Bundy and John Wayne Gacy as examples. Such people seek out trusted roles so they can dupe whole communities. That’s what drives much of our fascination with true crime. We're curious about their minds and their ability to live doubled lives for years. I thought Scrivner was going to now tell us how our efforts over the past fifty years at learning about these hidden killers has helped us to spot them more effectively. However, he moved into conspiracies and then paranormal subjects.

Since this is what drives at least a large segment of true crime fascination, I had hoped he'd extend his analysis. He doesn't quite show how our morbid curiosity about these hidden, calculating offenders helps us to improve our preparation for them. In fact, I don't think we have improved by very much. So, I thought about why.

We’ve learned a lot about such predators. We have plenty of analyses. Yet these individuals keep harming us. For all the time our experts have spent focused on these “werewolves,” we still can’t spot clear red flags in those who successfully blend in.

Here's my idea: The hidden predator—the chameleon—confronts us with competing motivations: safety vs. community. We develop certain expectations about behavior that make community bonds possible, and predators exploit them. So, to improve our ability to see the predators, we’d have to stop trusting these expectations. In other words, we’d have to be more suspicious about ministers, cops, nurses, scout leaders, psychology students, security installers, journalists, contractors, etc., etc. But then our social bonds would quickly fray, leaving us vulnerable in other ways. So, we choose community, which weakens our predator identification system.

I don't know if this is the answer, but it seems to follow the same logic. Learning about them doesn't necessarily prepare us if that preparation comes at a cost we're not willing to pay.

There’s Still Some Gain

It makes sense that we fixate on true crime due to its value for threat management. Engaging with these stories lets us safely consider what we might do. “When we open the door to safe experiences with bad feelings,” Scrivner says, “we can more easily conquer them.”

It’s no surprise, then, that the audience for true crime is largely female. They’re learning how to stay safe in a threatening world. They’re making the threat more predictable, which helps to reduce their anxiety. They can identify a clear source for the threat and experience how it gets neutralized through arrest and punishment. Vicariously, they gain a sense of agency, especially with participatory true crime, e.g. puzzling out unsolved cases.

Scrivner’s argument about our "morbid curiosity" for true crime is a worthy contribution, but the “prepared learning” part seems to need a more complex explanation. Despite how much we’ve studied the threat from camouflaged “werewolves,” they’re still successfully blending in.

Baumeister, R. F., et al. (2001). Bad is stronger than good. Review of General Psychology 5(4),323–70. doi.org/10.1037/1089-2680.5.4.323.

Öhman, A., & Mineka, S. (2001). Fears, phobias, and preparedness: Toward an evolved module of fear and fear learning. Psychological Review, 108(3), 483–522. doi:10.1037/0033-295X.108.3.483

Robertson, M. (February 4, 2010). Werewolf: How a parlour game became a tech phenomenon. Wired. https://www.wired.com/story/werewolf/

Scrivner, C. (2025). Morbidly Curious: A Scientist Explains Why We Can't Look Away. Penguin.

Yair Bar-Haim et al. (2007). Threat-related attentional bias in anxious and nonanxious individuals: A meta-analytic study. Psychological Bulletin 133(1). 1–24. doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.133.1.1.

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