YouSaid · the spoken record

Julia Shaw

lines on the record: 191
first: 2025-10-14
most recent: 2025-10-14
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Well, the essence of that is right. There is something called state dependent memory, which is that you're more like to remember things that were consolidated or created as memories if they match the state that you're in now. So if you are sad now and your brain sort of just going, you're more likely to remember other sad times because your memory and the emotional state of your brain is basically already activating those networks of sadness. And it's like, here's some other sad things and shitty things that happen to you. And it's the same with if you're embarrassed. That's the sort of classic one that we usually use as memory researchers, is that moment where you do something embarrassing. And for the next six hours, all you're thinking of is all the other embarrassing things you've ever done. And it's like your brain is like, would you like some other embarrassing stories?”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I'm criticizing analyzing their memories, whereas the others, the therapists, are more likely to be trying to help them manage the memories in their day-to-day life. And so it doesn't matter if they're true or not to therapists. What matters is that they're troubling to the people themselves. But once you get into a courtroom setting, as you say, the facts and what actually happened matter. And it's not just what you remember, it's what actually happened.”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For answers or sources of problems that we have that I don't like. I don't think it's true. And I think that there can be an uncautious approach to memory, as you were saying, where you have someone who is saying things and your role as a therapist is to help them manage their emotions now and to feel better. And that's the other thing, is that they have a very different role than I do. The therapist is trying to manage the person's well-being now. Whereas I am looking at the evidentiary quality. That is a complete, I'm almost like not quite the other side, but I'm in a very different role.”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It depends on the kind of therapy. So there's a lot of therapy that is evidence based and that is very much focused on tackling sort of feelings and reactions that you have right now. Then there is an area or a bunch of areas of therapy, including psychoanalysis, which are very focused on trying to find retroactively sources of mental illness in your personal past. I am very critical of the kinds of, well, both from an explanatory perspective, but also from a false memory perspective, I don't think that we are the way we are because of individual incidents that happen to us. I think that is a wild thing to think about the brain. Like to be like, you are the way you are because of this one interaction you had that one time is like, I mean, maybe this explains a tiny bit of you, but what about all the other life experiences you have every single day? And so I think that there's sometimes an oversimplified search.”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Receipts. That's all you got. You have to look at your original versions. If you only have your version now, the only thing you can look for is evidence that confirms or shows that it didn't happen. If you can't access that, then it ultimately is a matter of, especially if you've got two people saying complete different things, it ends up being a battle of confidence ultimately.”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, a witness or an alleged victim saying that they, you know, having ex-story the first time they go to the police and then three years later having a very different, sometimes categorically different account. And the question is, are they just, were they just too shy initially to say what really happened? Were they under pressure from other people? Were they not really remembering? Why has it changed? Or could it be that they have been undergone some really problematic like hypnotherapy or just shady therapy in general that is convinced them that things are maybe much worse than they initially remembered? And it's not that therapy doesn't necessarily, like therapy can bring out more details for sure. But the problem is that certain kinds of therapy mirror what we do in false memory research in terms of implanting false memories. And it just makes it really messy. And it makes the quality of the evidence really low because we can no longer tell.”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, there's different people having very different memories of the same experience, and there's the same person having different memories of the same experience. And so I work in both in some ways as an expert witness, but mostly in the individual changing their story in a dramatic way.”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. But you can also sometimes go back to your original account and go, actually, no, that was a bit wrong. And so as again an analytical person and someone who works as an expert witness on memory cases, I just want to see all the versions. I want your version history. I want the complete version history of your memory. And then I can tell you whether I think things have gone wrong here and if so, why?”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Good. It feels like collectively we are going to remember more details because you do, but it doesn't mean that those details are right. And so that's where I'd always say have your own version before you talk to anybody. Then, and my colleague Dr. Annelies Freideveld is one of the experts on the effect of things like eye closure on memory and collective memory. And she has found repeatedly that if you remember things together, especially if you've already got an original version of your own, you do usually remember more details and especially if you're helping each other to remember like in a relationship. You'll have someone who's better at remembering certain kinds of details, maybe names or what happened or what you were doing and the other person's better at when it happened. And so you can have these complementary memories that come in in social situations and you can then have more details that are remembered after.”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It does, and collective and individual memory are these really interesting, they interact in really interesting ways. So I would always say when I train, for example, people who go to deal with warlords in the German military. I was working with agents who are going abroad and who are in these really difficult situations where they had to remember a lot of information that was important for national security. They couldn't just sit there with a tape recorder being like, hey, or like a phone being like, hey, Mr. Warlord, can you just talk into this a bit closer? You can't do that. And so you have to remember it. And so what they were doing is they were coming back from their deployments and they would meet up immediately and have like a team meeting to be like, what did you remember? What happened? And the problem is that they would do that before writing their notes. And that is the wrong way around. And so they don't do that anymore because I've told them not to do that anymore. But it feels...”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Assume you are going to forget everything. Assume you're going to forget no matter how important, how emotional, how intense, how much you say to yourself, this is a failure of prospect of memory it's called, I will remember, you won't, just assume that you're not going to remember. And the closer you get to the time at which an event happened, and we call this contemporaneous evidence, the closer you get in time, the more high quality that memory is going to be. And I think there's this myth sometimes that like if you're drunk or if you're high or if you're really emotional, that's somehow you should wait. You should sort of like go home, sleep it off, and then recall your memory. That is not what the current advice in memory research actually says. It's in the moment as soon as possible, write it down, record it outside your brain. You can do it again when you wake up, but then at least you have an original version.”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right. So the first thing that's important is for people to understand that they are capable of creating these false memories and that they're not this really unusual, hard to generate thing, that they're actually a normal memory process. And that insight is why I wrote the memory illusion is because I think people need to just understand that their minds work like this and that they're really glitchy when it comes to the accuracy of their autobiographical memories. But again, that that's probably ultimately a good thing as well in terms of our overall human experience. But then what happens if you do have an important piece of mind?”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or think we remember incidents differently or better if they were created with AI images of ourselves or videos. So there was a study that came out, I think it was this year by a team including Elizabeth Loftus, which showed that if you turn photos of yourself into videos using AI, that you are more likely to believe that those things happened in the way that AI is telling you that they did, even though AI has absolutely no idea, and that then you are more likely to remember it with high confidence that it happened in the way that this AI has created it. And so we can see that there's lots of versions of this, whether it's interpersonal, social interactions or interactions with tech. And there's a big replication that's happening right now at the University of Maastricht of my study, or is about to happen, hopefully, actually, is where we're at.”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. And so it could have been two people, and I would have been happy. The fact that it was so possible was, frankly, quite surprising to everybody. And we did, in fact, cut the study short because we told ethics that we're only going to have like a 13% hit rate. We're like, oh, this is working really well. We're going to stop. And that was just because of how power calculations or whatever, science, because science. Since then, there have been other studies on implanting false memories. There have been ones also using AI tools, so like whether or not we remember”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so, from the trivial details, and I'd always say, yeah, good job, good job. You know, social reinforcement, little treat, little treat. And they would remember more and more details. And then they'd get more specific. And then they'd tell me who it was they allegedly attacked or stole from, where they were. And those details had to come from them because I don't know enough about their lives, right? So this is the other thing with false memories is it's basing it on lots of real pieces of memories, real places, real people, real feelings. They're just woven together in a way that never happened. And so just three interviews and you've got 70% of people confessing to a crime that never happened.”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm grinning as the person with their eyes closed says the most trivial detail. I remember a blue sky. And I remember going It's working.”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Technically, they could say no. They could say, no, I don't want to do that. But they go, yeah, of course I want to know. And so I do this imagination exercise with people close their eyes. Very simple and just imagine what could have happened, basically. And every time they say a detail, my very first detail ever, I remember this because I was so excited because they've got their eyes closed, right? And I'm right next to the head of department because they were worried because I was a PhD student that, you know, the ethics of it, the consequences, like it took like years to get the protocol through ethics and to make sure it was safe. Anyway, I'm.”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, you know, if you want to, we can do this memory retrieval technique called this imagination exercise. And I don't like to call it repression, but sometimes we hide away memories that we don't like about ourselves. And I'm using words that people know and mechanisms that people have heard of that are, frankly, quite disputed in actual science. But people go, oh, well, maybe I did repress this. And then everybody says yes.”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“See what's possible because you have to push it to also show that it's create. I can do this in this context so that we can warn police to not do this. So I said we had these two instances that your parents reported, and one of them was you had a skiing accident and blah, blah, blah. Let's start with that one. The second one was an incident where you were in contact with the police. But we'll get to that. So we'd first have 20 minutes talking about the true memory, which people, you know, they're getting going. It feels good. I've got a structured interview as well, which I'll then mirror in the false memory. So it all feels very illegit. And then we get to the second memory, and I say this, you know, there's this other important memory that your parents recalled. And then they'd say, I don't remember that. And I'd say, oh, okay, but I have this really detailed account. All you have to do is remember it. And then I would do the illusion of transparency, which is a really powerful psychological tool, which is to make people feel like they know what's going on when they don't really. And the thing I would do is just say,”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hurt somebody else, or they stole something, or they hit somebody. So, those are three of the conditions. And I randomly assign people to them. And they knew that I'd contacted their loved ones ahead of time. So they were participating in a childhood memory study, an emotional childhood memory study, and they knew that. And then I'd contacted their parents ahead of time to get information about what they were like as teenagers, where they lived, friends, basic things, and to make sure they hadn't ever experienced any of the target events. And then with that information, I said to the participants, okay, so there's these two things your parents reported happening. And one of them is a true one. And so I'd always include a true one to build rapport, which is, I'm doing the what not to do of interviewing, right? I'm laying it on thick”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's what false memories are, except that that then can look bad if you're trying to remember something specific. And so in my research, I used leading and suggestive questions like close your eyes, picture the event that I'm trying to implant. So I was implanting, for example, you're 14 years old. you were in contact with the police. The police called your parents and you assaulted someone with a weapon. And then the question is, what do you remember? And you say to me as a participant because you've been selected out to specifically never having had this experience. And just to be clear, a weapon, I don't mean a semi-automatic weapon. I mean anything. And usually it was a rock. And so people would say because a weapon is just anything you use to hurt another person. And I did the study in Canada. We don't have guns in the same way as in some other parts of the world. And so it was unlikely that my participants would have been like, yeah, I totally have all these guns. And so they would take something, an object.”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the fact that memory can be false in the way that I do it in my study is a result of the fact that our minds are made to creatively recombine information to solve problems in the present. And so even the fact that we have this gist memory, it's because we're optimizing data processing. We're basically saying these are the most important things from these events.”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's not just representativeness. It's also that we shouldn't take individual studies in that way. I'm not saying that 70% of people always have false memories either. It just means in this one study more people than not develop these complex memories.”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Can't remember. And in one study, obviously, I can't capture that. But it also doesn't mean that 70% of the time people are, you know, it might be 1% of the time or 0.1% of the time that people have these complex false memories.”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But other people think that it's easier to differentiate lines. So for me, it's almost impossible to differentiate the two. Other people think it's more clear. And then in terms of the frequency, so in my research, 70% of people became convinced that they committed a crime that never happened or experienced another important emotional event. And that number as well is challenged in that people go, well, does that mean that 70% of people can have false memories like this? And the answer is no. Obviously not. That's just in my sample. That's just these specific six false memories. And it could be that I think 100% of people are prone to some version of this, just maybe not in this specific study, right? If I had to come up with different false memory simples, or if I was a different person myself and people trusted me differently, again, those social factors that make it more or less likely that I'm going to be able to convince you that something happened in your life that you”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or that it approximates a memory in their minds. That's right, rather than just a thing they think kind of sort of happened.”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Telling me. And I can ask you, do you think it really happened or not? Do you believe it really happened? But it's really hard to differentiate. And so I've always thought that you need to ask people about the specifics, like how confident are you in this memory? Do you feel things in this memory? Does it feel like other kinds of memory, right? Sort of the describe the nature of this experience rather than being like, do you think this is a real memory? Because that's a hard thing to ask people to do.”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not hard Very easy to distort memories or to small false memories. It's harder to convince people of entire events, especially specific events. And this is widely debated, exactly how easy it is to implant a specific false memory. It's also one of the big debates around my own research is that when I was writing the memory illusion, which was my first book, and the research that was in line with that, there was a huge debate between me and a couple of other academics about what it means for something to be a false memory and how we should talk about the ease with which they're implanted. And that is still one of the biggest scientific debates in our field. And to me, I think that's, so the coding stuff is about the difference between what some people call a false belief and a false memory. So I think this thing happened, or I remember this thing happened. And that is a really difficult differentiation often, because all we have as social psychologists is what you're”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Accepted it, or your brain has accepted it as your own, and that's possibly because the other person told it in such vivid detail that you could imagine it, and basically your brain was like, well, this feels real now. And so the next time you thought about that, maybe not the next time, but maybe after a couple of times of thinking about it, you started going, this happened to me, right? And then you integrated into your autobiography.”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And if that particular detail is someone's face, then that's a really big problem And so, and it can also be an entire false memory. And so, this is where in my research and in research like mine, we've implanted memories, what we call memories or false memories of experiences that never happened at all. So while most things are modifications of real memories, false memory is complete false memories are when you think you experienced something that you didn't. And we all have them. We all have some memories that can't be true. And we usually realize them, for example, when we talk to our parents about our childhood or when we talk to friends and we say, remember that time we did this and your friend will go, that happened to me. That didn't happen to you. And you become what is known in research as a memory thief where you've stolen somebody else's memory and you've”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now most of the time, that doesn't really matter because you remember you hung out with a friend, you remember you were at this university, you remember approximately what your favorite cafe was, you remember this important negative or positive event, fine. You don't actually need to know exactly what you were wearing and drinking and seeing, but in a criminal justice setting, you do need to remember exactly what you were drinking and saying and doing, right? And so that's where we have this need to break down this human capacity for memory to this level of detail that it's just not made for.”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's not what I'm saying. I'm just saying that everything has a degree of falsehood to it. And this is where sometimes I'll get accused of being like, oh, but does that mean we can never use witness statements? I'm not saying we can't use any witness statements. I'm just saying that we need to be careful because even if people say things with confidence, it doesn't necessarily mean they're true. Or if they have multisensory details, they're describing in very specific detail what they smelled, what they heard, what they take, whatever. It doesn't mean it's necessarily true. Most of the time our autobiographical memories are good enough. And that's where memory scientists talk about this as gist memory, or just memory for events, much like for text. You get the gist of it, right? You're good enough. You generally remember accurately approximately what happened. But it's when you get to this so-called verbatim details, the specific details of memories that you find people are often really bad.”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We know that false memories are common, that they're a feature of a normal, healthy brain. They're not this glitch. They are a feature. And we know that false memories are incredibly common in terms of if you think about basically any memory. Now, I'm interested in autobiographical memories. This isn't memories of facts. This is memories of experiences, things that you've lived in some way. And of those autobiographical memories, basically every single autobiographical memory you have is false. The question isn't whether it's false, the question is how false. You're despairing over there.”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In that social interaction, it's sort of live. It's like active. And when you then finish that interaction, it sets back down. And the thing is that if you put it back in a different way, what's going to happen is the next time you're going to remember the latest version. And you might not realize that it's shifted. And so over time it can shift and you don't realize it and that's your truth. And that's where even just short interactions can have a profound impact on the human mind.”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But you don't even need that. So, this is what we find in investigative interviewing, which is police interviewing of witnesses and suspects, is that all you need is a leading question or a suggestive piece of information in a short interaction. Most police officers don't spend a long time and they don't have no memory of this person's past. They know basically nothing about them except for things related to the crime. And yet we know that within that very short, maybe half hour, one hour interaction, people's stories can change fundamentally. And the problem is that if you have a memory of something, that when you pull it up”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's just that we can't fact check them all the time. We're not in a conversation constantly being like, well, is that quite right? I'm going to use that for my homework, right? So it's both juicy and really troubling.”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then it's uncritically giving that to you, or I mean, sometimes, of course, there's other things where it's sort of appraising whether or not this is truthful or not, but it is giving that to you. And there's no safeguard from you just going, this is truth, and this is my past, or this is how I remembered it. And the problem is, is that not only is AI potentially distorting people and their memories, and never mind the factual basis on which they're relying, but it's also the other way around is that potentially by asking leading or problematic questions, the people are changing how the AI is creating the content, which is in turn on some fundamental level potentially having an impact on how it's discerning truth from fiction. And so that's where the false memory in human minds and confabulations in AI, I think, are much more similar than we think. And when I first saw AI confabulate, hallucinate, I was like, this is what people do all the time.”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There is what we've created with Gen AI is basically the ultimate false memory machine. We have created a tailored experience of something that is most of the time telling you what it thinks you want to hear.”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that is what we do. That is literally what I train the police on doing is how to make sure that you don't distort people's memories in the process and how to ask good questions. And so you get confabulations from both sides now. You get confabulations from AI and from the people. And the problem is that there's a third thing, which is the in-between, that I'm not sure is getting enough attention right now. And I wish that there was more integration of social scientists like me and people who do investigative interviewing and have done it for decades to understand what is happening in the in-between and so that we can both teach the people and the AI to respond better in that situation.”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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, I've trained people at the ICC, the International Criminal Court, who deal with collective memory, so they deal with hundreds of witnesses at a time in war crimes. And the question is, how do we try to preserve as original as possible memory without contaminating it? Well, or at least without contaminating any more than it already is. And that's where social psychology, I think, excels, is that we have done lots of research on how social settings change what people say. And to some extent, what people believe. And I think that's also where actually the leap to things like AI, I think, is not far because ultimately the way that we're engaging with large language models is that, and generative AI in general, is that it's structured as a social interaction structure as a conversation most of the time now.”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it's often quite procedural. So I'm also much more interested in applied sciences because I like the idea of 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 Cassen. So false confessions was Saul Cassen 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 bleeding and suggestive interview techniques. And so the procedural learning from that, which is what I'm”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Quite literally, they are seeing and hearing different things than you. And to not jump from that to what else are people perceiving differently than me, I think would be almost like a missed opportunity. And so I went to study psychology partly to understand that and what was going on there. And then that took me down the sort of reality hole. And honestly, the reason I went to criminal psychology, because I could have gone into any other, the criminal psychologists were the most fun. I feel like lots of psychologists, they took themselves so seriously. And I just, I couldn't. I was like, I don't, this isn't the vibe. And so the criminal psychologists were, they had this gallows humor. They were doing these arguably the most serious of the crimes and the cases, and yet were somehow having fun and having nice lives. And I saw myself and I went, well, I want to do this version. And so I did.”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In neuroscience, what is real? I mean, I mean that in every way. And I think that's because I grew up with someone who had a unique view of what is real in real time. And so seeing that, I think just affected me profoundly because not only was it very destabilizing in terms of my upbringing, but also it's just in your face.”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I am, but I also really like surrealism and I really like messing with sense of reality, which again is obviously something that then wove its way into my academic work But he was also right. I mean, I've always been very intellectual, let's just say. I skipped a couple of grades in school. I was part of the chess club. Like it was very much, it was the clever kid. And so, but there's also part of me that's just like, but art is beautiful. I love making art and it can speak to so many people. Anyway, my grandfather convinced me not to do it. And then I applied instead for psychology. Although at that point, you just had to say social sciences. You didn't have to yet specify. But I knew it was probably going to be psychology. And the reason for that was because my dad has paranoid schizophrenia. And so I think one of the reasons I'm so obsessed with this idea of what is real. And that is in every way, I mean that in terms of what is real in terms of perceptions of right and wrong, what is real in terms of our own memories of the world, what is real in terms of what happened in a crime, what is real in terms of perceptual ability?”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, if you look at my trajectory into academia and then through it, basically what happened is I was ready to go study art. That's what happened. I had my portfolio ready to go. I was going to go study art at undergrad. And then my grandfather intervened and was like Being an artist is a really hard life. Maybe you should reconsider.”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Still is, but I actually find that it's done the opposite most of the time. So I think as a woman, especially young woman who's in the public eye, you're sexualized anyway, unfortunately. And so that is and was already a huge part of my online experience. And actually, I think coming out as by A, you get sort of allies who suddenly are like, we're on your side, we're going to help you fight sort of the hypersexualization. And people get more, almost more weird about it in a good way. They get a bit quiet about it because they're like, oh, well, now it's an identity thing. So maybe I shouldn't comment on what she's wearing. And it sort of almost disarmed some of the more sexualized comments. So for me, I have to say it was mostly a positive experience.”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, the benefits are that you can live authentically. You can just be yourself. So, I do feel more free in who I am and who I'm able to sort of be online, for example, now that I'm out. And because I came out after in my 30s, I think also it was almost a foot in the door technique as well, which is a psychological technique of first coming in and then coming with your big ask. I had already published two books I was already an established scientist. I think if I tried by first, I ate wouldn't have been able to publish the book. It was the first mainstream book on bisexuality ever. And B, I don't think I would have been taken seriously as a scientist. And so having the other stuff first and then buy a sort of a side project that was acceptable. But I think the other way around wouldn't have been.”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'd say try and read widely on issues around sexuality, books like mine, but also other books might help you to navigate whether or not what labels there are and also whether or not those labels are good for you. I think things like the Klein grid are really helpful, especially for people who are more analytically minded, like you and I. I think it gives you a construct to work with and numbers to work with. And that can be really helpful to try and go almost seeing your sexuality as a mathematical equation. And I think that can be quite useful. And if that's how you think, then look at the Klein grid and see if that helps you to navigate things.”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was Benned. I sold the rights to a foreign publisher, and right after it was sold, the loss change, and they sent me this really sad email saying, unfortunately, we can't publish your book because it's now considered part of the gay agenda, sort of promoting gay, gay, and homosexual lifestyles. And so we can't publish it anymore. But I take a little bit of pride in the fact that it's a banned book. But I find it really sad, obviously, as to what it means. But it also makes me feel like it's more important. And that's what people were writing to me about.”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Look at the evolution of laws. For a while, women were kind of like it was socially not necessarily acceptable, but they were kind of getting away with it legally. But then more recently especially, as bisexuality gets more visible as well, certain countries have started writing it specifically into their constitutions and specifically into their laws that bisexual identities and behaviors are also seen as problematic and illegal. So again, these laws change all the time. But in terms of fan mail, especially from people in countries where homosexuality and bisexuality are illegal or are seen as problematic, are socially condemned, that was particularly important. So those people were particularly writing saying somebody's also saying, can I translate this into this other language on the DL, like on the download, and just like distribute this to my friends? I had people sending me messages saying I'm at X airport or an X.”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source