So, after having to sit through a Special Victims Unit marathon, I started to realize something.

Humans are oddly interested in the worst of mankind.

We take a look at things that if we were involved in, in real life, would try to erase from our memories.
Only recently has the genre of "torture porn" movies sprung up, such as Saw. Crime dramas from the 80s and 90s would never have shown the sorts of things they do now. The news bombards with information of murder, abuse, neglect, war, rape, and so forth.

Yet no matter how disgusting or terrifying it gets, we still look at it.

We want to close our eyes when the serial killer ambushes someone. But we just can't.
We would be repulsed if we met a real life Hannibal Lecter, but the first movie he was in won several awards.
We slow down at roadkill, at car accidents.

For a species that tries to be good, the only one which has the cognitive ability to think what it is doing is better for the Earth, we have a strange, and curious interest with the horrible, the bloody, the creepy.

Why?

because the majority of us have a strange ketchup addiction.

Edited 4/24/2016 17:13:50

It's called negative bias, you're very far from first to see it.

Yeah. There is a reason nobody cares that much about UNESCO but Rwanda made all the headlines.

It's why folk love police movies.

kil kil kil murda murda murda

pumped up kikz!!!!!1

mmm.. boi

I think it inherently lies within the fact that people are much better at identifying against things, so these allow them to claim they are not like them.
people are attracted to atrocities, not niceness because we fail to recognize the latter.

If we focused on goid things a lot, we wouldn't have evolved as a species. The constant perfecting and trouble shooting drove our growth.

It's probably since humans inherently psychologically can identify way more good things in their life than bad. I mean, even if you're starving and bleeding out from a gunshot wound, hey, at least you're not some dog mandated from birth to life torture for man's testing purposes.

I don't think dogs can fully reason how bad their situation is, but yeah at least you're not that pupper.

2 make us feel better about ourselves

Because the majority of us are evil at heart. Face it.

Because the media *cough* FOX NEWS *cough* is pandering to audiences with a message of fear and worry to keep viewers sucked in, looking for a happy ending.

"media" has to be one of the least rightly wielded words in English.

The single is "medium", the many is "media", and media will always have "are" after it, while medium will have "is" after it.

A better word that makes more sense is news agency.

Fair point.