Scenes of Suffering: Why do people choose to engage with emotionally evocative images and stories?
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Content available in the media (i.e., social media posts, news outlets) frequently portrays emotionally evocative situations. Previous work has shown that engaging with someone else’s suffering can hold epistemic, personal, social, or affective value. However, facing other people’s hardship can also be cognitively and emotionally taxing. Why do people decide to view and read stories of suffering? Drawing on models of curiosity and information seeking, motivated empathy, social norms, and hedonic goals, we examined how various motives predict choices to engage with positive and negative images and stories. Using a cross-validation approach, we conducted two exploratory studies and two preregistered confirmatory studies. The exploratory studies allowed us to select and finetune a set of motives that significantly predicted engaging with emotionally evocative content, and the results from these studies informed our hypotheses for the confirmatory studies. The results robustly showed that knowledge acquisition, self-relevance, and a sense of thrill positively predicted choice for emotionally evocative content regardless of stimuli valence. Furthermore, the expectation of experiencing positive and negative emotions predicted choices to engage with and avoid emotionally evocative content, respectively, although some studies suggested interactions with valence. Crucially, the four studies consistently demonstrated a stronger relationship between uncertainty reduction and choosing negative content as compared to choosing positive content. We discuss theoretical and applied implications of the results and how they reflect the epistemic, personal, and affective value that drives the exploration of suffering.
