CABINETS FULL OF CURIOSITY
University of Chicago grad student has made a specialty of morbid curiosity
“Morbid curiosity means there are two emotion systems going within you,” says Coltan Scrivner, a Ph.D. student at the University of Chicago. “One is information gathering, one is revulsion, but which one will win out?”
On a recent autumn afternoon Imet Coltan Scrivner in an Andersonville shop cluttered with the gruesome, the disgusting, the terrifying and, his specialty, the morbid. That tiny shop, WoollyMammoth, tucked into Foster Avenue, is a curiosity cabinet of the uneasy and disturbing, though for Coltan Scrivner, who studies morbid curiosity, itwas more like taking a trip to Target.
But no plasticHalloween ghosts here. Think giant clown heads, and devil heads, and witch’s brooms, and Ouija boards, and two-faced taxidermied goats, and (supposedly authentic) shrunken heads, and an antique portrait of Lizzie Borden, and Victorian funeral wreaths, and death masks, and lots and lots of real skeletons.
“Here’s a good example ofwhat I do,” he said, stopping at an old photo of a child in a bed. “This is a Victorian postmortem image of a dead baby. But if I showed you this and said itwas a sleeping child, thatwould change howyou respond to it. Whatwe don’t entirely understand yet though is why, if I tell you that it’s a picture of a dead baby, youwould still be tempted to look.” This is morbid curiosity. “Morbid curiosity means there are two emotion systems going within you,” he continued, stopping before another image. “One is information gathering, one is revulsion, but which one will win out?”
He nodded at a small doodle hanging on thewall.
A small doodle of Hitler, drawn by the Chicago serial killer JohnWayne Gacy.
It feltwrong, it felt gross. And so I leaned in for a closer look.
“Beyond it being just bad art, there are so many levels ofwrong going on here,” Scrivner said.
And yet hewonders: Why, biologically, evolutionarily, is it so difficult to look away?
Scrivner, a Ph.D. student in the Department of ComparativeHuman Development at theUniversity of Chicago, is not cadaverous, though he is long and thin, with a playful passing resemblance to Tom Hiddleston’s Loki fromtheMarvel superheromovies. His field of study is not unheard of— science has long tried to understandwhy many of us have an appetite for the horrifying— yet as a line of inquiry, this remains mostly outside of mainstream psychology. It’s also not often greeted with the sort of attention that Scrivner is getting. He’s been published in serious scientific
journals, he’s received more than $50,000 in grants (including fromthe esteemed Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society inHyde Park), he’s drawing media attention to prettywonky studies— such as a recent one on why horror fans areweathering the pandemic better than the rest of us. Scarily enough, he’s even been hired by Facebook to continue research at their headquarters.
Hiswork, eerily, feels right for 2020. “When I started (atUniversity of Chicago) Iwasn’t even sure of what Iwanted to study,” he said. “But I knew that Iwas interested in howpeople experience things, so I started thinking of cognitive paradoxes— those things people do that don’tmake sense. And it turns out, there’s a lot of that.”
No!
“Yes! Butwhy dowe gravitate to negative things— philosophers think about this, artists paint this, even video game designers try to capture it. Yet relatively few try to understand it.” Indeed, the day afterwe met, Scrivner had a Zoom meeting with a group of clinical psychologists atHarvard, curious about his research. Understanding howto overcome anxiety, for example, could be one area where the study of morbid curiosity might prove valuable. Dario Maestripieri, the Italian behavioral biologist andUC professor who made his name studying overlaps between humans and primates (and also acts as Scrivner’s advisor), said in an email that Scrivner is creative, rigorous and also that hiswork “has the potential to result in a general theory that explains what morbid curiosity really is, why it exists and howit relates to other aspects of human psychology and behavior.
More broadly, it can help us understand human individual differences at a deeper level.”
Scrivner began coming to WoollyMammoth last year to gather materials for one of his research projects, which had been humming along last spring until the pandemic shut it down. Here’s what he did: He invited several dozen Chicagoans into his lab at the university and showed them a series of objects, some morbid, some not. The morbid ones he found atWoolly. He placed them in a curio cabinet and made up stories about each. He told the subjects that many were on loan fromlocal institutions such as the FieldMuseum. Then he asked themmove in closer … if theywanted.
He told them that a skeleton key came from a guillotine, and that scientific vials had been used in a fatal poisoning, and that a mold of teeth had been taken fromthe mouth of a cannibal serial killer. He gave each object backstories, and most importantly, he outfitted his subjects with eye-tracking glasses, to see where eyeswent. But again, he was just starting when the pandemic shut it down.
The results so far?
One person said she didn’t “want to be the basic white girl who picks up true crime stuff, thenwent to the true crime stuff.” Menwent for gorier objects. Somewere curious about the seedier objects though unwilling to touch; some touched bad stuff to counter the good stuff they touched. Results have been promising, he said. But of course: There’s a reason for Chicago walking tours of serial killing sites and gangland slayings. There’s a reason your parents told you not to stare. There’s a reason terrorists release beheading videos, andwhyTMZexists. There’s a reasonwhy the bodies of Bonnie and Clydewere looted for mementos after their shootings, andwhy artists once kept skulls to remind themselves of
the fragility of their lives. No less than Carl Jung has written of our shadowselves buried deep who demand thatwe acknowledge our uglier thoughts.
This basic urge— to look at whatwe knowwe probably shouldn’t look at— may even contain a more basic desire to empathize. In his 2012 book “Everyone Loves a Good Train Wreck: WhyWe Can’t Look Away,” EricG. Wilson, an English professor atWake ForestUniversity inNorth Carolina who specializes in the link between literature and psychology, argued our itch to stare into a horror may be partly about recognizing some primal connection with those who have suffered.
Scrivner’swork, though, is more biological, more interested in howandwhy our bodies react to, say, the vaguely ominous yet actually safe. Such as a clown. “What I like about Coltan’swork
is he’s approaching these issues in an empirical, scientific manner,” said Stephen Asma, a philosophy professor at Columbia College who has written about our fascination with monsters. “He’s collecting data to showdeeper patterns of cognition. … He’s interviewing and surveying subjects, hooking them up to galvanic response sensors, tracking eye movements. What he uncovers about curiosity generally and morbid curiosity specifically will help us better understand the human mind.”
Mathias Clasen, Scrivner’s Denmark-based colleague (and the co-author of some of his papers), imagines the study of morbid curiosity eventually applying to not only the creation of more effective scarymovies but behavioral science, even traffic control— think rubbernecking.
Scrivner grew up in (no joke) Slaughterville, Oklahoma.
He’s 28, and yes, he’s a hardcore horrormovie fan. But no, he never did have a goth or emo phase. He did his masters in forensic science, focusing on DNA. Heworked for a while at theMuseum of Osteology in Oklahoma City, and yes, he keeps actual human bones in hisHyde Park apartment. But no, he doesn’t knowexactlywhy Facebookwants to help his research. He suspects it has to do with scary images and violent videos, though when hewas interviewed by the company, he told them he doubted his research did fit Facebook. He said they disagreed with him.
At the moment, albeit still early into his study, I asked if hiswork has a takeaway yet. He said that he thinks that maybe humans have developed their morbid curiosity as away of making sense of the violence or trauma that they expect to withstand themselves eventually.
What a gruesome thought, I said.
“I wrote a paper on gruesomeness!” he said. “Basically, it doesn’t take a lot to kill someone but some people, you know, they like to go the extra mile. Why, for instance, does someone put heads on stakes? We’re drawn to faces, OKI get that. Butwhy is that seen as worse than a dead body?”
Maybe it’s seen as awarning of what the people are capable of, I said.
“Whichwas our conclusion! But howdo you test that?” He gave subjects a story of a gruesome act. Rather than showwho committed the act, he asked them to imagine the perpetrator. He used an example that didn’t require vast strength— someone using a pocket knife to cut an eyeball out of a corpse. This someonewas often imagined as stronger than larger than average.
I told him that I grewup in a community where the craziest bastardswere almost always the shortest. You could always rely on them to overcompensate— a kind of Joe Pesci syndrome.
Yes, he said, noting that small terrorist groups often favor brutal videos, perhaps because it makes them appear more powerful and, well, because they also understand our innate morbid curiosity.
Central to Scrivner’s research is theMorbid Curiosity Scale he developed atUC, a survey he employs to predict behavior. It’s constructed as a series of statements that you respond to. If you sawstreet fight andwere not involved, would youwatch? If you lived inMedieval Europe, would you attend public executions? Would you like to learn about witchcraft? OK, howabout autopsies?
The more you think about your answers, the more uncomfortable this gets.
We sat on a bench outside. If therewas a car wreck right here, he asked, would I look at the victims?
I said I don’t think so.
He smiled the smile of someone who knew better.