Coltan Scrivner's Morbidly Curious: Curiosity and Thrill

Coltan Scrivner's Morbidly Curious is a friendly defense of the part of you that slows down for the car crash. A researcher who studies why we seek out frightening things, Scrivner argues the pull toward horror and true crime is common, and it is not a glitch. In an interview he keeps the definition plain: "Morbid curiosity can be simply defined as an interest in information about danger or threats." Notice the word information. The draw is partly a hunger to know. In the Big Five, that pull rides on two facets from two different traits.

Morbid curiosity is curiosity plus thrill

Scrivner's own definition splits neatly into two facets. The information half is Intellect (O5), the Openness facet for the appetite to understand and explore, here aimed at the one topic everyone claims to avoid. The rush half is Excitement-Seeking (E5), the Extraversion facet that craves stimulation and enjoys a jolt of fear when the stakes are safe. A horror fan tends to run high on both: curious enough to look, wired enough to like the spike. Someone low on both finds the whole genre baffling and a little unpleasant, which is also just a trait profile, not better taste.

The part that reframes the whole thing is Scrivner's argument that this curiosity is useful. Learning what danger looks like from a safe distance is cheaper than learning it for real, which is why he compares scary stories to a vaccine. As he puts it, "We can learn how to overcome our fears by being exposed to safe versions through scary play." A high-O5, high-E5 person is essentially running threat drills for fun, and studies during the pandemic found that horror fans handled real dread a little better than everyone else. The morbid streak turns out to be practice.

We map the thrill dimension across the model in sensation-seeking through OCEAN, and break the facet down on its own in Excitement-Seeking (E5). If you have ever felt vaguely guilty about your true-crime queue, Scrivner's read is the opposite of a diagnosis: the interest is common and doing a quiet job. If the genre leaves you cold, that is worth knowing too, because it usually means your O5 and E5 sit somewhere calmer, and you get your information a different way.

Read the book: Morbidly Curious: A Scientist Explains Why We Can't Look Away by Coltan Scrivner.

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