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Key points
- Many people believe that horror fans have low empathy.
- The claim that horror fans lack empathy is rooted in a flawed interpretation of a 2005 meta-analysis.
- Some morbidly curious people score high in empathy.
- Horror fans and morbidly curious people may be less coldhearted than the average person, research suggests.
One of the biggest misconceptions about horror fans is that they lack empathy. After all, how could someone enjoy a genre where there is so much violence and suffering?
This assumption has been taken pretty far. Last year, a NY Post critic who was reviewing the new "Saw" movie called fans of films like it “depraved lunatics who should not be allowed near animals or most living things.” I have written previously about why that was a misguided assumption. But what about the more moderate claim that horror fans are low in empathy?
Problems with the Horror Enjoyment and Empathy Research
Scientific claims about low empathy in horror fans almost always trace back to a 2005 meta-analysis. In the abstract, the authors claim their analysis confirmed that individuals lower in empathy reported more enjoyment of fright and violence.
Meta-analyses are the gold standard when it comes to the scientific consensus on a topic, but they can have problems that skew their claims. When I took a closer look at this meta-analysis, I saw three things that made me question the claims that horror fans were likely to have low empathy.
1. Low Number of Studies
The first concern was that the meta-analysis only included 6 studies that look at empathic concern, which was their measure of empathy. This wasn’t the authors’ fault; there simply wasn’t (and still isn’t) much research on horror fans and empathy. Still, 6 studies is pretty small for a meta-analysis. It’s difficult to make a strong claim from such a small number of studies.
2. Restricted Age Group
The second concern was the participants' ages in the studies. All of the studies in the meta-analysis used high school or undergraduate students. There’s nothing wrong with those study populations, but it would definitely skew the average levels of horror enjoyment. Horror fandom tends to peak in the late teens and early 20s and slowly decline after. At best, the results can only say that teenagers and young adults who enjoy horror have lower empathy.
3. Poor Stimuli Choice
The third concern was perhaps the most substantial. Of the six studies that looked at empathy in the meta-analysis, the two strongest ones showed correlations of -.40 and -.17. These two studies were driving the effect. In the discussion, the authors noted a major caveat concerning the two strongest studies, saying that,
“one examined the enjoyment of graphic violence such as torture and the other investigated the enjoyment of violent horror clips that concluded with brutal murders and no satisfactory resolution. In other words, these studies specifically focused on the enjoyment of victimization. When these two studies were eliminated, the average correlation in the remaining four studies did not differ significantly from zero and the correlations were homogeneous, with 100 percent of the variance attributable to sampling error.”
So, the key study backing the claim that horror fans are unempathetic doesn’t seem to demonstrate that. Recent work on morbid curiosity and empathy pushes this even further, suggesting that some horror fans might have somewhat high levels of empathy.
Dark Empaths
There was a study published last year that identified a subgroup of people who score high in both the Dark Triad (narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism) and in empathy. The researchers called this group the Dark Empaths.
I read their paper closely and was intrigued. These dark empaths sounded quite a lot like horror fans and morbidly curious people. So, I reached out to the authors and suggested we collaborate.
We ran a replication study using the Dark Tetrad (which includes sadism as a fourth dark trait). We also gave the morbid curiosity scale to a subset of about 250 participants.
We are still writing up the study, but we found that dark empaths were more likely to score high in morbid curiosity. We also found that dark tetrads were high in morbid curiosity. This wasn’t too surprising since the main factor influencing morbid curiosity is probably the dark traits rather than the empathy. But this does suggest something important—that empathy is relatively unrelated to being a morbidly curious person, and many morbidly curious people score high in empathy.
Horror Fans Are Not Coldhearted
This is also consistent with a study I conducted a couple of years ago looking at how morbid curiosity relates to a variety of personality traits. I found that morbid curiosity and horror fandom were positively correlated with some dark traits like psychopathy and Machiavellianism.
Interestingly, though, both morbid curiosity and horror fandom were negatively correlated with a trait called coldheartedness. Coldheartedness refers to a general disregard for other people’s well-being. So, despite scoring high on the overall scale of psychopathy, morbidly curious people and horror fans actually score lower than average in coldheartedness. They are, if anything, a bit more compassionate.
Horror fans and morbidly curious people might have dark minds, but they also seem to have soft hearts.
References
1. Hoffner, C. A., & Levine, K. J. (2005). Enjoyment of mediated fright and violence: A meta-analysis. Media Psychology, 7(2), 207-237.
2. Heym, N., Kibowski, F., Bloxsom, C. A., Blanchard, A., Harper, A., Wallace, L., ... & Sumich, A. (2021). The Dark Empath: Characterising dark traits in the presence of empathy. Personality and individual differences, 169, 110172.
3. Scrivner, C. (2021). The psychology of morbid curiosity: Development and initial validation of the morbid curiosity scale. Personality and Individual Differences, 183, 111139.
