Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex | Lex Fridman Podcast #483

- We all have the capacity to kill people and murder people and do other terrible

things. The question is why we don't do those things rather than why we

do those things quite often. Most men have fantasized about killing someone, about

70% in two studies, and most women as well.

More than 50% of women have fantasized about killing somebody. So murder fantasies

are incredibly common.

- The following is a conversation with Julia Shaw, a criminal

psychologist who has written extensively on a wide

variety of topics that explore human nature, including

psychopathy, violent crime, psychology of evil, police

interrogation, false memory manipulation, deception detection,

and human sexuality. Her books include

Evil, about the psychology of murder and sadism, The

Memory Illusion, about false memories, Bi, about

bisexuality, and her new book that you should definitely go

order now called Green Crime, which is a study

of the dark underworld of poachers, illegal gold

miners, corporate frauds, hitmen, and all kinds of

other environmental criminals. Julia is a

brilliant and kindhearted person with whom I got the chance to

have many great conversations with on and off the mic. This was an honor and a

pleasure. This is Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please

check out our sponsors in the description where you can also find

links to contact me, ask questions, give feedback, and so

on. And now, dear friends, here's Julia Shaw. You wrote the book Evil: The Science

Behind Humanity's Dark Side. So lots of interesting topics

to cover here. Let's start with the continuum. You

described that evil is a continuum. In other words, the dark

tetrad: psychopathy, sadism, narcissism,

Machiavellianism, are a continuum of traits, not a binary zero-one

label of monster or non-monster. So, can you explain this continuum?

- Yeah. So, each trait on the Dark Tetrad, as it's called, which is the

four traits that are associated with dark personality traits. So, things that we

often associate with the word "evil," like sadism, which is a pleasure in

hurting other people. Machiavellianism, which is doing whatever it takes to get

ahead. Narcissism, which is taking too much pleasure

in yourself and seeing yourself as superior to

others. And then there's psychopathy. Psychopathic

personalities specifically often lack in empathy, and

it's usually characterized by a number of different traits

including a parasitic lifestyle, so mooching off of others. Deceptiveness,

lying to people, and again, that empathy dimension where you

are more comfortable hurting other people because you don't feel sad when other people feel

sad. Now, all of those traits: psychopathy,

sadism, Machiavellianism, and narcissism, all of them have a

scale. And so you can be low on each of those traits or you can be high on

each of those traits. And what the Dark Tetrad is, it's actually a way of classifying

people into those who might be more likely to

engage in risky behaviors or harmful behaviors and those who are not. And if you score

high on all of them, you're most likely to harm other people. But

each of us score somewhere. So, I might score low on sadism

but higher on narcissism. And in all of them, I'm probably

subclinical. And so this is the other thing we often talk about in

psychology is that there's clinical traits and clinical diagnoses,

like someone is diagnosed as having

narcissism. Or they're subclinical, which is you don't quite

meet the threshold, but you have traits that are related, and that are so important for us to

understand in the same context.

- So, early in the book, you raised the question that I think you highlight is a very

important question: if you could go back in time, would you

kill baby Hitler? This is somehow a defining question. Can you explain?

- Well, it's about whether you think that people are born evil. So the

question of "Would you kill baby Hitler?" is meant to be something that gets

people chatting about whether or not they think that people are born with the traits

that make them capable of extreme harm towards others. Or whether they think

it's socialized, whether it's something that, maybe in how people are

raised, sort of manifests over

time. With Hitler, we know from certainly psychologists who have pored

over his traits over time and looked at who he was over the

course of his life, there's always this question of, "Was he mad or bad?"

And the answer to "Was he mad?" Well, he certainly

had some characteristics that people would associate with, for

example, maybe sadism, with this idea that

he was less high on empathy is probably also showcased

in his work. But in terms of whether he was born that

way, I think the answer usually would be no. And actually, in his early life, he

didn't showcase quite a lot of the traits that later defined the horrors that he

was capable of. So would I go back in time and kill baby Hitler? The answer is

no because I don't think it's a straight line from baby to adult,

and I don't think people are born evil.

- So you think a large part of it is nurture versus nature,

the environment shaping the person to become, to

manifest the evil that they bring out to the world?

- Well, and I'd be careful with using the word evil because I think we shouldn't use it to

describe human beings because it most commonly "others" people. In

fact, I think it makes us capable of perpetrating horrendous crimes

against those we label evil. So for me, that word

is the end of a conversation. It's when we call somebody evil,

we say, "This person is so different from me that I don't even need

to bother trying to understand why they are capable of doing terrible things

because I would never do such things. I am good." And so that

artificial differentiation between good and evil is something that,

certainly with the book, I'm trying to dismantle. And that's why

introducing continuums for different kinds of negative traits is really important,

and introducing this idea that there's nothing fundamental to people

that makes them capable of great harm. We all have the

capacity to kill people and murder people and do other terrible things. The

question is, why we don't do those things rather than why we do those things

quite often. So I think humanizing and

understanding that we all have these traits is the most important thing in my book,

certainly.

- Yeah, I think a prerequisite of doing

evil, I see this in war a lot, is to dehumanize

the other. In order to be able to murder them on scale, you have to

reformulate the war as a fight between good and evil. And

the interesting thing you see with war is both sides

think that it's a battle of good versus evil. It almost

always is like that, especially at large-scale wars.

- That's right, and on top of dehumanization, there is also this other thing

called de-individuation, which is where you see yourself as part of the

group, and you no longer see yourself as an individual. And so, it's this

fight of us versus them. And so you need both of those things. You need that

sort of collapse of empathy for other people, the people who are on the

other side. And you need this idea that you can be swallowed by the

group, and that gives you a sense of

also the cloak of justice, the cloak of morality, even

when, you know, maybe you're on the wrong side. And that's where, I mean,

getting into sort of who's on the right side of each war is always a more complicated issue.

But certainly calling other people evil and calling the other side evil

and dehumanizing them is crucial to most of these kinds of fights.

- Yeah, you promote empathy as an important thing to do when we're trying

to understand each other, and then a lot of people are uncomfortable

with empathy when it comes to folks that we

traditionally label as evil. Hitler's an example. To have

empathy means that you're somehow dirtying yourself by

the evil. What's your case for empathy, even when we're talking

about some of the darker humans in human history?

- My case for empathy, or evil empathy, as I sometimes call it, so empathy for people who we

often call evil... Also, the title of my book is Evil, or in

the UK market, it's Making Evil, which is a reference to a Nietzsche quote, which is, "Thinking evil

is making evil." The idea being that evil is a label we place onto

others. There's nothing inherent to anything that makes it

evil. And so, I also think that we need to dismantle that and

empathize with people we call evil because if we're saying that this is the

worst kind of act or worst kind of manifestation of what somebody can be, so if

someone can destroy others, torture others, hurt

others... I work as a criminal psychologist, so I work a lot on

sexual abuse cases, on rape cases, on murder trials. And so,

in those contexts, that word evil is used all the time. So,

this person is evil. And if we're doing that, then we need to go, okay,

but what we actually want is, we don't really just want to label people. We want to

stop that behavior from happening, and the only way we're going to do that is if

we understand what led that person to come to that

situation and to engage in that behavior. And so, that's why evil empathy, I think, is

crucial, because ultimately what we want is to make society safer. And the

only way we can do that is to understand the psychological and social levers that

led them to engage in this behavior in the first place.

- On a small tangent, I get to interview a bunch of folks

that a large number of people consider evil. So, how would you

give advice about how to conduct such interviews when you're sitting in front of a world

leader that some millions of people consider

evil? Or if you're sitting in front of people that are actual,

like convicted criminals, what's the way to conduct that interview? Because to

me, I want to understand that human being. They also have their

own narrative about why they're good and why they're

misunderstood, and they have a story in which they're not evil and they're going to try

to tell that story. And some of them are exceptionally good at telling that

story. So, if it's for public consumption, how would you do that interview?

- I think it's important to speak with people whom we or who a lot of

people dehumanize, including myself. I mean, I also speak with people who I think

are or have... I know have committed terrible crimes, and I've

spoken to these people because, as a criminal psychologist, that's often part of my job.

So, what's interesting, I think, when you're speaking to people who have

committed really terrible crimes, or certainly who've been convicted of

terrible crimes, is that not only is it potentially

insightful because they might give you a real answer and not just a controlled

narrative about why they committed these crimes. If they

are either maintaining their innocence or they're more reluctant to do that, I think

even the narrative that they are controlling, that they're

being very careful with, still tells us a lot about them. So, I

think, certainly in my research on environmental crime as well,

what we see is that people use a lot of rationalization. They say things like, "Well,

everybody's doing it," and, "If I hadn't done this first, somebody else would have done

this waste crime or this other kind of crime." So there's this

rationalization. There's this normalization. There's this

diminishing of your own role and agency, and

that still tells us a lot about the psychology of people who commit crimes,

because most of us are very bad at

saying sorry and saying, "I messed this up, and I shouldn't have done

that." And instead, what our brains do is they try to make us feel better, and they

go, "No, you're still a good person despite this one thing." And so,

we try to rationalize it, we try to excuse it, we try to explain it. And there is some truth to it

as well, because we know the reasons why we engage in that behavior and other people

don't have the whole context. So, we also do have more of the whole

story. But on the other hand, we need to also face the fact that sometimes we

do terrible things, and we need to stop doing those terrible things and prevent

other people from doing the same.

- I find these pictures of World War II leaders as children

kind of fascinating, because it grounds you. It makes you realize

that there is a whole story there of environment, of development through their

childhood, through their teenage years. You just remember they're all kids.

Except Stalin. He was looking evil already when young.

- Well, people used to not smile in photos as well. So looking at historical photos of children,

or sometimes even kids in other cultures, it's like, "Oh, why are they all so serious?"

But our creepiness radars are also way off. This is something that I've been interested in for a long time as

well, is that we have this intuitive perception of whether or

not somebody is trustworthy. And that intuitive perception, according to

ample studies at this point, is not to be trusted. And one thing in

particular is whether or not we think someone is creepy, including children, but

usually the research is done, of course, on adult faces and with adults.