If you lived in ancient times, one day there was a culprit in the vegetable market who wanted to be beheaded, would you be interested in watching?
If there was now a documentary with vivid images related to the mummy-making process, would you want to study it?
If you had a real Book of the Dead in front of you, would you want to open it?
You might reply, "I don't really want to do these things—even if there's an urge creeping deep inside of you to take a look at these dark and bloody things."
In psychology, this curiosity about death information is a morbid curiosity (Morbid Curiosity) that everyone has.
What is pathological curiosity
In the Morbid Curiosity Scale compiled by Scrivner, there are four types of pathological curiosity[1], namely:
Curiosity about the minds of dangerous people (real crime/murder, e.g., interest in interviewing a jailed serial killer who wants to hear him tell about his crimes)
Curiosity about interpersonal violence (violent scenes, for example, if you lived in ancient Rome or the American West during the Gold Rush, you would want to watch a gladiatorial or duel)
Curiosity about supernatural forces (mystical powers, e.g., interest in topics such as witchcraft, occultism, secret religions, etc.)
Curiosity about an abnormal body (wound/corpse, e.g., curiosity about the embalming process of a corpse, or the process of amputation)
In summary, pathological curiosity can be summed up as a curiosity about negative information that threatens one's own survival, which is often dirty and depraved in the traditional conception.
A typical example of highly morbid curiosity is the investigator in the Cthulhu myth, and the various elements written by the author Lowe and his subsequent creators, such as:
Mysterious symbols, twisted creatures, strange deaths, strange rituals, whispers from eternity, and most importantly, the dangerous unknown itself... And so on and so forth
For the sickly curious, it is simply the throbbing fire of the night that draws them to jump into the pit.
There is nothing more benevolent about this world than the inability of the human mind to integrate its entire contents. We live on a calm island called Ignorance, surrounded by an endless sea of black, and we shouldn't have set sail.
- "The Call of Cthulhu"
Cthulhu stories rarely have good endings, and characters exposed to forbidden knowledge either die crazy or are transformed into inexplicable beings.
So the Croat story looks like a parable to warn people away from dangerous information, but the reality... Why is it that people are becoming more and more interested in this kind of thing?
Why do people have this curiosity?
To explain the source of pathological curiosity, we must first start with curiosity, for this concept, psychology gives a variety of explanations [2], see the following figure:
From the timeline, we can see that the definition of curiosity in psychology is becoming more and more abstract (the desire for knowledge - > the mechanism of future reward maximization based on novelty and complexity theory), but also more and more rich in connotations.
To sum up these concepts, curiosity is the desire for information, which drives individuals to explore the unknown, novelty.
Negative information is also information, blood, death... Negative information about it is even more helpful than positive information, and to avoid danger, we must first understand the danger.
When something scares us, resents us, but at the same time provides us with information to deal with future threats, if there is an internal drive that helps us overcome our inner uneasiness to access this information, then that internal drive is adaptive, which is a protective vigilance [3].
In contemporary times, psychologists have named this intrinsic drive pathological curiosity.
In simple terms, if you live in an environment where your peers often die, then it is beneficial to know the state of death; if you live in an environment where violence is ubiquitous, then it is also beneficial to know that violence is also beneficial.
It just so happens that the living environment of our ancestors is such a dangerous environment, so pathological curiosity as an adaptive trait is preserved in the genes of some people.
As the godfather famously said: Be close to your friends, but be closer to your enemies.
Although it seems quite logical...
It seems reasonable, right, but let's wait... This is the reasoning logic of evolutionary psychology, and empirical research does not seem to support this hypothesis.
A new 20-year study explores the relationship between pathological curiosity and interest in coronavirus [4], where interest in coronavirus is divided into two dimensions:
Pathological interest (e.g., how interested are you in seeing photos of the role of the coronavirus on the body?) ）
General interest (e.g., how interested are you in stories of the death/recovery of COVID-19 patients?) ）
The researchers found that pathological curiosity was only significantly associated with pathological interest in the new crown virus, and had little to do with the general interest in the new crown virus
That said, a preference for scary scenes may really just be a preference for horror _
Of course, the researchers also gave other explanations, such as pathological curiosity has fully understood the general new crown virus information in the early stage of the epidemic, so they are desensitized to such information.
In the researchers' view, the evolutionary psychological explanation of pathological curiosity has not been completely denied, but from the available data, Xuetangjun really cannot give a particularly accurate explanation for this phenomenon for the time being.
It doesn't matter, pathological curiosity belongs to the newer field of psychological research, there will be more research to follow up on this topic, if you find any cutting-edge research, Xuetangjun must be synchronized to everyone in time!
Pathological curiosity is not psychopathy
Although it is called "pathological", pathological curiosity is not really a pathology, and it is not clinically classified as a psychological disorder because of pathological curiosity, let alone a psychopathy.
But we need to note that psychopaths + morbid curiosity are extremely high ... This tends to be portraits of "Jack the Ripper" type murderers.
The most notable feature of psychopaths is the low ability to empathy: that is, the difficulty of empathizing with the feelings of others, which prevents them from developing moral concepts and feelings of guilt and remorse.
Everyone is more or less pathologically curious, and we can certainly be curious about those "dark" things, but we can't lose our empathy for sensing each other.
Also interested in the execution scene, rather than being a numb, indifferent, hilarious spectator, perhaps exploring the various causes behind the dark side of human nature, using empathy for tragedy as a safety rope, while understanding the story while maintaining the bottom line of condemning crimes, this can better satisfy your curiosity ~
After all, curiosity kills cats, but satisfaction can make cats come back to their souls!
Pathological curiosity, this word, reminds Xuetangjun of a classic column of childhood, "Approaching Science". The show's blurry and shaky picture, eerie and penetrating soundtrack, and bizarre and bizarre events greatly aroused my great morbid curiosity at that time. Unfortunately, with the truth that "the blood-spitting strange person is only bleeding gums" and "the house dog barks only because the ground leaks electricity", the curiosity of the xuetang jun is finally cured
bibliography
[1] Scrivner, C. (2020, March 27). The Psychology of Morbid Curiosity: Development and Initial Validation of the Morbid Curiosity Scale. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/xug34
Huang Qi, Chen Chunping, Luo Yuejia, & Wu Haiyan. (2021). The mechanism and role of curiosity. Advances in Psychological Science, 2017, 29(4): 723.
[3] Harrison, M. A., & Frederick, E. J. (2020). Interested in serial killers? Morbid curiosity in college students. Current Psychology, 1-10.
[4] Scrivner, C. (2020). An infectious curiosity: Morbid curiosity and media preferences during a Pandemic. Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture, 5(1).
Author | Emeria
Edit | Wooden boats
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