Psychology explains people who love true crime may have less to do with violence than you think, and more to do with understanding dangerous people, anticipating threats and managing fear

A missing person case appears on a podcast. A decades-old murder becomes the subject of a documentary. A stranger's carefully reconstructed crime fills an evening that could have been spent watching almost anything else. For millions of people, true crime has become a strangely compelling form of entertainment. But what exactly keeps people coming back to stories about murder, deception, kidnapping and other real-world crimes?

It may not simply be an appetite for violence. A 2025 study published in the British Journal of Psychology offers one of the clearest recent examinations of the question. In “Out of the dark – Psychological perspectives on people's fascination with true crime,” psychologists Corinna Perchtold-Stefan and colleagues examined true-crime consumption and the psychological characteristics associated with it.

The researchers found that people can be drawn to true crime for several different reasons, including morbid curiosity, defensive vigilance and excitement. Crucially, when the researchers separated curiosity about violence from curiosity about dangerous people, curiosity about violence itself did not significantly predict true-crime interest. Curiosity about the minds of dangerous people did.

The attraction may be the mystery inside the mind

Someone watching a crime documentary may not be particularly interested in seeing violence. They may instead be trying to understand how a person could commit an extraordinary act.

What motivated the offender? Were there warning signs? How did investigators identify the suspect? Could someone who appeared ordinary really behave this way?

This kind of interest fits into a broader psychological phenomenon known as morbid curiosity: the tendency to seek information about dangerous or disturbing subjects.

Psychologist Coltan Scrivner examined this phenomenon in his 2021 study, “The Psychology of Morbid Curiosity: Development and Initial Validation of the Morbid Curiosity Scale”. Across four studies involving more than 1,800 participants in total, Scrivner developed a scale for measuring morbid curiosity and found evidence that it represents a relatively stable individual difference.

People with stronger morbid curiosity were particularly inclined to seek information when threat was central to the subject.

That does not mean they necessarily wanted to experience the danger themselves. Curiosity can make threatening information psychologically compelling precisely because it tells us something about an unpleasant part of the world.

True crime can become a lesson in danger

The newer research points to another possible motivation: defensive vigilance. In Perchtold-Stefan and colleagues' study, some participants reported consuming true crime because it helped them learn about dangerous situations. This motive was particularly pronounced among women, who also reported greater overall true-crime consumption in the study.

The researchers suggest that one possible explanation is that information about real crimes can help people think through potential threats: what danger looks like, how situations escalate and what might help someone avoid becoming a victim.

Fear can be part of the attraction

There is another apparent contradiction. Why would someone who is frightened by crime deliberately consume more stories about it?

The study found that fear of crime was independently associated with greater true-crime consumption, particularly with motivations related to defensive vigilance and emotion regulation.

One possible explanation is that uncertainty itself can be uncomfortable. Learning about a frightening event may provide a sense of information and structure around something otherwise unpredictable.

In that sense, a true-crime documentary can transform an amorphous fear, something terrible could happen, into a story with identifiable people, circumstances and warning signs.

It isn't only about self-protection

The research does not suggest that every true-crime fan is secretly conducting a safety lesson. Perchtold-Stefan and colleagues also found excitement to be an independent motive. Mystery, entertainment and the appeal of real events can all contribute to consumption.

The study also found associations between true-crime consumption and certain antagonistic personality characteristics, meaning the picture is considerably more complicated than simply declaring true-crime fans fearful or safety-conscious.

And the researchers stress that their findings cannot establish a single psychological explanation for the genre's popularity.

What the evidence does challenge is the simplest assumption: that fascination with true crime automatically means fascination with violence.