There are people who fall asleep with white noise. Another with a series already seen three times. Yet another with a voice that tells of a murder, a kidnapping, a body found in a ditch. True crime is now there, among normal habits, with an almost grotesque naturalness: headphones in your ears, dinner to prepare, real blood in the background.
The same suspicion has always swirled around this genre for years. By staying inside real stories of violence, something shifts. Maybe the moral boundary loosens. Maybe certain ideas take root. Maybe one becomes better at even imagining how to hurt others.
Psychology has been working on violence in the media for a long time. Especially about video games and movies. Some scholars have long argued that violent content can activate aggressive thoughts and reduce sensitivity to suffering. Within this discussion, however, true crime has remained quite on the margins, despite being one of the most consumed genres. Yet he talks about attacks, serial murders, kidnappings, abuses, hostages. All this stuff really happened.
In the United States, about half of the public consumes true crime on TV, in books or in podcasts. Doubt, at that point, stops seeming like lounge paranoia. A group of researchers led by Corinna M. Perchtold-Stefan, from the University of Graz, decided to understand whether this exposure to real violence can increase so-called malevolent creativity. The results were published on The Journal of Creative Behavior.
Malevolent creativity is a pretty neat trait. It means knowing how to generate original and harmful ideas with the intention of hitting someone, taking revenge, inflicting physical or psychological pain. It’s not simple anger. It’s not even simple aggression. It’s that extra step: inventing an unexpected way to hurt.
The idea to be verified was twofold. On the one hand, true crime could offer a kind of repertoire, an implicit handbook of destructive behaviors. On the other hand, those who seek this genre could do so for completely different reasons: to better understand justice, orient themselves in fear, learn to recognize danger.
Three minutes to imagine revenge
To understand where the truth lay, the researchers constructed two studies. The first involved 160 adults online. Each was asked how often they consumed true crime. Then the participants filled out a questionnaire about their tendencies towards physical and verbal aggression. They also took a standard test of verbal creativity, the one where you have to come up with as many unusual words or phrases as possible within a very tight time limit.
The most interesting, and also most unpleasant, part came next. To measure malicious creativity, participants had to imagine themselves trapped in unfair social situations. A careless colleague who spills coffee on an expensive book. A neighbor who promises to pay you for a favor and then disappears. From there the task began: three minutes to invent as many harmful and creative ideas as possible to strike back.
Those responses were then evaluated by independent reviewers along three lines. They counted how many revenge ideas had been produced, how harmful they were, and how original they were.
The overall result was much less cinematic than expected. No clear and general link between consumption of true crime and malicious creativity. Only a small and limited signal appeared: the most assiduous fans of the genre produced a slightly higher number of revenge ideas, but this only happened among people who already had a very aggressive personality.
Then there is a more subtle and even more interesting passage. Usually those with high verbal creativity tend to have more originality even in malicious ideas. Here that connection seemed to jam. In heavy consumers of true crime, general creativity did not translate into more original ways of harming others. It’s a small detail, but it matters.
Horror also entered the second studio
To see if those results held up even when changing context, the team set up a second study with 307 participants in the lab. This time they added more questionnaires, including ones on depressive mood and preferences for other genres, such as fictional horror and science fiction. It served to separate the effect of true crime from a broader taste for entertainment.
The general creativity test has also changed. In place of verbal creativity came affective creativity, that is, the ability to quickly produce positive reinterpretations of stressful or threatening situations. In practice: being able to construct reassuring thoughts to calm yourself down, for example while walking alone in a dark park.
The malicious creativity test has also been expanded. Participants had to invent new revenges in different scenarios, such as an unbearable roommate or a romantic rival. The reviewers, in addition to quantity, harmfulness and originality, also classified the type of revenge: physical damage, material damage, social manipulation, small tricks.
Here too, true crime did not do what many fear. Consumption of this kind was weakly associated with a greater number of ideas, but those ideas were not particularly harmful or even exceptionally original. When those who consumed a lot of true crime imagined revenge, it more often ended in forms of intimidation or social manipulation than in physical devastation.
The data that stood out the most concerned fictional horror. That preference appeared much more related to the ability to produce highly harmful ideas. The reason proposed by the researchers rows. Invented horror must not stay within the limits of the real world, of physics, of law, of plausibility. It can afford a much broader vocabulary of damage. True crime, however dark, often revolves around patterns of concrete, repetitive, brutal violence in the most earthly way possible.
The other element already seen in the first also returned in the second study. Those with high affective creativity tended, in general, to produce more original revenge. However, if that same person consumed a lot of true crime, his or her malevolent originality was lowered. Again, the bond was broken.
The authors propose some explanations. The first concerns empathy and moral sensitivity. Staying for a long time inside true stories of murders and abuse could make the aftermath much more present: the family members, the trauma, the devastation, the consequences that remain with the living. With that weight in your head, investing imagination in doing badly can become tiring, repellent, mentally costly, even in a simple test.
The second explanation comes from criminology, through routine activity theory. Simply put: people regulate their behavior when they better perceive the risks, the controls, the presence of the authorities and the concrete possibility of being stopped. Those who frequent true crime a lot could develop a greater sensitivity towards the practical consequences of crimes. And that vigilance could extinguish the impulse to imagine new, risky and “brilliant” forms of aggression.
Then there is the most boring and most important part, the one that prevents us from being prophets. The two studies have a cross-sectional design. They photograph a single moment, they don’t follow people over time. Therefore they cannot say with certainty whether true crime really changes something in creativity or whether it is some traits already present that orient both media consumption and test results together.
For this reason, researchers want to move forward with experimental and longitudinal studies, capable of observing how these relationships change over the years. Among the next leads there is also the way in which the public perceives the novelty of the crimes told: that too could count in the way in which the mind processes them.
For now, the picture remains fairly clean. True crime seems to do very little to turn someone into a more imaginative criminal. In certain cases, indeed, it almost seems to take away the luster from the very idea of creative revenge. The fascination remains, of course. Compulsive consumption remains. That strange habit of folding clothes while listening to the news of a massacre remains. But the manual of evil, at least here, has not been seen.
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