Abstract
This paper examined, with a behavioral paradigm, to what extent people choose to view stimuli that portray death, violence or harm. Based on briefly presented visual cues, participants made choices between highly arousing, negative images and positive or negative alternatives. The negative images displayed social scenes that involved death, violence or harm (e.g., war scene), or decontextualized, close-ups of physical harm (e.g., mutilated face) or natural threat (e.g., attacking shark). The results demonstrated that social negative images were chosen significantly more often than other negative categories. Furthermore, participants preferred social negative images over neutral images. Physical harm images and natural threat images were not preferred over neutral images, but were chosen in about thirty-five percent of the trials. These results were replicated across three different studies, including a study that presented verbal descriptions of images as pre-choice cues. Together, these results show that people deliberately subject themselves to negative images. With this, the present paper demonstrates a dynamic relationship between negative information and behavior and advances new insights into the phenomenon of morbid curiosity.
Highlights
People are curious of highly intense negative information
In order to generate more insight into the dynamic way in which people respond to negative information, the present paper aims to map the phenomenon of morbid curiosity by asking a simple question: if you give people a choice, do they choose to view images that portray death, violence or harm?
Study 2 provided evidence against this interpretation by demonstrating similar choice behavior when images were well matched in terms of content and visual configuration. These findings suggest that people choose to view negativity, rather than the most visually complex stimulus, another way of countering the possible role of visual complexity would be to demonstrate similar choice proportions for negative images when that choice is not based on the visual characteristics of stimuli
Summary
People are curious of highly intense negative information. This phenomenon, often referred to as morbid curiosity [1], can be inferred from the popularity of horror movies and crime shows; the observation that people seek out coverage of violence in the news and on the internet; and the existence of phenomena such as “disaster-tourism” and “rubbernecking”. Most studies presenting highly intense, negative stimuli focus on avoidance states such as fear and disgust (e.g., [6, 7]) or on basic dimensions of affective experience such as arousal and valence (e.g., [8, 9]).
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