April's Exhumed Essay
Unearthing a paid post from the vault each month.
I’m currently working on producing a true crime docuseries. It’s one that, if it gets made, will blow open a major true crime case that almost everyone reading this has heard of.
Working on this has me thinking more about our fascination with true crime again. Despite the popularity of true crime, very little empirical work has been done to try and understand who is fascinated with true crime, why we are fascinated with it, and what it means about our psychology.
One of the first posts I ever wrote for my Substack was a primer on my own theory of our curiosity about killers. Now seems like as good a time as any to open it up for all readers.
Why We Love True Crime
For the past few hundred thousand years, humans have had to adapt to this new threat. We could no longer solely rely on the cues of reactive aggression that we had evolved to recognize. We now had to actively learn novel cues of proactive aggression.
For the next 30 days, The Origins of Our Fascination With True Crime will be free to all subscribers.
This post is a short primer to Chapter 3 in my book, Morbidly Curious: A Scientist Explains Why We Can’t Look Away, in which I detail my theory of why we love true crime.
As a reminder, if you send me a screenshot of your book order, you’ll get 3 months of the paid version of my Substack for free. That’s an $18 value for free when you purchase a $19 book. You can send the screenshot to MorbidlyCuriousBook@Gmail.com.