#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Episode publishedPodcast: Lex Fridman PodcastLex Fridman Podcast
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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, they should definitely go order now called green crime, which is a study of the dark underworld of poachers, illegal gold miners, corporate fraud
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 personality specifically often lacks an empathy. And it's usually characterized by a number of different traits, including a parasitic lifestyle, so
So early in the book, you raised the question, that I think you highlight as 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. And so the question of would you kill baby Hitler is sort of 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 is sort of manifests over time. And with Hitler, we know from certainly psychologists who have poured over his traits over time and looked at who he was over the course of his life. There's always this quest
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 I would 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. It's, in fact, I think makes us capable of perpetrating horrendous crimes against those we label evil. So for me, that word is it's 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 e
Yeah. I think a prerequisite of of doing evil, I see this in war a lot, is to dehumanize the other. In order to be able to murder them at 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 the 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 deindividuation, 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
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