Why Is Scaring People So Much Fun?

Pacific Standard:

For some children, sleepovers are bonding experiences between friends where the night’s pajama-inducing tranquility and intimacy facilitates more meaningful connections. For other children, sleepovers are dystopian nightmares spent in the residential equivalent of that hotel in the Shining. These children find their daylight friends transformed into sadists under cover of night. In a mix of partial shame and partial pride, I must admit that sleepovers with me were like the latter. I loved (and still love) to scare the devil out of people (not infrequently by convincing them the devil was already inside them).

Research published in Psychological Science makes the case for “everyday sadism,” challenging the prevailing notions that only narcissists and psychopaths experience it. And indeed, true malevolence seems to be missing from scary pranks. “When we do scare others, we usually do it to people we care about,” Clasen says, pointing out that some of the most common perpetrators of scary pranks are parents scaring their own children. They might not consciously be preparing them to survive battle with zombies and ghosts, but they’ve given them preparation for other challenges with the associated terror.

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