Voices of True Crime – Gender Differences in Anxiety and Identification

True crime podcasts became very popular recently. Prior studies (e.g., Perchtold-Stefan et al., 2025; Vicary & Fraley, 2010) have shown, that women are the main consumers of True Crime Podcasts. Research on fear of crime indicates that women report higher perceived vulnerability, which may increase engagement with victim-focused narratives (Ferraro, 1996). Apart from that, our assumption is, that identification with a victim in a True Crime story increases anxiety. Identification describes the extent to which listeners adopt the perspective and emotions of a character (Cohen, 2001). One possible indicator for high identification could be the gender of the victim, as identification tends to be stronger when salient social characteristics are shared. However, experimental studies on the effects of corresponding gender on identification and level of anxiety are lacking. We implemented our study ideas by using a 2 (gender of participants: male / female) x 2 (gender of the victim: male / female) between subjects repeated measures design. We created a true crime podcast, in which we varied the gender of the victim and measured the level of identification. We expect a higher identification when the gender of participants corresponds to the gender of the victim in the True Crime story. Level of anxiety should be related to the identification and the level of arousal in the story. Identification is expected to serve as a mediator between the gender of the victim and the level of anxiety as the dependent variable. This design enables us to test the indirect effect of victim gender on anxiety via identification, depending on the gender of the listener.