Why Do People Who Have More Enjoy Horror More?

From horror films and TV series to haunted house attractions and terrifying Halloween goods, people consume a wide variety of horror-related experiences and products. In fact, the market demand for horror consumption has been rising in the past decades, making the genre of horror one of the most widely consumed form of entertainment. Yet, the extant understanding of this type of consumption remains relatively limited (Andrade and Cohen 2007). For example, when might consumers be more or less likely to engage in horror consumption? What might underlie such difference in preference? Our research seeks to help answer these questions. Recent research suggests that consumers frequently experience perceived scarcity (vs. abundance) in resources such as goods and wealth (e.g., Booth 1984; Mullainathan and Shafir 2013; Shah, Mullainathan, and Shafir 2012; Roux, Goldsmith, and Bonezzi 2015; Zhu and Ratner 2015; see Cannon, Goldsmith, and Roux 2018 for a review). Such differences in perceived resource availability can trigger a generalized mindset, impacting subsequent consumer behavior in unrelated contexts (e.g., Mehta and Zhu 2015; Roux et al. 2015). Complementing and extending these prior findings, the current research explores how and why consumers’ activated resource availability mindset can shape their preference for counterhedonic consumption. We propose that consumers with a resource abundance (vs. scarcity) mindset tend to have a higher preference for consuming horror. This occurs because resource abundance (scarcity) mindset increases (decreases) one’s sense of control, which serves as a type of ‘protective frame’—the feeling that danger and threat one is experiencing will not cause actual harm (Apter 1992; Andrade and Cohen 2007)—and hence allows consumers to experience more pleasure when consuming horror.