![]() For example, it's not uncommon for a gazelle to cross paths with a cheetah on the savanna. When you consider that many prey animals live close to their predators, the benefits of morbidly curious behavior such as predator inspection become clear. Customers at Dystopia are threatened by ghouls that could break past a thin wire barrier at any moment. It also gives them an opportunity to practice dealing with scary experiences. Morbid curiosity is a powerful way for animals to gain information about the most dangerous things in their environment. 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. ![]() ![]() This behavior occurs across a range of animals, from guppies to gazelles.Īt first blush, getting close to danger seems like a bad idea. The inspection occurs when an animal looks at or even approaches a predator rather than simply fleeing. Morbid fascination with danger is widespread in the animal kingdom-it's called predator inspection. The monkeys were “satiating their horror,” as Darwin put it. Then another would do the same thing, then another. After seeing one monkey do this, another monkey would carefully walk over to the bag to take a peek, then scream and run. A monkey would cautiously walk up to the bag, slowly open it, and peer down inside before shrieking and racing away. 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. 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. The phenomenon of scary play surprised Charles Darwin. 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. Our desire to experience fear, it seems, is rooted deep in our evolutionary past and can still benefit us today. This paradox is now being resolved by research on the science of scary play and morbid curiosity. ![]() We devour tales of psychopathic killers on true crime podcasts, watch movies about horrible monsters, play games filled with ghosts and zombies, and read books that describe apocalyptic worlds packed with our worst fears. This paradox of horror's appeal-that people want to have disturbing and upsetting experiences-has long perplexed scholars. They crowd in during Halloween, to be sure, but show up in every other season, too. This might sound like the kind of place nobody would ever want to be in, but every year millions of people pay to visit haunts just like Dystopia. Then you hear the chain saw revving up, and a masked man bursts through the wall. As you walk into the house, you become disoriented in a dark maze filled with strange objects and broken furniture when you turn a corner, you're confronted by bizarre scenes with evil clowns and terrifying monsters reaching out for you. You know you're at a scary attraction in the woods of Denmark called Dystopia Haunted House, yet everything sounds so real. Chain saws roar, and spine-chilling screams echo from behind a dense wall of trees. ![]()
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