Why We Can't Stop Watching Other People Fail

The most watched television documentary of the last decade is probably not one you would name if you were trying to describe your cultural tastes to a stranger. It is *Making a Murderer*, or *Tiger King*, or *Don't F**k with Cats*, or one of a hundred variations on the same template: a real person, usually not famous, makes catastrophic decisions that destroy themselves and often others, and we watch all of it with horrified attention.

I want to examine why, because I think it reveals something about the psychology of an attention economy that we tend to leave unexamined.

Schadenfreude — pleasure at others' misfortune — is one of the most documented and least admitted emotional responses in psychology. Studies using fMRI show that watching a disliked person suffer activates reward circuitry in the brain. This is not a bug in human psychology. It has evolutionary origins: in small groups, observing the consequences of others' rule-breaking helps establish and maintain norms. The failure of someone who broke the rules confirms that the rules are real.

But social media and streaming have scaled this impulse far beyond its evolutionary context. The public shaming dynamic that Twitter normalized in the 2010s — a person says or does something wrong, or is alleged to have done something wrong, and thousands of strangers pile on — is schadenfreude at industrial scale. The dopamine hit of the pile-on, the satisfaction of the correct take, the community-building function of shared contempt: these are ancient impulses running on modern infrastructure.

True crime is more complicated. The genre has been defended on the grounds that it raises awareness, advocates for victims, and scrutinizes failures of the justice system. These defenses are sometimes valid. But they do not explain why true crime about wrongful convictions is dramatically less popular than true crime about lurid, often female, victims. The justice system critique is the acceptable rationale. The lurid spectacle is the product.

I am not trying to shame true crime fans, which would be ironic. I am genuinely fascinated by people who are fascinated by catastrophe, including myself. I watched all of *Tiger King* and found myself checking Wikipedia for updates on the people involved. This is not behavior I am proud of, but it is real behavior that I think deserves to be examined rather than euphemized.

What are we looking for when we watch?

Part of it is the reassurance of narrative. Real life is chaotic and unresolved. True crime gives it a shape: beginning, middle, consequence. Even when the resolution is incomplete, the narrative form provides a sense of order that chaotic reality does not.

Part of it is the illusion of safety. The person failing is not us. Their failure is visible to us but not ours to experience. There is a specific pleasure in observing a situation you will never be in.

And part of it — this is the uncomfortable part — is that catastrophe is interesting in the same way that fire is interesting: it exceeds the normal boundaries of what is allowed to happen. The rules that constrain ordinary life do not apply. Watching someone violate them, and watching the violation unfold, is a form of transgressive pleasure that is hard to name without sounding worse than you mean.

The question is what we do with this knowledge. I do not think the answer is to stop watching. I think the answer is to watch with more awareness of what we are actually doing — and, when we find ourselves unable to look away from someone's worst moment, to ask whose interests that inability serves.