Sociological theories try to explain why true crime has such a grip on modern culture. But the best explanation may be hidden in the evolutionary history of our species and how we learned to survive.
Brian, interesting hypothesis in simulations. Let’s conduct an thought experiment. Take two groups: the first is raised and lives in relative safety, with little fear of what “true crime” can do to them. The second group grows up in a relatively dangerous environment where cons are the norm, violence is prevalent. My guess is that true crime stories are only interesting to the first group. The second group lives them on a regular basis and has no need or interest in true crime stories, and if anything does not want to be reminded.
I pose this based on my own life. Until I was almost 13, I grew up in a college town in Indiana. Pretty safe and small. At 13 we moved to S FL as the days of the cocaine cowboys, Mariel boatlift, money laundering and drug running. I saw more things in 6-8 years than I have seen collectively since. That is a real life simulation that remains with me though I hope to never use it, yet it colors the way I see the world to this day. I do not need true crime stories having seen it up close and personal.
Fascinating! Makes sense to me - how else might one get reliable info on how to detect these dangerous people in our lives? Or model how one would react to them?
I’d add, consistent with this simulation theory, there is a sort of anti-vicarious appeal. These make us feel good about ourselves that we are able to reject our darker impulses to gratify whatever urges at the expense of others. Then additionally the group able to outsmart the perp to bring him to justice - it is comforting that we are mostly safe from antisocial monsters and we’ve chosen wisely to not be one (because for sure we’d be caught.)
It is a pro-social narrative structure gratifying to us pro-social beasts.
This is an interesting theory. It doesn't explain, however, why I LOVE fictional mysteries but do not like true crime at all, nor even mysteries "based on real events." Some of us like to whet our simulation of danger from the safety of pure imagination.
As long as we’re talking psychology, (OK, evolutionary psychology) there is going to be a spectrum. The primary temperament would be vigilance and the spectrum runs from complacence to paranoia. For example, people who know that they are far more likely to be a have a gun injury from keeping a gun in their home than from being attacked yet still keep one for “defense” are high on the vigilance scale. My brother, who lives in a suburb of around 30,000 and who does not lock his doors even when away on vacation, is very low on the scale. (He’s had one “break-in” in 50 years and suggests that it was “kids” whose larceny saved him a trip to Goodwill and his open-door policy saved him the broken windows that his neighbors suffered) My point is that if there is a vigilance gene it may not be passed on. I’m not sure I buy the evolution explanation.
Our brains like what they know. They exist to protect us from danger. Since death is an eternal mystery because nobody has survived to tell us what happens, our brain becomes fixated on how to navigate the experience and survive. Our brains want to know how to identify any possible threat we might encounter.
On a more psychological level, we need to believe that good triumphs over evil. That there are consequences and systems put in place to prevent people from getting away with hurting us.
As for why women especially are so invested in the true crime general, fear is encoded in our dna. We are raised our whole lives to fear. Fear getting pregnant out of wedlock. Fear of never marrying. And the biggest one of all: being harmed by men. We gravitate towards true crime because our brains know how to navigate fear.
This was an excellent article. Thank you for making it free.
I worked on developing true crime made for TV movies in the 90s. I talked to victims, survivors, family members, police officers, journalists. I scoured media for the next cool story, and read lots of gory stories. It burned me out. I am done. (My predecessor in the job went on to write the Hunger Games series...I consider that good therapy.) I don't need any further guidance about threats. I occasionally dip into a podcast episode ("Serial') or try to make it through a show...and I can't finish them. Seconding Paul's thoughts: I will say that the stories then and the stories now are overwhelmingly about privileged white people, so they seem to me to focus on protecting the already most-protected.
It's not just in the distant past that humans could be prey. Crocodiles, sharks, tigers and other predators still kill people to this day. Presumably they will for as long as they exist. Fellow humans, of course, now as always, represent a still-greater risk. The hypothesis described in this post might not be testable, but sounds perfectly convincing to me.
Subconsciously, human beings create and are attracted to content that reflects the mindset and spiritual state both within them and without.
This is what I call 'information resonance'. Like attracts like.
On the other hand, a content creator is attracted to creating such content because they, too, resonate with such information subconsciously. In both cases, the resonance is due to the fact that we filter it from the consciousness field.
If we look at the content of movies and series nowadays, we would see that at least 75% of them deal with murder, death, violence, drugs and sex as the center plot.
This is what sells today. This is what's interesting. We, the viewers, are attracted to it. Contrarily, if we go back 50 years ago, on a societal level, it didn't interest anyone. It didn't sell.
These things are cyclical. According to my observations and understanding of global cycles, the interest in crime, or more accurately the theme of ‘death’, happens every 400 years or so. It also fits the timeline you proposed in your essay.
One can also notice that as time has gone by, so has changed the protagonist.
We are moving away from a culture that presents the main character as a “hero that saves the day” to one that presents them as broken and damaged; a drug dealer, a scammer, a thief, having suicidal tendencies, drunk, addicted or mentally ill are all becoming the new normal. Nowadays, being a gangster who scams or robs people in daylight is what the average kid aspires to.
In turn, we, the viewers, clap our hands. We love these types of content and want more of it. Anything else bores us. We look for the destruction, for the killings, for the enmities and the human suffering in order to forget the emptiness that arises within us.
Now, I'm not here to toot the moral horn. The moral font is disintegrating from the human genome anyway. I'm just here to show where it comes from and where it is going.
The evolutionary psych angle makes a lot of sense to me. I was fascinated with true crime for a period in my twenties & I’ve come to believe it was partly about being a woman who’d moved away from my hometown to a big city & I was (unconsciously) trying to learn how to keep myself safe(r). Most serial killers are men & most of their victims are women, after all, plus the garden variety criming & abuse, so women do really need to learn what to look for. I don’t pay attention to true crime anymore. I think because (as Mulder says to Scully, in a season 10 episode): once you’ve seen one serial killer, you’ve seen them all. It was certainly true for me. Once I’d sort of solved the puzzle of who they are, at least in my own mind, I completely lost interest in the genre.
Television crime shows are studies of human nature. When I got cable, I watched crime stories round the clock for a time until I read that these shows cause depression.
Interesting speculation. I choose a more plausible explanation from a source I have chosen to trust which explains Creation, evil and our fascination therewith. The reader might want to check out God's explanation otherwise known as Revelation. The sources are (1) scripture, (2) Sacred Tradition (early Church Fathers in large part) and (3) the Magisterium of the Church, the Church founded by God Himself (see scripture) who was also the Creator who, in a jaw-dropping act of love, became a Creature and then willingly died for all and rose again, conquering death and all evil. Check it out.
Brian, interesting hypothesis in simulations. Let’s conduct an thought experiment. Take two groups: the first is raised and lives in relative safety, with little fear of what “true crime” can do to them. The second group grows up in a relatively dangerous environment where cons are the norm, violence is prevalent. My guess is that true crime stories are only interesting to the first group. The second group lives them on a regular basis and has no need or interest in true crime stories, and if anything does not want to be reminded.
I pose this based on my own life. Until I was almost 13, I grew up in a college town in Indiana. Pretty safe and small. At 13 we moved to S FL as the days of the cocaine cowboys, Mariel boatlift, money laundering and drug running. I saw more things in 6-8 years than I have seen collectively since. That is a real life simulation that remains with me though I hope to never use it, yet it colors the way I see the world to this day. I do not need true crime stories having seen it up close and personal.
Fascinating! Makes sense to me - how else might one get reliable info on how to detect these dangerous people in our lives? Or model how one would react to them?
I’d add, consistent with this simulation theory, there is a sort of anti-vicarious appeal. These make us feel good about ourselves that we are able to reject our darker impulses to gratify whatever urges at the expense of others. Then additionally the group able to outsmart the perp to bring him to justice - it is comforting that we are mostly safe from antisocial monsters and we’ve chosen wisely to not be one (because for sure we’d be caught.)
It is a pro-social narrative structure gratifying to us pro-social beasts.
This is an interesting theory. It doesn't explain, however, why I LOVE fictional mysteries but do not like true crime at all, nor even mysteries "based on real events." Some of us like to whet our simulation of danger from the safety of pure imagination.
As long as we’re talking psychology, (OK, evolutionary psychology) there is going to be a spectrum. The primary temperament would be vigilance and the spectrum runs from complacence to paranoia. For example, people who know that they are far more likely to be a have a gun injury from keeping a gun in their home than from being attacked yet still keep one for “defense” are high on the vigilance scale. My brother, who lives in a suburb of around 30,000 and who does not lock his doors even when away on vacation, is very low on the scale. (He’s had one “break-in” in 50 years and suggests that it was “kids” whose larceny saved him a trip to Goodwill and his open-door policy saved him the broken windows that his neighbors suffered) My point is that if there is a vigilance gene it may not be passed on. I’m not sure I buy the evolution explanation.
Our brains like what they know. They exist to protect us from danger. Since death is an eternal mystery because nobody has survived to tell us what happens, our brain becomes fixated on how to navigate the experience and survive. Our brains want to know how to identify any possible threat we might encounter.
On a more psychological level, we need to believe that good triumphs over evil. That there are consequences and systems put in place to prevent people from getting away with hurting us.
As for why women especially are so invested in the true crime general, fear is encoded in our dna. We are raised our whole lives to fear. Fear getting pregnant out of wedlock. Fear of never marrying. And the biggest one of all: being harmed by men. We gravitate towards true crime because our brains know how to navigate fear.
This was an excellent article. Thank you for making it free.
I worked on developing true crime made for TV movies in the 90s. I talked to victims, survivors, family members, police officers, journalists. I scoured media for the next cool story, and read lots of gory stories. It burned me out. I am done. (My predecessor in the job went on to write the Hunger Games series...I consider that good therapy.) I don't need any further guidance about threats. I occasionally dip into a podcast episode ("Serial') or try to make it through a show...and I can't finish them. Seconding Paul's thoughts: I will say that the stories then and the stories now are overwhelmingly about privileged white people, so they seem to me to focus on protecting the already most-protected.
It's not just in the distant past that humans could be prey. Crocodiles, sharks, tigers and other predators still kill people to this day. Presumably they will for as long as they exist. Fellow humans, of course, now as always, represent a still-greater risk. The hypothesis described in this post might not be testable, but sounds perfectly convincing to me.
Here’s a less “alluring” theory.
Subconsciously, human beings create and are attracted to content that reflects the mindset and spiritual state both within them and without.
This is what I call 'information resonance'. Like attracts like.
On the other hand, a content creator is attracted to creating such content because they, too, resonate with such information subconsciously. In both cases, the resonance is due to the fact that we filter it from the consciousness field.
If we look at the content of movies and series nowadays, we would see that at least 75% of them deal with murder, death, violence, drugs and sex as the center plot.
This is what sells today. This is what's interesting. We, the viewers, are attracted to it. Contrarily, if we go back 50 years ago, on a societal level, it didn't interest anyone. It didn't sell.
These things are cyclical. According to my observations and understanding of global cycles, the interest in crime, or more accurately the theme of ‘death’, happens every 400 years or so. It also fits the timeline you proposed in your essay.
One can also notice that as time has gone by, so has changed the protagonist.
We are moving away from a culture that presents the main character as a “hero that saves the day” to one that presents them as broken and damaged; a drug dealer, a scammer, a thief, having suicidal tendencies, drunk, addicted or mentally ill are all becoming the new normal. Nowadays, being a gangster who scams or robs people in daylight is what the average kid aspires to.
In turn, we, the viewers, clap our hands. We love these types of content and want more of it. Anything else bores us. We look for the destruction, for the killings, for the enmities and the human suffering in order to forget the emptiness that arises within us.
Now, I'm not here to toot the moral horn. The moral font is disintegrating from the human genome anyway. I'm just here to show where it comes from and where it is going.
The evolutionary psych angle makes a lot of sense to me. I was fascinated with true crime for a period in my twenties & I’ve come to believe it was partly about being a woman who’d moved away from my hometown to a big city & I was (unconsciously) trying to learn how to keep myself safe(r). Most serial killers are men & most of their victims are women, after all, plus the garden variety criming & abuse, so women do really need to learn what to look for. I don’t pay attention to true crime anymore. I think because (as Mulder says to Scully, in a season 10 episode): once you’ve seen one serial killer, you’ve seen them all. It was certainly true for me. Once I’d sort of solved the puzzle of who they are, at least in my own mind, I completely lost interest in the genre.
Television crime shows are studies of human nature. When I got cable, I watched crime stories round the clock for a time until I read that these shows cause depression.
Interesting speculation. I choose a more plausible explanation from a source I have chosen to trust which explains Creation, evil and our fascination therewith. The reader might want to check out God's explanation otherwise known as Revelation. The sources are (1) scripture, (2) Sacred Tradition (early Church Fathers in large part) and (3) the Magisterium of the Church, the Church founded by God Himself (see scripture) who was also the Creator who, in a jaw-dropping act of love, became a Creature and then willingly died for all and rose again, conquering death and all evil. Check it out.