Back when you were a kid, you probably loved Halloween for the fun costumes and candy haul. Now, as an adult entrepreneur, you might be more interested in the holiday as a business opportunity. This year, it is estimated that Americans will spend $12.2 billion on various Halloween paraphernalia.
But whether you just like dressing up and terrifying neighborhood children or are more keen to cash in on the national obsession with this spooky season, the same question remains: Why do people like to scare themselves so much? After all, at first glance skeletons, dripping blood, and supernatural horrors sound like things we should be desperate to avoid.
Even monkeys like being terrified
Our attraction to frightening and dangerous things may seem counterintuitive, but it turns out it’s not strange. As a recent Scientific American investigation into why we enjoy scaring ourselves explains, an attraction to the terrifying is relatively common throughout the animal kingdom.
Charles Darwin himself once demonstrated this fact with what sounds like a pretty fun experiment for all involved. The famous scientist threw a bag with a snake in it into a pen of monkeys at the zoo. Rather than avoiding this potentially poisonous visitor, the monkeys took turns peeking into the sack, squealing, and running away like kids at a haunted house (OK, this probably wasn’t as much fun for the snake).
This shows humans aren’t unique in our weird attraction to being scared. But why are so many animals, including us, fascinated by things that could harm them? Scientists actually have a word for this phenomenon, Scientific American explains. The term is predator inspection, and it refers to the tendency of animals that could become lunch to pause to watch whatever creature might be keen to eat them.
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