The Evolutionary Reasons We Are Drawn To Horror Movies and Haunted Houses 25
Scary play lets people -- and other animals -- rehearse coping skills for disturbing challenges in the real world. Scientific American: Our desire to experience fear, it seems, is rooted deep in our evolutionary past and can still benefit us today. Scary play, it turns out, can help us overcome fears and face new challenges -- those that surface in our own lives and others that arise in the increasingly disturbing world we all live in. The phenomenon of scary play surprised Charles Darwin. In The Descent of Man, he wrote that he had heard about captive monkeys that, despite their fear of snakes, kept lifting the lid of a box containing the reptiles to peek inside. Intrigued, Darwin turned the story into an experiment: He put a bag with a snake inside it in a cage full of monkeys at the London Zoological Gardens. A monkey would cautiously walk up to the bag, slowly open it, and peer down inside before shrieking and racing away. After seeing one monkey do this, another monkey would carefully walk over to the bag to take a peek, then scream and run. Then another would do the same thing, then another.
The monkeys were "satiating their horror," as Darwin put it. Morbid fascination with danger is widespread in the animal kingdom -- it's called predator inspection. The inspection occurs when an animal looks at or even approaches a predator rather than simply fleeing. This behavior occurs across a range of animals, from guppies to gazelles. At first blush, getting close to danger seems like a bad idea. Why would natural selection have instilled in animals a curiosity about the very things they should be avoiding? But there is an evolutionary logic to these actions. Morbid curiosity is a powerful way for animals to gain information about the most dangerous things in their environment. It also gives them an opportunity to practice dealing with scary experiences.
When you consider that many prey animals live close to their predators, the benefits of morbidly curious behavior such as predator inspection become clear. For example, it's not uncommon for a gazelle to cross paths with a cheetah on the savanna. It might seem like a gazelle should always run when it sees a cheetah. Fleeing, however, is physiologically expensive; if a gazelle ran every time it saw a cheetah, it would exhaust precious calories and lose out on opportunities for other activities that are important to its survival and reproduction. Consider the perspective of the predator, too. It may seem like a cheetah should chase after a gazelle anytime it sees one. But for a cheetah, it's not easy to just grab a bite; hunting is an energetically costly exercise that doesn't always end in success.
The monkeys were "satiating their horror," as Darwin put it. Morbid fascination with danger is widespread in the animal kingdom -- it's called predator inspection. The inspection occurs when an animal looks at or even approaches a predator rather than simply fleeing. This behavior occurs across a range of animals, from guppies to gazelles. At first blush, getting close to danger seems like a bad idea. Why would natural selection have instilled in animals a curiosity about the very things they should be avoiding? But there is an evolutionary logic to these actions. Morbid curiosity is a powerful way for animals to gain information about the most dangerous things in their environment. It also gives them an opportunity to practice dealing with scary experiences.
When you consider that many prey animals live close to their predators, the benefits of morbidly curious behavior such as predator inspection become clear. For example, it's not uncommon for a gazelle to cross paths with a cheetah on the savanna. It might seem like a gazelle should always run when it sees a cheetah. Fleeing, however, is physiologically expensive; if a gazelle ran every time it saw a cheetah, it would exhaust precious calories and lose out on opportunities for other activities that are important to its survival and reproduction. Consider the perspective of the predator, too. It may seem like a cheetah should chase after a gazelle anytime it sees one. But for a cheetah, it's not easy to just grab a bite; hunting is an energetically costly exercise that doesn't always end in success.
Not everybody is (Score:3)
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There are, indeed, people who do not believe in peer reviewed science.
Where I come from, we call them "stupid."
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I certainly can't watch horror movies with other people around. My brain is wired to find the scary parts very, very funny, and people throw things as you when you laugh at loud at the parts that make them jump.
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I'm no thrill seeker but still find these movies boring due to the dumb stories, or total lack there of.
Can't say I've ever done a haunted house trip. Closest I probably went on that front was a paintball game in a derelict freezing works with gaping pits inside the middle of the buildings. My team mates kept complaining I wasn't playing my part because I refused to stoop while running.
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Consider that evolution may favor a mix in which only some individuals will have the urge to stick their necks out, so that their group gains the benefit of learning how they died. This could explain interest in horror not only by "predator inspection" but by a third set of group members that like to watch the inspectors get killed, and then spread that knowledge to the more well-adjusted remainder.
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Or thrive on pushing others to put their necks out.
Jump Scares over Java (Score:2)
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So, our ancient ancestors thought it was a good idea to evolve a 'let's poke the saber-tooth tiger' instinct?
Haven't seen the videos and memes of "press the toe beans" on cats and lions and tigers, have you? There's something in our human nature to do so. It's like asking why bears are dangerous if they're friend shaped.
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So, our ancient ancestors thought it was a good idea to evolve
No, nobody thought about it at all. Those who had those genes were more likely to live long enough to breed. That's what evolution is. That's all evolution is. There's nothing else to it.
Boundary and edge detection (Score:5, Interesting)
So, our ancient ancestors thought it was a good idea to evolve a 'let's poke the saber-tooth tiger' instinct? Great job, evolution! Next, you'll tell me our love for horror movies is just an ancient survival tactic for dealing with our in-laws' surprise visits. And here I thought my affinity for haunted houses was just because I wanted to feel something other than existential dread about my code not compiling. But hey, if a gazelle can casually size up a cheetah on the savanna, I can surely handle one more 'based on a true story' ghost flick. Or at least that's what I'll tell myself next time I'm hiding behind the couch.
It's boundary detection that's the survival trait.
We learn not to touch the stove at a young age by getting burnt once, but we don't avoid stoves. Instead, we cautiously explore the boundaries and see what areas will burn and what actions will result in a burn, and then learn to work around those boundaries.
Similarly, as kids we can fall down and scrape our knees/elbows quite badly, but we still explore skateboarding and learn ever more dangerous tricks.
Fear of falling is innate: human children are born with it. Despite this, many people go on to work around the danger in various jobs and hobbies: rock climbing, linesmen, and roofers to name a few. They know about the risks, but they also have identified the boundaries of the risk and they know their own abilities - you know that grabbing the branch makes you perfectly safe, because you know that you can hang by your hand for a few seconds while you gather your legs under you.
Danger is usually localized in space and time, and has a rational component. Learning the boundaries of risk allows more choice, and is a survival trait.
not telecommuting then (Score:2)
many prey animals live close to their predators,
No shit
"Horror" is like "Africa" -- bigger than you think (Score:2)
My kid (she's 12 now) slowly got into horror and I went along with her. I never cared about it before and thought of it as a narrow niche of "scare." Nothing is further from the truth. It is a wide and diverse genre, with dozens of contradicting sub-classes. To me, after reading and listening to Johanna Isaacson (https://www.commonnotions.org/stepford-daughters) I can no longer stand it when people reduce it to "scary." It makes me think of Stephen Hawking explaining all religion in one or 2 sentences. I fe
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I guess it depends how you define a movie. As a kid, horror was indeed scary but those same and similar movies as adults I would not call "psychological thrillers".
They are fun to watch because the "bad thing" is usually pretty interesting or very different then what you would normally expect to see. Many times your average horror movie is more an action movie with lots of people dying to some monster. Those are just fun watches.
Then again, stuff like IT (clowns are scary) or Pet cemetery (I love cats but w
This is just storytelling (Score:2)
For example, maybe the animals (and us) do it for the rush of endorphins (or whatever) when you (usually) don't get eaten.
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Why would you look repeatedly at a predator who is close by? Perhaps you use your eyes as sensors to identify the location of various obstacles, and you want to refresh periodically the state of the surroundings?
Why would you repeat a measurement performed by your co-monkey just a minute ago, where the only clue you have observed so far is a nondescript shriek which didn't inform you o
Patching too? (Score:3, Funny)
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"Learning to cope with it" isn't quite the same as relishing every opportunity.
Final Explanation, the movie (Score:2)