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

Julia Shaw is a criminal psychologist and author who in her books explores human nature, including psychopathy, violent crime, the psychology of evil, police interrogation, false memory manipulation, deception detection, and human sexuality. Thank you for listening ❤ Check out our sponsors: https://

• 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 em