You’re at it again—doomscrolling your way through breakfast. You idly pluck at your plate of scrambled eggs as one apocalyptic tableau after another slides down the screen of your phone. And the vertical parade of calamity continues unabated until your attention snags on the horrifying image of some recent act of violence—the outrage du jour—and try as you might, you simply cannot look away. As your coffee cools and your eggs turn to yellow gelatin, you realize that you’ve lost yet another round in the ongoing battle with morbid curiosity.
Having been told that such a steady diet of negativity is bad for your mental health, you’ve tried to cut back on your consumption of digital death and destruction, and on this occasion, as on so many others, you push the lock button on your phone with a feeling of defeat. But before you put that phone in your pocket and scold yourself for weakness, what if I were to tell you that the morbid curiosity that you feel so guilty about might not be a personal failing after all, but rather a survival adaptation tracing all the way back to your evolutionary roots as a human being? A paper published recently in Psychological Review suggests that the proverbial inability of human beings to look away from a train wreck may just be hardwired into our brains.
To Approach or Avoid an Aversive Stimulus?
Prior research on morbid curiosity has focused on the paradoxical question of why human beings are frequently compelled to approach environmental stimuli that should objectively be expected to trigger disgust or fear—emotions widely known to trigger a response of avoidance. Taking a step back from the question to look for a logic behind the apparent paradox, psychologist David S. March proposes an “adaptationist” model of morbid curiosity. Rather than some sort of perverse and ghoulish form of sensation-seeking, March argues, our tendency to approach that mangled carcass in the path up ahead rather than to turn tail and run the other way as fast as our legs will carry us is actually “an evolved cognitive mechanism specifically tuned to resolve ambiguity surrounding survival-relevant stimuli.”
The key term in this description is “ambiguity.” Reflecting on the daily lives of our evolutionary ancestors as they trekked through the forest, March imagines one of them happening upon the carcass of a dead animal lying in the path. To our modern sensibilities, such an encounter would likely trigger an emotional response of disgust (at the sight of seeing things on the outside of the animal’s body that ought to be on the inside) or fear (at the thought that whatever wreaked this havoc upon the poor creature may still be lurking in the woods), both of which would instinctively compel us to avoid rather than approach the carnage.
Threat or Opportunity?
In the untamed prehistoric wilderness, however, the emotional reaction wouldn’t have been so straightforward. Faced with the same scene of death, our ancient ancestors would have felt a tingling in the brain of incipient disgust or fear, but countering their urge to flee the scene immediately would have been their perception of another sensation—opportunity. A dead animal could indeed be a legitimate trigger of disgust (if the carcass is contaminated with some sort of contagious sickness) or fear (if the source of the violence that killed the animal is still nearby), in which case fleeing would be warranted. But the dead animal up ahead could also represent a potential survival benefit.
In the short term, it could be a food source (assuming it’s not contaminated, of course), and in the longer term, it could provide valuable survival information about recognizing signs of a predator’s presence and knowing when to be vigilant. To our ancient ancestors trying to find food without becoming food, the dead animal could represent either a threat or an opportunity, and the ambiguity of the stimulus would have left them in a state of “motivational limbo.”
An Uncertainty-Reduction Strategy
Faced with such ambiguity in a literal life and death scenario, ordinary avoidance reactions of disgust or fear would have momentarily taken a back seat to a powerful approach motivation—“uncertainty reduction.” Sensing that there was survival-relevant information in that dead animal, they would have been driven to approach the carcass to resolve the question of whether it represented a threat or an opportunity. Or, as March describes it, the ambiguous stimulus would have activated an “attentional approach state” with the goal of “determining whether avoidance is necessary and/or approach may be beneficial.”
Fast-forward a few millennia, and the environments in which we spend the majority of our time in the 21st century present us with far fewer threats of consuming contaminated flesh or being eaten by a predator than those in which our ancient ancestors lived. Over the course of those millennia, however, our brains have changed far more slowly than the world around us has. When our daily activities present us with grotesque images of death and destruction—whether in the form of a car accident on the highway or a disturbing story on our smartphones—even though the carnage has no possible bearing on our own personal well-being, our brains instinctively kick into “uncertainty-reduction” mode, shoving our seemingly more appropriate reactions of disgust or fear aside and driving us toward rather than away from the disturbing stimulus.
The next time you feel the urge to take a closer look at the car crash out your window or the graphic video on your screen, whether you choose to fight or indulge your morbid curiosity, you should at least feel a little less guilty about it. It’s not a cheap dark thrill your brain is seeking, but survival-relevant disambiguation.
www.psychologytoday.com
