I don’t think reading or hearing about real-world violence makes people more creative about hurting others. In fact, people who frequently use true crime may be less likely to use their imagination for nefarious purposes. These findings were recently published in The Journal of Creative Behavior.
Media consumption shapes how people think, feel, and behave in their daily lives. Researchers have spent decades examining how fictional violence in video games and movies affects aggression. Many psychologists suggest that consuming violent content stimulates aggressive thinking and desensitizes viewers to human suffering. But one extremely popular genre has largely escaped scientific scrutiny. True crime media focuses on real human stories such as assaults, serial murders, and hostage situations.
Half of Americans consume true crime stories through television, books, or podcasts. It is often argued that immersion in these harsh realities can leave a lasting negative mark on an individual. A team of psychology researchers wondered whether constant exposure to real-life violence might enhance a particular psychological trait known as malicious creativity.
Malicious creativity involves intentionally generating highly original and harmful ideas in order to harm or take revenge on others. People who exhibit this trait go beyond standard aggression by inventing novel and unexpected ways to cause physical or emotional pain. University of Graz researcher Corinna M. Perchtold Stefan and her colleagues set out to see if the true crime genre provides a guiding blueprint for this kind of behavior. They measured whether people who frequently listen to or watch true crimes could come up with unique ways to exact revenge.
Researchers evaluated this idea from two opposing angles. On the other hand, realistic depictions of extreme violence can systematically change one’s boundaries and provide practical knowledge against destructive behavior. On the other hand, people who actively seek out true crimes may have different underlying motivations, such as a desire to understand justice or an urge to prepare for real-world dangers.
The researchers conducted two separate studies to explore these concepts. In the first study, the team surveyed 160 adult participants online. Participants reported how often they engaged with true crime media and completed a questionnaire measuring their natural tendency toward physical and verbal aggression. They also completed a standardized test of linguistic creativity that required them to generate as many unusual words and sentences as possible within a strict time limit.
To capture malicious creativity, the researchers asked participants to imagine being trapped in an unfair social situation. Example scenarios include a careless co-worker spilling coffee on an expensive book or a neighbor breaking a promise to pay assistance. Participants had three minutes to come up with as many harmful and creative ideas as possible to get revenge on the perpetrator.
An independent reviewer then judged participants’ responses based on three different categories. Reviewers counted the raw number of revenge ideas generated, scored how harmful the ideas were, and rated how original the ideas were. The results showed no direct and widespread association between true crime consumption and malicious creativity. The researchers found that frequent true crime fans created revenge plans slightly more often, but this was only true for participants who already had highly aggressive personalities.
The first study also revealed an unexpected pattern regarding the quality of revenge ideas. Typically, people who score high on creativity in general words also score high on originality in malicious ideas. Researchers have found that consuming large amounts of true crime media can disrupt this cognitive connection. For consumers who actually commit serious crimes, their basic creative potential did not translate into highly creative ways of harming others.
To see if these patterns hold under different conditions, Perchtold-Stefan and her team conducted a second study. They recruited 307 participants in a supervised laboratory setting. The researchers added new questionnaires to measure depressed mood and preferences for other media genres, such as fictional horror and science fiction. This allowed us to separate the specific impact of real crimes from broader concerns about general entertainment.
In the second study, the researchers replaced a common verbal creativity test with an assessment of emotional creativity. Emotional creativity measures a person’s ability to smoothly invent positive ways to reinterpret threatening or stressful situations. Those taking this test may need to quickly brainstorm reassuring thoughts to calm themselves while walking alone through a dark park at night.
The second study utilized a slightly expanded malicious creativity test. Participants once again had to devise revenge plans and adapt the plots to new scenarios involving intrusive roommates and romantic rivals. Reviewers also categorized specific types of revenge, looking for themes such as physical harm, property damage, social manipulation, or simple ruse.
Again, researchers found little evidence that true crime popularity promotes creative aggression. True crime consumption was weakly associated with producing more ideas, but the ideas themselves were neither significantly harmful nor highly original. When criminal consumers did come up with ideas for revenge, they largely featured forms of social intimidation and manipulation rather than physical destruction.
Instead, a second study found that liking fictional horror was far more associated with generating highly harmful ideas. The researchers noted that fictional horrors are not constrained by physics, reality, or the human justice system. Although fictional horror media may provide a deeper vocabulary of ready-to-use harm, true crime stories often repeat similar patterns of blatant physical violence in the real world.
Just like the first study, the researchers found that high consumption of true crime can break the link between an individual’s overall creativity and their malicious originality. Participants who scored high on emotional creativity generally created more unique revenge plans. But when those same highly creative people are ingested with real crime material, their ideas for revenge suddenly become less original.
The authors proposed several reasons for these missing links. Hearing true stories of murder and abuse can increase a person’s empathy and moral sensitivity. Consumers who frequently experience crime in real life may be keenly aware of the horrific aftermath of real-world violence. This realization can make creative efforts to cause similar harm, even within the confines of a hypothetical psychological test, mentally taxing or unappealing.
Another explanation is borrowed from a criminological concept called routine activities theory. This theory suggests that when people become acutely aware of risk and the presence of authorities such as law enforcement, they adjust their behavior. Frequent engagement with real crime stories may increase a person’s sensitivity to the real-world consequences of criminal behavior. This wariness may inhibit the motivation to imagine novel but dangerous forms of attack.
Because the study relies on a cross-sectional design, scientists are unable to prove exactly how media habits and creative abilities influence each other over time. The team took only one snapshot of the participants. The cross-sectional setting means that researchers cannot state with absolute certainty whether actual criminal behavior changes a person’s creativity, or whether pre-existing personality traits promote both habits simultaneously.
The researchers plan to follow up with experimental and longitudinal designs to test how these relationships evolve over several years. Future research might measure how viewers subjectively perceive the novelty of the crimes they hear. For now, the data suggests that true crime enthusiasts are using their favorite genres to understand human suffering, rather than as a violent instruction manual.
The study, “Are fans of violent stories more likely to create creative harm? True crime as an environment that stimulates malicious creativity,” was authored by Corinna M. Perchtold-Stefan, David Cropley, Katharina Sattler, Christian Rominger, Andreas Fink, and Matthijs Baas.
