Does listening to true crime make you a more creative criminal?

Reading about or listening to stories of real-world violence does not seem to make people more creative when it comes to harming others. In fact, heavy consumers of true crime might actually be less likely to use their imaginative skills for malicious purposes. These findings were recently published in The Journal of Creative Behavior.

Media consumption shapes how people think, feel, and act in their daily lives. Researchers have spent decades testing how fictional violence in video games and movies might influence aggression. Many psychologists suggest that consuming violent content primes aggressive thoughts and desensitizes watchers to human suffering. Yet one exceptionally popular genre has largely escaped scientific scrutiny. True crime media focuses on real human stories of assault, serial murder, and hostage situations.

Half of the public in the United States consumes true crime tales on television, in books, or through podcasts. People often debate whether immersing oneself in these grim realities might leave a lasting, negative imprint on an individual. A team of psychology researchers wondered if this constant exposure to real-life violence might boost a specific psychological trait known as malevolent creativity.

Malevolent creativity involves intentionally generating highly original and harmful ideas to damage or take revenge on other people. A person displaying this trait goes beyond standard aggression by inventing novel, unexpected ways to cause physical or psychological pain. University of Graz researcher Corinna M. Perchtold-Stefan and her colleagues set out to see if the true crime genre provides an instructional blueprint for this kind of behavior. They measured whether frequent listeners or viewers of true crime are more capable of dreaming up unique ways to exact revenge.

The researchers evaluated the idea from two opposing angles. On one hand, realistic portrayals of extreme violence might systematically alter a person’s boundaries, providing them with practical knowledge for destructive behaviors. On the other hand, the people who actively seek out true crime might have different underlying motives, such as a desire to understand justice or an urge to prepare for real-world dangers.

The researchers conducted two separate studies to investigate these concepts. In the first study, the team surveyed 160 adult participants online. Participants reported how often they engaged with true crime media and filled out a questionnaire measuring their natural tendencies toward physical and verbal aggression. They also completed a standard test of verbal creativity, which required them to generate as many unusual words or sentences as possible within a hard time limit.

To capture malevolent creativity, the researchers asked participants to imagine being trapped in unfair social situations. Example scenarios included a careless colleague spilling coffee on an expensive book or a neighbor breaking a promise to pay for help. Participants had three minutes to invent as many harmful, creative ideas as possible to get back at the offending wrongdoer.

Independent reviewers then judged the participants’ responses based on three distinct categories. The reviewers counted the raw number of revenge ideas generated, scored how damaging the ideas were, and rated how original they were. The results did not show a direct, broad link between true crime consumption and malevolent creativity. The researchers found that frequent true crime fans produced a slightly higher number of revenge plots, but this was only the case for participants who already had highly aggressive personalities.

The first study also revealed an unexpected pattern regarding the quality of the revenge ideas. Normally, people who score highly on general verbal creativity also score highly on the originality of their malevolent ideas. The researchers found that consuming a lot of true crime media seemed to disrupt this cognitive link. For heavy true crime consumers, basic creative potential did not translate into highly original ways to harm others.

To see if these patterns held up under different conditions, Perchtold-Stefan and her team conducted a second study. They recruited 307 participants in a supervised laboratory setting. The team added new questionnaires to measure depressive moods and preferences for other media genres, including fictional horror and science fiction. This allowed them to isolate the specific effects of true crime from a broader interest in general entertainment.

In the second study, the researchers swapped the general verbal creativity test for an assessment of affective creativity. Affective creativity measures a person’s ability to smoothly invent positive ways to reinterpret a threatening or stressful situation. A person taking this test might have to quickly brainstorm reassuring thoughts to calm themselves down while walking alone through a dark park at night.

The second study utilized a slightly expanded malevolent creativity test. Participants again had to invent revenge schemes, adjusting their plots for new scenarios involving a disruptive roommate or a romantic rival. Reviewers also categorized the specific types of revenge, looking for themes of physical harm, property damage, social manipulation, or simple trickery.

Once again, the researchers found very little evidence that true crime popularity drives creative aggression. True crime consumption was weakly associated with generating a higher number of ideas, but the ideas themselves were not notably harmful or exceptionally original. When high true crime consumers did come up with revenge ideas, they heavily featured forms of social intimidation or manipulation rather than physical devastation.

Instead, the second study found that a preference for fictional horror was far more associated with generating highly damaging ideas. The researchers noted that fictional horror is not constrained by physics, reality, or the human justice system. Fictional horror media might offer a deeper vocabulary of out-of-the-box harm, while true crime narratives often repeat similar, real-world patterns of blunt physical violence.

Just like the first study, the researchers found that high true crime consumption seemed to sever the link between an individual’s overall creativity and their malevolent originality. Participants who scored high in affective creativity generally produced more unique revenge plots. But if those same highly creative people consumed large amounts of true crime material, their revenge ideas were suddenly much less original.

The authors proposed a few reasons for these missing links. Listening to real stories of murder and abuse might increase a person’s empathy and moral sensitivity. A frequent true crime consumer might be acutely aware of the terrible aftermath of violence in the real world. This awareness could make it mentally taxing or unappealing for them to exert creative effort in bringing about similar harm, even within the confines of a hypothetical psychological test.

Another explanation borrows from a criminological concept called routine activity theory. This theory suggests that people adjust their behavior when they are highly aware of risks and the presence of authorities, like law enforcement. Frequent engagement with true crime narratives might heighten a person’s sensitivity to the real-world consequences of criminal actions. This vigilance could suppress their motivation to imagine novel yet risky forms of aggression.

Because the research relied on a cross-sectional design, the scientists cannot prove exactly how media habits and creative abilities influence one another over time. The team only captured a single snapshot of the participants. A cross-sectional setup means that the researchers cannot state with absolute certainty whether true crime consumption alters a person’s creativity or if preexisting personality traits drive both habits simultaneously.

The researchers plan to follow up with experimental and longitudinal designs to test how these relationships evolve over several years. Future studies might measure how audiences subjectively perceive the novelty of the crimes they hear about. For now, the data suggests that true crime enthusiasts use their favorite genre to understand human suffering rather than using it as a violent instruction manual.

The study, “Do Fans of Violent Stories Show a Higher Potential for Creative Harm? True Crime as a Stimulating Environment for Malevolent Creativity,” was authored by Corinna M. Perchtold-Stefan, David Cropley, Katharina Sattler, Christian Rominger, Andreas Fink, and Matthijs Baas.