No, horror fans aren’t low in empathy
New research undermines a decades-old idea about why people love scary movies
A longstanding mystery in film fandom is why some people love horror. Scary movies are ostensibly designed to evoke negative feelings like dread, terror and disgust — yet scores of horror fans line up to watch fictional monsters and murderers stalk and kill their victims. Science has long seemed to offer one explanation for this: horror fans are simply more cold-hearted than others, allowing them to get a thrill out of on-screen brutality.
But that idea never sat quite right with horror fan Coltan Scrivner. “It doesn't really resonate with what I see in the world,” he says. So Scrivner, a behavioral scientist at Arizona State University in Tempe and Aarhus University in Denmark, started digging into the data on horror fandom and empathy.
He found that the supposed link between liking horror and lacking empathy largely hinged on two studies from the 1990s. One measured how much people enjoyed brutal murder scenes, the other how much people enjoyed scenes of torture or other graphic violence.
“That’s not a great way of understanding how much someone likes horror,” Scrivner says. Bouts of violence may be key plot points for many horror films, but fans are often drawn to these movies for their other features — such as tension, character development and atmosphere. For that reason, using graphic violence to judge how much people love horror is sort of like using breakup scenes to gauge how much people love rom-coms, Scrivner says.
To more directly test the relationship between horror fandom and empathy, Scrivner recruited 244 online participants from the United States. People rated how much they enjoyed different types of horror, such as monster, psychological or slasher flicks. They also filled out questionnaires that measured their levels of cognitive empathy (the ability to recognize how others are feeling), affective empathy (the ability to feel how others feel) and cold-heartedness (a lack of concern for others’ wellbeing).
Participants’ enjoyment of horror movies was not related to their levels of affective empathy. But people who particularly liked horror seemed to be slightly higher in cognitive empathy and lower in cold-heartedness. “It’s a small correlation,” Scrivner says. “But importantly, it’s in the opposite direction of what you would expect if horror fans had low empathy.”
In a second study, 307 online participants from the United States reported which of 50 horror films they’d seen in the past decade. They also filled out the empathy and cold-heartedness questionnaires. The number of horror movies people had seen was unrelated to their levels of empathy and cold-heartedness.
In a third experiment, 215 people from the first study were told they’d been randomly drawn to receive $0.50 on top of $1 they’d already been paid for participating. They could donate any amount of their bonus to another participant who hadn’t been drawn. About half of people decided to donate at least part of the money — but people’s level of horror fandom was not related to how much they donated.
A $0.50 donation is “very much an imperfect measure” of empathy, Scrivner admits. But comments left by participants explaining their decisions hinted that people still took the exercise seriously.
“I didn’t ask them specifically to elaborate on that, but a lot of people did,” Scrivner says. “Some people said, ‘Normally I would donate, but it's been a rough month,’ or ‘I decided to donate half because that seemed fair.’” To Scrivner, those comments show that even a small-stakes donation offered some real insight into participants’ consideration for others.
Overall, the trio of studies suggests that people who enjoy horror more are not less empathetic or more cold-hearted than others, Scrivner reported January 6 in Journal of Media Psychology: Theories, Methods, and Applications.
The notion that loving horror requires a certain level of callousness may make some surface-level sense to non-fans. But in fact, Scrivner says, it doesn’t make any sense when you think deeply why most fans watch horror films: to be scared.
“It’s not scary because there’s a man with a chainsaw. It’s scary because you are taking the perspective of the protagonist being chased by the person with the chainsaw,” Scrivner says. “To take the perspective of that protagonist, you have to have some moderate level of empathy… [otherwise], the film’s not going to be scary. It’s not even going to be interesting.”
Scrivner’s past research has hinted at other reasons people may relish horror — from basking in the adrenaline rush, to stress-testing their own grit, to processing the horrors of real life. But it seems that the specter of the cold-hearted horror fan that has haunted the scientific literature for decades should finally be put to rest.