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Morbid curiosity

Morbid curiosity is focused on death, violence, or any other event that may cause harm physically or emotionally. It typically is described as having an addictive quality, associated with a need to understand or make sense of topics that surround harm, violence, or death. This can be attributed to one's need to relate unusual and often difficult circumstances to a primary emotion or experience of one's own, described as meta-emotions.

One explanation evolutionary biologists offer for curiosity about death is that by learning about life-threatening situations, death can be avoided. Another suggestion some psychologists posit is that as spectators of gruesome events, humans are seeking to empathize with the victim. Alternatively, people may be trying to understand how another person can become the perpetrator of harm. According to science journalist Erika Engelhaupt, morbid curiosity is not "a desire to be sad", instead it "has the ability to set our minds... at ease be reassuring us that even death follows the rules of the natural world."

Interest in human curiosity about difficult circumstances dates back to Aristotle in his Poetics, in which he noted, "We enjoy and admire paintings of objects that in themselves would annoy or disgust us." In a 2017 paper, Suzanne Oosterwijk, a psychologist from the Netherlands, concluded that people choose to see graphic images even when presented the option to avoid them and look at them for a longer period of time than neutral or positive images.