Audiences on the dark side: Do antisocial personality traits predict motives for true crime listening?

Abstract

True crime is the most popular topic among podcasts in the United States (Shearer et al., 2023), yet very little is known about the fans of this genre. We used data from true crime podcast listeners (n = 300) to investigate both what motivations drive true crime podcast use and whether specific personality traits shape those motivations. We found that motives related to information seeking were prevalent among fans of true crime podcasts. We also found that trait psychopathy and narcissism were significantly associated with many important motives for true crime podcast consumption. Overall, findings indicated general patterns of user motivation among fans of true crime podcasts as well as differential motivation and use across dark triad personality traits. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved)