Why do we love true crime?
What a survey of podcast listeners, a scale of morbid curiosity, a study of book choices and a meta-analysis of unfinished tasks say about the pull of true crime.
Answer to the question
Why do we love true crime?
People report ordinary reasons for loving true crime. In a survey of 308 podcast listeners, entertainment, convenience and boredom were prominent, and women also rated social interaction and escape higher. Research on morbid curiosity describes a normal, stable interest in information about danger, and unfinished stories add a pull to come back.
Key takeaways
- In an online survey of 308 true crime podcast listeners, 73 per cent were women; entertainment, convenience and boredom were prominent motivations, and social interaction, escape and voyeurism were significantly stronger for women (Boling and Hull, 2018).
- Morbid curiosity, a motivation to seek out information about dangerous phenomena, was measured as a stable trait that scored steady over four to six weeks and is described as normally occurring (Scrivner, 2021).
- Studies of readers' actual book choices found women gravitating toward true crime while men preferred other violent genres (Vicary and Fraley, 2010).
- A 2025 meta-analysis found no general memory advantage for unfinished tasks but a general tendency to resume them (Ghibellini and Meier, 2025).
- Adam Alter's Irresistible treats the unresolved ending as a design choice that holds an audience by leaving a gap to be closed.
A genre built on the hardest days of strangers draws most of its audience from people who might be expected to look away. The research on why we love true crime keeps returning to the gap between a heavy subject and a light motive. Listeners, readers and viewers describe the pull in everyday terms, and the studies that measure it describe a normal interest more than an unusual one. They also describe a pull that is social, since a case is something to discuss, and a pull that is structural, since a story left open invites a return. Each of these has been measured separately, with different samples and different methods, and they point the same way.
Plain reasons from listeners
Kelli Boling and Kevin Hull asked the audience directly. Their online survey of listeners to true crime podcasts, published in the Journal of Radio and Audio Media, found three motivations that stood out across all listeners: entertainment, convenience and [boredom](https://thewhyweproject.com/articles/why-do-we-get-bored). Three further motivations were significantly stronger for women than for men: social interaction, escape and voyeurism, the paper's own label for taking an interest in other people's lives.
In the Boling and Hull sample of 308 listeners, 73 per cent were women. Those answers describe a pastime, not a preoccupation. A podcast fits a commute or a chore, an episode fills a gap in the day, and a case becomes something to talk over afterwards with a friend. The social interaction finding matters most for the question. A true crime story that people discuss gets a second life in conversation, so part of the appeal sits in the company it creates and not only in the story itself.
True crime draws ordinary curiosity
Coltan Scrivner approached the same appetite from the other side, by treating it as a trait that anyone can have to some degree. His paper in Personality and Individual Differences introduced a 24-item Morbid Curiosity Scale, defined as a motivation to seek out information about dangerous phenomena. Across four studies, including 1,370 people in the first two, higher scorers tended to be socially curious and preferred films built around a central threat, and scores held steady over four to six weeks. In the final study the scale strongly predicted whether people chose to look further into morbid information. The author concludes that morbid curiosity is a normally occurring trait.
An interest in true crime fits this trait without needing any darker explanation. A case file is information about danger delivered at a safe distance, and the pull that sends one person to a threat-themed film sends another to a documentary or a podcast series. The same logic is at work in Why We Enjoy Horror Films, where the pleasure comes from facing something frightening on terms the viewer controls, with the frame of a screen or a speaker doing the protecting. The scale does not test true crime itself, so the link to the genre is an inference.
Who picks the genre
Amanda Vicary and Chris Fraley started from an apparent puzzle. Books about real murders have a large readership, and a violent subject might be expected to draw men most of all. Reader reviews suggested the opposite. In their first two studies, which examined the books people actually chose, women gravitated toward true crime while men preferred other violent genres. Three further studies altered features of true crime stories to find which elements women found most engaging, and the authors interpret the pattern through evolutionary perspectives on aggression and homicide.
That result and the survey above describe one audience from two angles. One shows what people pick when they have a choice, and the other shows what they say they are getting from it, which includes escape and company. Neither paper makes a claim about what the genre does to its readers, and neither needs to for the main point to stand: the audience is large, it is mostly female in these samples, and its reasons are everyday ones.
That everyday quality is easy to miss when the subject is so heavy. A person who follows true crime on a long drive is doing something close to what a person does with any serial story: choosing company, structure and a puzzle to turn over. The weight of the subject sits in the material, while the habit sits in the listener's day. So far the research has measured three separate things, and it is worth keeping them apart:
- The reasons people give: entertainment, convenience, boredom, social interaction and escape.
- A stable interest in information about danger, found in ordinary people to varying degrees.
- The choices people make between genres and between story features.
None of the three measures an effect the stories have on their audience.
An open case invites a return
Adam Alter's Irresistible treats the unresolved ending as a deliberate design choice. In his account, a series that stops before the answer arrives holds its audience by leaving a gap to be closed, and he counts that unresolved tension among the ingredients that make some experiences hard to put down. The information gap account of curiosity describes the same thing from the viewer's side: curiosity grows when the distance between what you know and what you want to know becomes visible, which is also why a sealed puzzle in Why We Love Mystery Boxes holds attention.
The research on unfinished tasks sharpens what that pull is. A 2025 meta-analysis by Romain Ghibellini and Beat Meier found no general memory advantage for tasks that were interrupted, a result that sets aside the old idea behind the Zeigarnik effect. It did find a general tendency to go back and resume them, the pattern at the centre of What is the Ovsiankina effect.
For a true crime listener at the end of an episode, the better reading is that an open case makes you want to go back, not that it makes you remember more. Of the findings above, this one has the firmest footing, because it rests on a pooled analysis and not on a single survey or scale, and a story that stops at its most open point gives people every reason to press play on the next episode, whatever else first drew them to the genre, whether company, a puzzle or a spare hour.
Common questions
Why do we love true crime?
People report ordinary reasons. In a survey of true crime podcast listeners, entertainment, convenience and boredom were prominent, and women rated social interaction, escape and voyeurism higher than men did. Research on morbid curiosity adds a stable interest in information about danger, and unfinished stories add a pull to come back.
Is liking true crime unusual?
The research describes it as ordinary. A scale of morbid curiosity, a motivation to seek out information about dangerous phenomena, was built and tested across four studies and treats the trait as normally occurring, with people differing in how much of it they have.
Why do more women than men follow true crime?
In the podcast survey, 73 per cent of the 308 listeners were women, and an earlier study of book choices found women gravitating toward true crime while men preferred other violent genres. The authors of that study interpret the pattern through evolutionary perspectives, and the survey authors found social interaction, escape and voyeurism more salient for women.
Does an unresolved ending help us remember a story?
A 2025 meta-analysis found no general memory advantage for unfinished tasks. It did find a general tendency to resume them, which fits the urge to listen to the next episode.
Sources
Alter, A. Irresistible. Seed book; vault hub Books/Irresistible.
Boling, K. S., & Hull, K. (2018). Undisclosed information, Serial is my favorite murder: Examining motivations in the true crime podcast audience. Journal of Radio & Audio Media, 25(1), 92-108. doi:10.1080/19376529.2017.1370714 https://doi.org/10.1080/19376529.2017.1370714
Scrivner, C. (2021). The psychology of morbid curiosity: Development and initial validation of the morbid curiosity scale. Personality and Individual Differences, 183, 111139. doi:10.1016/j.paid.2021.111139 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2021.111139
Vicary, A. M., & Fraley, R. C. (2010). Captured by true crime: Why are women drawn to tales of rape, murder, and serial killers? Social Psychological and Personality Science, 1(1), 81-86. doi:10.1177/1948550609355486 https://doi.org/10.1177/1948550609355486
Ghibellini, R., & Meier, B. (2025). Interruption, recall and resumption: a meta-analysis of the Zeigarnik and Ovsiankina effects. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 12. doi:10.1057/s41599-025-05000-w https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-025-05000-w