Women and True Crime: A Love Story

(PHOTO: Mark Larson.)

Using data collected from Amazon.com book reviews of titles relating to true crime and war and written by members with gendered usernames, researchers at the University of Illinois concluded that women are far more likely to want to read about horrible, violent things (rape, murder, serial killings) that really happened, to ordinary people like themselves. Men, on the other hand, like reading about traumatic injuries and death occurring as a result of gang violence or wars.

Coding usernames for gender, the researchers found that women wrote 70 percent of the reviews of books about true crime, while men wrote 82 percent of the reviews of books on war. The gender of the author appeared to play no role in women’s preference for true crime books.

A second study gave participants summaries of two books...a “true account” of the murder of two women in Hawaii (and) either a true story of two female soldiers who died in a Gulf War army unit, or a true account of two female members of a Los Angeles gang who were killed. Women overwhelmingly chose the true crime books over the books about war or gang violence, even when the main characters of all of the books were female.

The researchers suspected that women prefer true crime stories in part because such stories provide information that the readers feel could help them avoid or escape from a potential attacker. Previous studies have shown that women are much more likely than men to fear becoming crime victims, and there may be an evolutionary benefit to learning from others’ negative experiences, Fraley said. Perhaps the fear of an attack and the desire to avoid becoming a victim drives many women to read true crime stories, he said.

To get at this question, the researchers conducted three more studies in which the summaries of the books included details that might help explain the choices women made. They found that women were much more likely than men to choose a book if it included a “clever trick” the would-be victim used to escape from an attacker, or a psychological profile of the attacker. And women, but not men, were much more interested in books with female victims.

You can read the entire report here.