Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory, and the Continuum of Evil with Julia Shaw

This episode features criminal psychologist Julia Shaw, who challenges conventional notions of "evil" by presenting it as a continuum of personality traits rather than a binary state. She introduces the Dark Tetrad—psychopathy, sadism, narcissism, and Machiavellianism—explaining that all individuals score somewhere on these scales, often subclinically. Shaw argues that the capacity for extreme harm is inherent in all humans, evidenced by the commonality of murder fantasies, and emphasizes that understanding why people *don't* commit such acts is often more crucial than focusing solely on those who do. The discussion uses the "baby Hitler" thought experiment to illustrate her belief that individuals are not born evil, but rather shaped by nurture and environment.

Shaw strongly advocates against labeling individuals as "evil," asserting that such categorization dehumanizes and halts productive inquiry into the psychological and social factors driving harmful behavior. She highlights how dehumanization and de-individuation are critical components in large-scale conflicts like war, where both sides often perceive themselves as righteous. To counter this, she promotes "evil empathy"—a dispassionate, analytical approach to understanding perpetrators' motivations—as essential for criminal psychologists to identify levers for prevention and enhance societal safety, rather than condoning or sympathizing with the acts themselves.

The conversation delves into the practicalities of interviewing individuals who have committed heinous crimes, noting that even their controlled narratives, filled with rationalization and minimization of agency, offer valuable psychological insights. Shaw discusses the unreliability of intuitive perceptions like "creepiness" and the widespread overconfidence in lie detection, particularly among law enforcement, which can lead to misjudgments and wrongful convictions. She references research by Aldert Vrij on deception detection and Jennifer Skeem's work on tailored treatments for psychopathy that focus on pro-social behavior rather than just empathy.

Finally, the episode explores the psychology of serial killers, citing loneliness and a deficit in "reality monitoring"—the ability to distinguish truth from delusion—as significant contributing factors. This lack of social tethering can lead to radicalization in one's own thoughts, as seen in cases like Robert Pickton or Jeffrey Dahmer, whose extreme actions are presented as distorted manifestations of fundamental human desires. Shaw concludes by reiterating that the core psychological components underlying even the most atrocious acts are present in all of us, underscoring the importance of understanding these shared capacities to prevent future 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.

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.

each trait on the Dark Tetrad... 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.

I don't think it's a straight line from baby to adult, and I don't think people are born evil.

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.

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.

evil is a label we place onto others. There's nothing inherent to anything that makes it evil.

it's really hard to detect whether someone is lying reliably, and that people, especially police officers... are no better than chance at detecting lies, and yet they think they are.

loneliness, which I think not only contributes to them committing the crimes in the first place, but also allows them to get away with things because they don't have as much of a social network or any social network that is helping them to do what's called reality monitoring, to understand what's true and what's not.