Out of the dark – Psychological perspectives on people's fascination with true crime

The success of the true crime media genre reflects humanity's avid curiosity about violence, deviance, and murder, yet psychological research on this phenomenon is lacking. In this article, we highlight why true crime consumption may be relevant to various research fields that go beyond simple media preferences. Additionally, we present a large-scale behavioural investigation for comprehensive empirical insights into motives, and behavioural and well-being correlates of true crime consumption. In n = 307-571 participants, we (a) confirm a robust gender difference in true crime consumption in favour of women, and (b) find more general (morbid curiosity) and distinct motives (defensive vigilance, excitement) for true crime consumption. Additionally, (c) through principal component analysis, we extract five components from numerous variables (negative affectivity, antagonism, fear of crime, self-focused adaptive regulation, and affective creativity) to test for contributions to true crime consumption. Ultimately, (d) in multiple regression models, gender, income, fear of crime, and antagonism emerged as unique predictors of overall true crime consumption, though results varied for different formats (e.g., podcasts) and motives. Notably, defensive vigilance motivation (higher in women) was linked to more adaptive self-regulation. Our investigation adds to the emerging body of research on negative crime-related information seeking.