Morbid Curiosity Scale

You know the pull. A news headline about a serial killer, and you click before you can stop yourself. A documentary about a pandemic, and you watch the whole thing. A friend describes a gruesome injury, and instead of looking away, you lean in and ask questions. Morbid curiosity — the drive to seek out information about dangerous, threatening, or taboo phenomena from a safe distance — is one of the most universal and least understood human traits. Nearly everyone has it to some degree. The question is what kind you have, and how much.

This test measures four distinct dimensions of morbid curiosity. You will receive a separate score for each, showing where your curiosity concentrates — whether it is the psychology of dangerous people, the mechanics of the human body, the spectacle of violence, or the pull of the paranormal.

Coltan Scrivner, a researcher at the University of Chicago and later Arizona State University, developed the Morbid Curiosity Scale across four studies with over 1,300 participants¹. The central insight of the work is that morbid curiosity is not a single monolithic trait — it breaks into four distinct factors, each reflecting a different kind of threat-relevant information-seeking. Understanding which factors drive your curiosity tells you something specific about what your brain is trying to learn when it gravitates toward dark content.

Minds of Dangerous People is the most universally endorsed factor — even people who score low on overall morbid curiosity tend to score moderately here. It captures the desire to understand why people commit violent or criminal acts: the psychology behind serial killers, cult leaders, and terrorists. This is the true-crime factor, and it explains why true crime is the most popular podcast genre despite most listeners being relatively low on overall morbid curiosity. The gender gap on this factor is the smallest of the four, which helps explain a well-documented paradox: women consume more true crime than men despite scoring lower on morbid curiosity overall. Women's curiosity is relatively concentrated on understanding dangerous minds — potentially reflecting what Scrivner describes as defensive vigilance, the motivation to learn about threats in order to avoid them¹.

Body Violation is the least endorsed factor overall. It captures clinical, anatomical curiosity about the human body under extreme conditions — autopsy, surgery, decomposition, toxicology. This is not gore for its own sake but an intellectual fascination with biological processes pushed to their limits. People who score high here are the ones who watch surgical videos, read forensic pathology case studies, and ask the questions about physical reality that most people would rather not think about. Interpersonal Violence captures interest in witnessing conflict and aggression, often framed historically or hypothetically — gladiatorial combat, medieval battles, street fights. This factor has the largest gender gap, with men scoring substantially higher. Paranormal Danger captures the pull of the supernatural: ghosts, the occult, witchcraft, exorcism. Of the four factors, this one shows the strongest relationship with openness to experience¹.

One of the most important findings in this literature is what morbid curiosity does not predict. Scrivner² found no relationship between morbid curiosity and lower empathy or compassion — horror fans and morbidly curious individuals are not cold or unfeeling. In fact, psychopathic coldheartedness was weakly negatively correlated with morbid curiosity (r = -.12) in the validation studies¹. Morbidly curious people do experience arousal when encountering threatening content — they are not numb to it. The difference is that they find the arousal informative rather than purely aversive. Big Five personality traits explain only about 4% of variance in morbid curiosity scores, with agreeableness as the only significant predictor¹. This means morbid curiosity is genuinely its own thing — not just a side effect of being disagreeable, open, or neurotic.

The behavioral validation of the scale is unusually strong. In Study 4, Scrivner¹ gave participants a choice between viewing morbid and non-morbid versions of the same content (e.g., a video of an autopsy versus a video of a cooking demonstration). Morbid Curiosity Scale scores predicted 53% of the variance in actual viewing choices (r = .73) — a remarkably high predictive validity for a personality measure. Beyond the lab, morbid curiosity predicted fandom for crime, horror, and thriller media but was unrelated to preferences for comedy or romance. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Scrivner, Johnson, Kjeldgaard-Christiansen, and Clasen³ found that morbidly curious individuals showed significantly greater positive psychological resilience with no corresponding increase in psychological distress — suggesting that the habit of engaging with threatening information from a safe distance may function as a form of psychological preparation.

Scrivner⁴ has argued that morbid curiosity is best understood through an evolutionary lens: organisms that are curious about threats — that want to understand predators, pathogens, and dangerous conspecifics — are better prepared to survive encounters with them. The key phrase is "from a safe distance." Morbid curiosity is not a death wish. It is your brain's threat-learning system doing exactly what it evolved to do, channeled through modern media. True crime podcasts, horror films, and forensic documentaries are the contemporary equivalents of gathering around the fire to hear about the lion that almost killed someone in the next valley. The information feels morbid, but the motivation is adaptive.

This test uses 24 items scored on a 6-point Likert scale with no neutral midpoint — you are pushed to lean one way or the other on every item. Your responses are converted into factor scores across the four dimensions and then transformed to population-normed percentiles. Most people show an uneven profile: high on one or two factors, moderate or low on the others. That unevenness is the interesting part — it tells you what your brain considers worth investigating and what it would rather leave alone.

Footnotes

1. Scrivner, C. (2021). The psychology of morbid curiosity: Development and initial validation of the morbid curiosity scale. Personality and Individual Differences, 183, Article 111139. doi:10.1016/j.paid.2021.111139 ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶

2. Scrivner, C. (2024). Bleeding-heart horror fans: Enjoyment of horror media is not related to lower empathy or compassion. Journal of Media Psychology, 36, 330–341. doi:10.1027/1864-1105/a000405 ↩

3. Scrivner, C., Johnson, J. A., Kjeldgaard-Christiansen, J., & Clasen, M. (2021). Pandemic practice: Horror fans and morbidly curious individuals are more psychologically resilient during the COVID-19 pandemic. Personality and Individual Differences, 168, Article 110397. doi:10.1016/j.paid.2020.110397 ↩

4. Scrivner, C. (2025). Morbidly Curious: A Scientist Explains Why We Can't Look Away. Penguin Books. ISBN: 9780143137344 ↩