 I just recently got into watching scary movies, and that's a huge step for me. I don't think I could fully put into words how scared I used to get. Scary movies gave me nightmares, but even worse, they heighten my anxiety like you wouldn't believe. I am a fully grown man, and even watching a silly zombie movie like Shaun of the Dead was torture for me. And although I'm an adult, I have no problem admitting how truly scared I used to be. This past year, things changed a little bit. I've been dating my lovely girlfriend for coming up on about four years, and she loves scary movies. And up until recently, I pretty much just let her watch them alone. Then, my son started becoming interested in the YouTube channel Dead Meat, and he really wanted to watch the It remake. Hey Dylan, I got a surprise for ya. Hey Dylan, what up man? Hey, I'm here with your dad, Chris. He told me you're awesome. And you know what? I don't think he's a liar. So, keep being awesome, and good people man, wish you were here. One day, I decided it was time to fight my fear because I don't want my son to be in his 20s and 30s as scared as movies as his dad was. So my son and I started watching scary movies with my girlfriend, and we watched a lot of them. When we first started, my son and I would sit next to each other on the couch and close our eyes together. But after months of some exposure therapy, him and I watched scary movies and scary TV series, like a couple of champs. He absolutely loves watching scary movies with us, and not to brag, but I think I've impressed my girlfriend with how not scared I am these days. But after diving deep into the horror movie genre, I started noticing something interesting about the human mind and how we think while watching scary movies. I know there are plenty of fellow horror fans out there, so I thought it would be fun to blend a little psychology and critical thinking with how we watch horror movies. Something I noticed while watching horror movies is that a lot of us have a lot of opinions while we watch the movie. We say what we do in those situations, and we have ideas about what the characters should and shouldn't do. Aside from previously being extremely afraid of scary movies, something else that makes me a little less manly is that I'm not a huge sports fan, but I imagine we watch scary movies like people who yell at football games on TV about what the players and coaches should be doing. As I've grown more familiar with horror movies, I've also started to notice that the horror community is quite critical of these films. While I could do a whole different video about the nuanced discussion around preferences for what makes a good horror movie or TV series, I wanted to cover something that I noticed while doing some self-reflecting. Since coming to this realization, it's not only helped me enjoy horror movies a bit more, but I also try to use it in my daily life to help me better understand the decisions that other people make, which I may find silly or irrational. But before we get started, if you're new to the Rewire Soul, make sure you subscribe and ring that notification bell. Here we analyze different topics to improve our critical thinking skills and to gain a better understanding of the world as a whole. Recently we watched The Haunting of Blind Manor, which was the follow-up season to The Haunting of Hill House on Netflix. Not to spoil much, but there's one scene in the early episodes where the main character Danny goes down to the basement alone and sees a doll sitting there by itself. As I watch this scene, I remember thinking, turn all of the lights on, all of the lights, right now. And why are you walking down there? Run! Run down there! Grab the doll and leave! It was then that I realized a major thinking error that many of us have, so I started thinking about it. And I noticed it even more as I watched more scary movies and shows. This thinking error is what psychologists call the curse of knowledge, and it can also fall into the category of the false consensus effect bias. This is a problem we all have where we think that other people know what we know or have the same information that we do. Before I dive deeper into this thinking error, we should first discuss the theory of mind. The theory of mind is something that separates us humans from non-human animals, and it's our ability to tune into others and predict what they know. For years, psychologists have studied children to see when various stages happen, and they found that the theory of mind typically develops around age 4 or 5. In 1983, they first did the classic experiment testing for theory of mind. They brought children in of different ages for the study, and here's what they did as explained in this article from The Guardian. In the experiment, children were presented with two dolls, Sally, who has a basket, and Anne, who has a box. Sally puts a marble in her basket and leaves the room, while Sally is away, and takes the marble from the basket and hides it in her box. Finally, Sally returns to the room, and the child is asked three questions. 1. Where will Sally look for her marble? The belief question. 2. Where is the marble really? The reality question. And 3. Where was the marble at the beginning? The memory question. The critical question is the belief question. If the children answer this by pointing to the basket, then they have shown an appreciation that Sally's understanding of the world doesn't reflect the actual state of affairs. If they instead point to the box, then they fail the task, arguably because they haven't taken into account that they possess knowledge that Sally doesn't have access to. What's interesting is that although we develop theory of mind by early adolescents, we still fail theory of mind tests on a regular basis, and I think scary movies are a great example. We assume that people know what we know and see what we see, and this is the curse of knowledge at play. In another experiment from 1990 at Stanford University, they paired people up as either the tapper or the listener. The tapper would pick a well-known song like the Happy Birthday song, and the listener would have to guess it as the tapper played the song on a table. Before the experiment started, the researchers asked the tappers the probability that the listener would guess correctly, and they predicted about 50 percent. But what actually happened? The listeners only had an accuracy ratio of 2.5 percent. Why was accuracy so low but the predictions were so high? The curse of knowledge. The tappers hear the song in their head with various notes playing, whereas the listener only hears the tapping on a table and a certain rhythm. If you've ever played a game of Pictionary, you've most likely been frustrated by your curse of knowledge as you try to draw what you think is the perfect image of a cat. So, bringing it back to scary movies and TV shows, I've enjoyed them quite a bit more when I leave my curse of knowledge to the side. As soon as we turn on a scary movie, we already have a lot more information than most of the characters in the movie. The biggest piece of knowledge that we have is that we know the genre of the movie. We know what the typical scary movie brings to the table, which can include things like an antagonist, supernatural occurrences, and the possibility of jump scares. If we've seen previews of the movie or the movie as a sequel, we know even more about what the unsuspecting characters are going to be facing. If we revert back to the theory of mind, we can take a step back and realize that some of the characters in the movie don't know what we know. When we watch from this perspective, I've noticed that it makes the movies much more enjoyable. Don't get me wrong, there are a lot of bad scary movies, like The Turning, which was based on the same ghost story as Bly Manor. But there are some scary movies that are much better than we give them credit for when we realize the writers did a great job writing around what the characters do and don't know at different points throughout the film. Not only does this make scary movies more interesting to watch, but when we remember this in our daily lives, we start cutting people some slack. So many of our disputes with other people are because of the curse of knowledge and we neglect to realize that the other person doesn't know what we know. When we take a step back and come from a place of understanding and overcoming our curse of knowledge, we can enjoy scary movies a lot more while simultaneously improving our emotional intelligence in our everyday relationships. All right everybody, thank you for watching this quick video essay. I really wanted to get a video out for spooky season. At the time of recording this, Halloween is tomorrow, but I hope this is a video that you can come back to and help you enjoy scary movies a little bit more. And by the way, I'm not exaggerating with how scared I used to be of scary movies. Like it is embarrassing to think about, but now I watch them and I'm just like boom, stoic as possible. You know what I mean? But anyways, yeah, let me know what some of your favorite scary movies are. I might do some more stuff of just breaking down scary movies and diving into some psychology and philosophy and things like that. So if there are any of your favorite scary movies that you want me to dive into, let me know down in the comments. Or just if you have some suggestions, we're always looking for new stuff, all right? But anyways, that's all I got for this video. If you liked this video, please give it a thumbs up. If you're new, make sure you subscribe and ring that notification bell. And a huge, huge thank you to everybody who supports the channel on Patreon as well as everybody who supports the channel by getting my books at therewiresole.com or the books that I recommend, usually in the description down below. All of you are awesome and I will see you next time.