Criminal psychology

We all have the capacity to kill and murder people and do other terrible things. The question is, why we don't do those things, rather than why we do 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, "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 on and off the mic. This was an honor and a pleasure. This is the 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? So, each trait on the dark tetrad, as it's called, are the four traits that are associated with dark personality traits, 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 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.

It just means that you need to think about it. Speaking of which, you've done a lot of really great stuff, podcast shows. One of them is Bad People Podcast. You co-host it. It has over 100 episodes, each covering a crime. What's maybe the most disturbing crime you've covered? One of the most disturbing crimes that we covered on Bad People, and just to be clear, Bad People, much like the title Evil, is sort of tongue in cheek, where the idea is it's people whom we refer to as bad people. And then it's always a question of, like, who are these, quote unquote, "bad people," and are we all capable of doing these terrible things? But one of the most, certainly, problematic, dark cases that we covered was the Robert Pickton case. And the episodes are called Piggy's Palace, because that was the nickname for the farm where Robert Pickton brought victims whom he had kidnapped, and then he killed them, and he did terrible things to their bodies. And rumors have it, certainly, that he fed some of these victims to pigs. Now, one of the reasons I covered that case is actually because it was influential in my own career. So, Robert Pickton is one of the most famous Canadian serial killers of all time. And as I was doing my undergrad at Simon Fraser University in Canada, I was being taught by someone called Stephen Hart. And Stephen Hart was an expert witness on the Robert Pickton trial, and so he was keeping us abreast of some of the developments of what he was covering.

And again, again, this idea of heroic imagination, actually simulating, imagining yourself standing up and saving the person when a crowd is watching, they're drowning, to be the one that dives in, tries to help. You mentioned 70% of men and some large percentage of women fantasize about murder, and I also read that you wrote that recidivism for homicide is only 1 to 3%. So that raises the question, why do people commit murder? Murder is a really interesting crime because most of the time it's perpetrated for reasons that we don't like as a society. So as a person who talks a lot to the news and also to producers who are trying to make true crime shows, who don't necessarily have a deep understanding of psychology, let's just say, and who come at you with myths where you go, "Oh, no, we're not, we're not going to talk about that. We're not going to talk about whether or not the mom is to blame for this person killing somebody." I hate that. That's one of my least favorite sort of... The trauma narrative of all people who do terrible things must have had a terrible childhood, I think, is really problematic.

Oh, the internet. So one more episode, you interviewed the lady Cecilia, who got Tinder Swindled. Can you tell what happened with the Tinder Swindle situation? So the Tinder Swindler, that was a person who pretended on Tinder to be a rich guy who had this lavish lifestyle, and he would match with women on Tinder, and very quickly love-bomb them. So he would send them all kinds of messages and immediately start being very emotional, very sharing, pretend that he's messaging from his private jet, or actually message from his private jet but pretend that he's in love with this person very quickly. And then he would invite women, in this case Cecilia, to very expensive, luxurious dates. So he would whisk them away to Paris, or he would show them his private jet, or he would take them to a really expensive restaurant almost to prove that he, in fact, is this really wealthy guy.

Is there any way out of that? Maybe the jealousy study, or is this a vicious downward spiral whenever there are any signs like this that means you're screwed, get out? Or is this just the puzzle of the human condition and humans getting together and having to solve that puzzle? I have non-traditional views on jealousy. I'm not a jealousy researcher, but I have done some research on sexuality, and I personally think that jealousy is basically always a red flag because what it means is that the person who is jealous isn't secure in the relationship, and the reason that they're not secure in the relationship is either because the relationship is wrong for them or because they are insecure in themselves. And I don't think it is a sign of love. I don't think it is a sign of, you know, you want to protect your mate. I think it is mostly control, and it's the desire to control and to possess. And jealousy, we know, is a precursor to intimate partner violence almost always.

So, the fact that a lot of people cheat, does that mean every single person that cheated is probably not going to be good at monogamy? I guess if you can just analyze all of human civilization as it stands and give advice, that's definitively true for everyone. Not- That's exactly what psychologists do all the time. Yeah.

Or thinking they're lying. So with men... So, I wrote a book called Bi: The Hidden Culture, History, and Science of Bisexuality, and I did that after I created a bisexual research group. So, I wasn't a sexuality researcher, but as a bi person and a scientist, I was interested in the science of bisexuality, and I couldn't really find it. It was really hard to figure out what people were actually learning about bisexual people in comparison to other kinds of queer people. And one of the things I found is that the terms that are used are not necessarily bi. And so it could be things like plurisexual. So, if you type into Google Scholar the word bisexual, you're going to get a lot of confusing things also because bisexual is used for, like, two sexes where you have multiple sexes or you can change, and so they're bisexual.

Since we're on the topic of sexuality, one of the things you touched on in your book on evil was kinks, sexual fantasies. I think the point of describing that was that we often label that as evil or bad. What can you say about what you've learned from kinks and sexual fantasies from writing that book? The reason I included kinks and evil and sexual conversations in general is because it is so often thrown into the same conversation. So if someone comes to me and says, "Julia, I want you to help me explain why this person killed this other person." And they'll often say, "Did you know that he or she was also into," insert kink here, or insert nontraditional relationship structure here, or insert whatever. And I respond to that by going, "Okay, so?" And I think people use these words like, "Oh, he was really into BDSM," and think that that's going to have this really important impact on me. Or, "Ooh, they were swingers." And so... And again, I go, "Yeah?" That's, you know, almost like, "And in other news, they were swingers."

And it's often quite procedural. So I'm also much more interested in applied sciences because I like the idea of, you know, what do we do with this information? And the thing that interests me most from a research perspective, I mean, I did my PhD in false memories, so implanting false memories of committing crime, which was the study that ended up going viral because I was the first to do it. And I built on a history of people implanting false memories of various kinds of other emotional events. But it was the first time that someone had combined false confessions research and false memory research. And so that was the research of Elizabeth Loftus and Saul Kassin. So false confessions was Saul Kassin, and false memories was Elizabeth Loftus. And I was just doing them both at the same time. And the question was, could you get people to believe that they committed a crime that never happened and confess to it? And not just that, but believe that it actually happened, so remember it? And the answer to that in short is yes, you can, especially using specific leading and suggestive interview techniques. And so the procedural learning from that, which is what I'm most interested in, I don't, like that's sort of a party trick to be able to actually do it. And that's just so that you can then take that and go, "Okay, well, how do we prevent this?" And so I've since trained police lawyers.

All right. This conversation totally is leading me to do some soul-searching on many fronts. You have done incredible work across a number of disciplines. I mean, from, from sexuality to evil to memory. And now in your upcoming book, Green Crime: Inside the Minds of the People Destroying the Planet and How to Stop Them. Can you speak to the psychology of the people, the organizations that are killing Earth, as you describe, including illegal gold miners, animal traffickers, con men who falsify data and bribe regulators to keep polluting, and many other types of criminals? Is there a psychology similar to the psychology of some of the folks we've been talking about? So the book, Green Crime, is really an experiment for me in whether we can apply criminological and criminal psychology ideas to the area of environmental protection and crimes. Because there are people who are convicted of crimes, who are convicted of crimes specifically in relation to destroying the Earth and our natural resources, our shared resources. I sometimes think about the Earth as like a house. And if someone was coming into your house and just setting things on fire and then walking out unpunished, you'd be really upset, and correctly so. Or poisoning your water, or just leaving a bunch of garbage all over your house. And that's what people are doing on a planetary scale. And the question is, are we responding effectively? And if so, who?

Yeah, I probably have a bunch of categories of people. Stuff with kids is just like— ... it's tough. It's tough. It's tough. What gives you hope about this beautiful world of ours, about the future of human civilization, given all the darkness that you have studied? I think the fact that there are people who study the darkness gives me hope, and that there are people who want to understand why we do bad things, myself included, but I mostly get to benefit from other people's research that I summarize into my books. I think that the tech that we are now experiencing mostly also gives me hope, in that there is this whole new frontier of capacity to implement scientific findings if we want to do so and choose to do so. Even in memory interviewing, we were talking about the potential role of AI in distorting our memories.