We Need Monsters to Hate
Why We Hate Killers: The Psychology of Disgust & True Crime
Like flowers, monsters are constantly blooming. And we can’t stop staring at them. That pull to look straight at the ugliest parts of human behavior, to name them and drag them into daylight, isn’t some morbid hobby. It’s more like the practical need to clean a wound so it doesn’t get infected. Disgust is a society’s immune system, and immune systems only get strong through exposure. You can’t build immunity to something you refuse to look at.
That same disgust is what feeds the appetite. It’s why we can’t look away from the true-crime documentary, the courtroom footage, the case file. Researchers who study morbid curiosity say this isn’t pathology. It’s an old survival circuit: we’re wired to study what could hurt us, because understanding a threat is the first step to outrunning it. Forensic psychologists describe it the same way. People want to understand the abhorrent mind not despite the horror, but because of it, the same itch that makes you want to see how the trick was done. There may even be a gendered layer. Some research on true-crime audiences suggests women, who are statistically more likely to be targeted, gravitate toward the genre for the same reason you’d study a predator’s habits before walking into its territory.
So our disgust isn’t what’s wrong with us. What we do with it is another story.
Does our reaction to murder make killers want to kill more?
Sometimes, yes. And some of them have practically said so out loud.
Take Dennis Rader, the man who called himself BTK. He killed ten people in Kansas, and at one point he got annoyed that nobody was talking about it. He wrote to a local TV station, basically asking how many people he had to kill before he got some attention. He gave himself the nickname. He wasn’t hiding. He was campaigning. After more than a decade of silence, when the media started revisiting his case, he got chatty again, and that’s what got him caught.
Psychologists have long worried about this loop. Suicide researchers call it the Werther effect: it’s the volume and detail of coverage that moves the needle, not just its existence. Nobody can prove murder works exactly the same way, but when a killer is practically begging for the camera, it’s hard to say the attention is innocent. For some of them, it isn’t a byproduct of the crime. It’s the motive.
Then there’s the case where the audience didn’t recoil at all. During Lindsay Clancy’s trial, countless mothers turned a triple murder into a trend, filming themselves crying over her words. When a toddler died in Illinois the same week, the internet rushed to call it a copycat. No one has proven that, and the Illinois mother’s lawyers reject it. But the speed of the leap tells you something. We’re so primed to see contagion that we find it before the evidence does.
Which means even our reactions, disgust included, can become fuel. We plaster the killer’s face everywhere, narrate his childhood, give him a nickname. The fascination and the incentive run on the same wiring. That’s the part most true-crime content doesn’t want to sit with: watching is not neutral.
Does disgust stop monsters, or just make us feel better?
Here’s the story we like to tell ourselves. Disgust works like a floodlight. Name the monster, shame him, put his face on the news, and he scurries back into the dark. The rest of us sleep better. It’s a comforting idea. It’s also only half true.
To see why, it helps to know where disgust comes from. Psychologists who study it as a moral emotion, not just the stomach-turning kind you feel at spoiled milk, say it started as a pathogen-avoidance system. Evolution took that same revulsion, redirected it from rotten food to rotten character, and found it handy for policing people.
There’s a well-known framework for this, built by psychologist Paul Rozin back in ‘99. We feel anger when someone violates our autonomy, contempt when they violate community norms, and disgust when something feels like a violation of purity or decency itself. Monsters get filed under that last one.
Listen to the words we use for them: sick, twisted, inhuman. Nobody says that about a thief. That’s disgust language, and it’s physical on purpose. It’s a social signal that says this one doesn’t get to belong here. We’re marking someone for expulsion, not just punishment. It may even be a deliberate choice, a way of signaling that the objection is moral rather than personal.
But does it push monsters into hiding?
Sometimes. There’s real evidence that anticipated shame, the private dread of being seen as monstrous, is one of the stronger predictors of whether someone follows through on wrongdoing at all. In some studies, like Grasmick and Bursik’s classic work from the ‘90s, it outperforms fear of arrest or prison. Most of us know this feeling. What stops you from doing something terrible usually isn’t a cop. It’s picturing the look on someone’s face when they find out. The threat of disgust, held quietly in the mind before the act, does seem to hold some people back.
Public shaming tells a different story. Disgust performed loudly, at scale, on someone who’s already been caught seems to backfire. Economist Eric Rasmusen modeled it in ‘96 and found an almost perverse effect: the more a society shames, the less any single act of shaming deters, because the pool of “acceptable” people shrinks and the cost of being an outcast among outcasts drops. Criminologist John Braithwaite made a related argument: shaming that casts someone out, instead of leaving a way back in, tends to push people toward isolation and away from the relationships and accountability that might have stopped them from reoffending.
You can see the real-world version in sex offender registries. It’s disgust turned into policy: names, photos, and addresses, published for the neighbors. And the research on whether they work isn’t flattering. Studies reviewed by the Justice Department’s research arm found the registries aren’t likely to be an effective deterrent against reoffending, and that they may create conditions that make things worse, with more barriers to jobs and fewer supportive relationships. The laws have defenders, and the evidence isn’t unanimous. But a system built to expose people mostly seems to make them harder to hold on to.
The instinct to make monsters flee into the dark can, in practice, make sure they stay there. Alone. Unwatched.
So disgust doesn’t neutralize monsters so much as relocate them. We perform it to feel like we’ve drawn a line, whether or not the line holds. We get the catharsis of collective revulsion. The monster, more often than not, just finds different shadows.
None of this makes our disgust fake or pointless. It’s still what lets a society notice and name what it won’t tolerate, and that naming matters even when it doesn’t fully deter. But let’s be honest: disgust is doing something for us as much as it’s doing something to them.
Does our disdain create our ethics, or just confirm the ones we already had?
Mostly, it confirms them. Psychologist Jonathan Haidt pictures it as a rider on an elephant. The elephant is your gut reaction (that’s monstrous). The rider is your reasoning mind, who isn’t steering so much as jogging along behind, making up reasons. We don’t feel disgusted because we reasoned our way to a moral conclusion. We were disgusted first, and then we found the logic.
The model has critics, and some argue reasoning matters more than Haidt gives it credit for. But the experiments are hard to wave away. Researchers gave people scenarios that were disgusting but hurt no one. People condemned them anyway, instantly and with total certainty. When asked why, many couldn’t come up with a reason that held up, and they didn’t change their verdict. They just said some version of I don’t know, it’s just wrong. Researchers call it a moral dumbfounding. The elephant had already decided. The rider was improvising a speech.
Now think about how you react to a killer. You hear what he did, and you already know how you feel about him. The speech about justice and evil comes after. Our certainty is real, but it’s a feeling, not a proof.
That’s why ‘good triumphs over evil’ isn’t something we reasoned our way to. It’s something we feel and then spend our lives defending. That doesn’t make it wrong. It does make it fragile, though. Because a feeling has to be felt again to keep working. Every generation has to feel the disgust fresh, or the line starts to blur.
Once the reflex fades, do our reasons hold up? Most of the time, we never check.
Hating the flowers never stopped them from blooming. The flowers don’t care how we feel about them. They only care what we feed them.
