Why do people get obsessed with True Crime? The first reason of these actually relates to all of the other reasons, in some form or another and that reason is survival Instinct. Animal brains in general give more weight and attention to potential threats than potential rewards. Because in evolutionary terms, missing a potential threat is game over for your genes.
The key region involved in threat detection is the amygdala. As your brain is parsing through the barrage of information that’s coming in from your environment, the amygdala is scanning that information, looking for potential threats to flag. And when it flags something as a threat, there are two pathways from the amygdala. The slow pathway is sending that information to your higher order cortical regions, which process complex information and, in this case, can figure out whether that thing is really a threat. In humans this is when you become consciously aware of something – to think about something. It takes time. The other pathway is the fast pathway and this is what gets immediately engaged. If the amygdala flags something as a potential threat – that’s dangerous enough… Something that could kill you in a moment, like a tiger which could kill you immediately – that’s dangerous enough that the amygdala is going to send a signal to go into fight or flight mode immediately. It may even trigger reflex motor behaviors. So an example of this fast pathway is what happens if you put a cucumber behind a cat… The cat freaks out. This is pre-thinking. This is a reflex behavior. Because the cat’s amygdala has sent a signal that could be a poisonous snake. So get out of here! You got to get out of here! In time that slower, higher cortical pathway is still getting engaged and so the cat realizes, after that initial reflex, that’s not actually a snake. So then the cat may decide to investigate the cucumber (give it a sniff, figure out what it is). That’s slow pathway that happens after that immediate reflex motor behavior – fight or flight mode.
There are aspects of True Crime that might in fact engage that fast pathway – immediately get flagged by your amygdala and put you in a state of excitement – heart rate might speed up just from looking at some of these sensational thumbnails or seeing a cover of a book. And that reflex might be just clicking on the thumbnail, or pulling the book of the shelf just instinctively. But the part that’s really going to keep you engaged is that slow pathway. Once the amygdala is sending it to your higher order cortex, you start paying conscious attention to it. And at that point you realize this definitely is worth continuing paying attention to. You find that you’re quite curious to learn more. So, wanting to understand the killer is quite natural. The difference between the kind of predators our brains are good at detecting, the ones they can detect easily, like a snake or beast of some sort, versus psychopathic killers is that the latter can hide in plain sight. When we become aware that there are people that seem normal, that look normal, or even seem charming, that might actually be cold-blooded killers, we’re going to feel like we need to figure out who they are. We need some system to detect these people. Otherwise, what if they kill us. The survival Instinct is essentially universal. But we all vary in the extent to which we enjoy the curious aspect. Merely curiosity by itself is a trait that we vary in. Probably most closely related to openness to experience, in terms of the Big Five personality traits. And then, within curiosity there are more specific interests that we also might vary in, like interest in human psychology. There’s also variation in the morbid part. Some people are just more drawn to dark topics. Some people are fascinated by natural disasters. It is fundamentally related to a survival Instinct. Serial killers and spree killers can be thought of as a type of natural disaster, but where the nature in this case is human nature. So true crime represents these case studies in disasters of human nature, or in human predators. And in turn, there’s going to be this kind of innate survival-based curiosity.
What might be going on in the minds/brains of people who are enjoying this type of curiosity?
One thing is a break from mental noise. True Crime is so salient, because of our brain’s survival Instinct, it offers a powerful escape from usual background noise and stress. As you get invested in the details of a case, your mind just aligns its focus completely towards this thing. It’s a pretty nice break from the mental chatter that might otherwise be going on in your minds. Mental chatter is a self-talk that’s often just happening in our minds (problems, stressors, low mood, anxiety, self-analysis, overanalyzing, overthinking).
That shift in attention happens in the brain thanks to dopamine. People tend to think of dopamine as the feel-good chemical, because when you get a hit of dopamine it must feel good, like rewards (food, mating opportunities etc.). But it can’t actually be the feel-good chemical, because it also underlies anything that’s addictive. Dopamine also gets released just when you’re expecting something good to happen. But when it hasn’t happened yet. And, in fact, it gets released when your brain detects a threat. Signs of immediate danger cause a surge of dopamine release into your cortex. It’s because what dopamine actually is – important chemical. It’s your brain’s way of tagging something that is important and worth paying attention to. When there’s a surge of dopamine, your brain is saying ‘this is important pay attention to it, keep paying attention to it,’ as long as the dopamine’s going. Amygdala, part of the limbic system, a major dopamine pathway, that also connects to your frontal cortex where the conscious control of your attention is also located. This is a pathway that’s about learning or knowing what to pay attention to. The dopamine effects on attention – to seek out true crime is to seek out dopamine stimulation.
– Andrew van der Vaart, MD, PhD