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

“Through with it, and very few people who do engage in murder wanted to do it in that instance, never mind again. I think in general, we have the way that we look at lots of crimes upside down. So we put murderers in prison for a really long time because we think that that's justice, which is sure if that's one version where it's an eye for an eye kind of, life for life. There's obviously the more extreme version of that, which is the death penalty, which I don't adhere to, but I could see the rationalization of you stole somebody else's life, so you don't deserve to have one. But there's also the other side, which is if we're looking at prevention, murder is really, like, they're not going to, people aren't going to go out and murder again. So that is a really low risk in terms of recidivism, actually. And higher risk are things like fraud and elder abuse and sexual violence. And so in some ways, sometimes our sanctions are upside down in terms of how we can actually make society safer. And they're in line more just with how we perceive justice to work. So this big fundamental questions about how we organize.”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This person, I mean, it's these really stupid reasons, and it is just this bad decision in the moment, an overreaction to a fight, to an argument. And it wasn't planned. It's not some... At best, right? If you will, in terms of justice, but they don't have the same kinds of consequences. And we don't like that. We like things that have extreme consequences to have extreme reasons. And so that's why I think there's this real desire to show serial killers and to show people who are in fact planning murders for a really long time and then engage in them rather than this fight that goes out of control or someone drink driving or someone who is, I mean, unfortunately intimate partner homicide is also one of those situations that is common, one of the top four reasons for murder as well. But that's not the almost glamorized version that we see of murder online or that we see in the news. So I think it's always important to talk about murder as something that is rarely inherent to an individual. Very few people want to murder. They might fantasize about it, but they don't want to go.”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 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'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. What really happens in murder most of the time, which is not what you see on TV because it's really boring, is it's a fight that gets out of control. And if you look at the real reasons stated, it's things like this person owed me $4. And so I killed him. This person stole my butt.”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You read the room, and you assume, well, nobody else has intervened yet, and so it must not be a real problem, that desire to not stand out in a negative way is often what hinders heroicism. I mean, that's why we look at heroes, people who especially risk their own lives to save others, especially strangers. We see them with a sort of respect that nobody else gets. And that's because we recognize that we might not be capable of that. If I saw a stranger drowning in a river, would I really risk my life jumping in the river to maybe save them? I think that's a big question, Mark. And so when people do that, especially when people almost have this inherent reaction that they just jump in, they just go for it. That is something that is a really admirable quality in that we as humans do celebrate and we should. And I think often we should celebrate those.”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not become a bystander. And actually, the bystander stuff is interesting because there was a really famous case, the murder of Kitty Genevese, and there were all of these both ear and eyewitnesses. So an ear witness is someone who just hears things and an eyewitness is someone who sees the crime happening. And they didn't intervene in the murder of this woman. And so this case was often taken as this almost example of, look how terrible human beings are. We just walk by, we don't care about what's happening to strangers on the streets. And actually what's happened since is that there's been lots of other bystander experiments and they have not substantiated this. So we need to be very careful with looking at these extreme cases and going how horrible that this happened to this one person. And it is, but that doesn't mean that that's always how it happens. And so actually what we find in bystander research is that most of the time bystanders do intervene. It's just when there has already been a crowd that has accumulated”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Zombardo has also spoken at length about evil and that all of us are capable of it in the right circumstances, but he also is a big proponent of what he calls the heroic imagination. And the heroic imagination is really what the purpose of everything I do is. The purpose of what I do isn't just to go, ooh, this is curious and to stop there. The point is to then prevent it. And to prevent it in ourselves, because that's, I think, ultimately what has to happen. You can't do a top-down sort of government level approach to trying to be so tough on crime that no one will ever commit crime. That's impossible. But you can change, sort of to say it in an attacky way, the hearts and minds of individuals to recognize the pathways towards evil and to go, wait, I'm off track. I don't want to go this way. And I'm going to stop myself here and here so I can find my way back. And so the heroic imagination is exercising that. I see someone on the street. How do I make sure that they're okay?”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, it's also been called the heroic imagination. So, someone who has studied evil, quote unquote, at length is called Philip Zimbardo. He did the Stanford prison experiment. And that was an experiment, which has now been torn apart in various ways. It was absolutely influential for psychology. It's where participants were randomly assigned, whether they would be prisoners or guards in a mock prison experiment. And then for a number of days, they were told to do various things. And it got out of control, and the guards went way over what they were supposed to be doing. And they effectively started pseudo-torturing some of these inmates or these pretend inmates. And the whole thing had to be stopped prematurely. But it was really fundamental in showing how just by randomly being assigned into guard the person in charge or inmate, you can within a matter of days have a completely different way of thinking about one another.”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People who've done terrible things, that is how you also realize that you do not want those consequences. And so, yeah, you maybe want to murder this person, but you don't really want to murder this person. That intuitive sort of animalistic brain coming in. But then luckily we have higher reasoning that goes actually, if you think this through, that's a pretty terrible consequence for yourself. So the better thing to do is not to murder this person. So I think it's adaptive to be able to fantasize and think about these things. Obviously, if you start getting to a point where you're ruminating and you're going these circles, where you're constantly fantasizing about doing dark things, especially to a specific person, I'd always advise seeing somebody to talk to a psychologist, for example, because that then does become a risk factor for acting on those dark fantasies. But up to that point, if it's just a fleeting thought or something that sort of in one day you have these thoughts, that is totally healthy, I would say.”
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 important to admit that to ourselves and research on murder fantasies finds that 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. And certainly according to some researchers, that's a good thing. Being able to rehearse and think through doing the most terrible things It's a great dress rehearsal for also how we don't want to live our lives. And only if you”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Turn into murder that they can turn into these horrible versions. And to then also spot the red flags if you start going down that path. I think if we don't rehearse evil, if you will, we are much more like to engage in it, especially in those moments where we don't have much time or energy to really think about what we're doing.”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think all of us are capable of doing basically the worst things we can imagine. And one of the reasons I think that is because you can see neighbors turning on each other, especially if you look historically at the start of wars or big political moments where you have people who would have called each other friends, turning each other into the police, killing each other, doing terrible things. So I think all it takes is to become convinced that the people you think are your friends are actually your enemies, whether that's just in your own world or in a larger political national landscape, that I think I don't think it takes all that much for us to be capable of doing terrible things. But that's also why it's really important when things are good and when you're not at war and when you have the capacity to think deeply about important issues to train your mind on these thoughts of knowing that things like loneliness can manifest in these extreme ways, that things like jealousy and aggression that they can”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Something I have felt. And the difference between me engaging in that and this person engaging in that are these other factors. But the core is in all of us.”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The untethered goes to a dark place and it then is often combined with some of these other dark tetrad traits. So you've got someone who maybe is high on psychopathy, low on empathy, someone who's high on sadism, someone who thinks that it's okay to pursue your own goals. And your own goal can be, like with Jeffrey Dahmer, you can be wanting to create the perfect partner, which in some way seems to be what he was trying to do by killing people and piecing them together and sewing up a sort of new version. There's something in that where I can't help but go, that's so sad. I don't go, oh my God, how terrible, how awful. And of course it's atrocious. Of course it's heinous. But I have this real sympathy for that. And I think that's important for us to have, though, and not to say, I can't relate to this person at all, but to say that is an extreme manifestation.”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so for these kinds of cases, if you don't have someone intervening, whether that's a family member or therapist saying, how can you tell whether this thought is real? Maybe that thought, maybe you're not hearing that voice, right? Maybe that aspect of what you're thinking isn't true and bringing you back and closer to reality, you can just wander off to whatever alternate universe that you might live in in your head. And it's the same with radicalization in other contexts is that you see that people who drift more and more into a certain group that has certain beliefs that are maybe divorced from the evidence, divorced from reality, you can see that people will get more extreme over time. And unless you have a tether that brings you back, that allows you to do reality monitoring, it's going to be very difficult to find your way out of that. reality monitoring problem and I think part of that's related to the lack of social networks that people”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Psychology, but Robert Picton. I mean, he was a tricky person because I think he was profoundly lonely. And this is something we see with a lot of serial killers, is that they have this loneliness, which I think also 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. And so when you see people get radicalized in their own thoughts, whether that's in the sense of things like schizophrenia, where you've got psychosis, you've got delusions, maybe command hallucinations. That's when you think you're hearing voices and someone is telling you that you have to do something, usually something harmful to other people. And if you don't follow those, you will hear those voices forever. They're profoundly distressing, and they are one of the aspects of schizophrenia that if you have it does make you more prone to violence.”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, he's done a lot of difficult cases, as have other researchers like Elizabeth Loftus, who's one of the main founders of the area of false memory research, which is what I also do. I do research on memory and false memory and witness statements. Elizabeth Loftus has also been recently for the Glene-Maxwell case. She was in the press. And so she has worked with lawyers to educate the court on memory in lots of really, really controversial cases. But the way she would explain it is that it's still her role to just train people and teach people on how memory works. She's not there to decide whether people are guilty or innocent. But she is there to help people distinguish between fact and fiction when it comes to how our memories work or don't.”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 Picton trial. And so he was keeping us abreast of some of the developments of what he was covering. And I found it so interesting. And I loved Stephen Hart as a person. And he seemed to have the sense of humor, this gallows humor around it all, despite being faced with one of the arguably worst people in Canadian history. And I thought that that was so interesting, that someone could be so nice and so kind and so wonderful and be an expert witness for these kinds of people. And so that's one of the reasons I went to the field is because of this case as well. And so we had him on the show. So he came on to the bad people and we interviewed him for it.”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 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 Picton case. And the episodes are called Piggy's Palace because that was the nickname for the farm where Robert Picton 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. One of the reasons I covered that case is actually because it was influential in my own career. So Robert Picton is one of”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Cover those cases, but in a different way? Or should we anonymize? So it doesn't mean that you shouldn't never cover that case. It just means that you need to think about it.”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Unquote evil. I think it's more that you add this nuance, which I guess sometimes can be estranging to other people. So there's that. So when you speak with others, sometimes, like even when I say we shouldn't use the word evil, people go, no, but you have to. Does that mean you're trivializing things? And the answer is no, I'm not trivializing. I'm just trying to understand. Also, like sympathizing or being empathetic towards people whom others have written off is always going to get that response from some people. And I mean, there are real questions around whom we're platforming and what that has and what role we have as content creators, both of us, of the people we talk about, how we cover them. I often come across this in true crime work that I do because I get asked to do TV shows. I host TV shows and I host BBC podcasts. And there's always the question of sometimes people commit murder to become famous. And should it be a blanket ban that we don't cover those cases? Or should we?”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's the classic scientist response as well to what other people in society go, ooh, they go, you know, this is horrible or this atrocious thing has happened or this shocking existential crisis inducing thing I've just found is giving me existential crisis. And scientists and say, go, wow. And you can sort of see the delight in discovery as well. And I think sometimes scientists read us callous because we enjoy this discovery of knowledge and the discovery of insight. It just feels like this little light bulb has gone off and you go, oh, I understand a tiny bit more about the human experience or about the world around us. And I think it must be similar. I don't know that I feel or worry that I sort of become more”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Huge amounts of witnesses, huge amounts of potential witness victims. And so in these cases, there are very visceral descriptions sometimes of heinous crimes. Think that as someone who does this work, you can't be someone who sees it as anything other than a puzzle. So, you have to look at it and go, here's the different pieces of information. What I am doing is pattern recognition. I'm not here to emotionally invest in each of these victims or potential victims. That's not my role. There's therapists for that. There's other people who do that work. I am here working with the police. I'm here working with lawyers. I'm here looking at it more sort of objectively to see how this all fits together. And so I think that's how I engage with it. I see it as this puzzle that I'm trying to figure out.”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think so. I think that's what people fear. So, a lot of the Nietzsche quotes they use as well are some of them I like because they speak to the chapters I write about and the issues I write about but some of them I also like because they are how people think about evil and people who are labeled evil. And I do think with gazing into the abyss and the abyss gazing back, it's more of a, you're trying to find it. And that's why in some ways that doesn't work actually, because it isn't a total blank. It isn't the abyss. There are in fact things that you can see, even if it's just superficially and patterns you can recognize to help you and key decision makers, especially in legal settings, make better decisions around people like this. So when they see these patterns, they act a better way. So yeah, I get asked a lot as a criminal psychologist, do you carry the cases that you deal around with you? So some of the cases involve”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But then there's other research which finds that if you use other kinds of interventions, it's like Jennifer's scheme in California, who does research on people with psychopathy who have committed severe crimes. And she specifically creates these treatment programs that aren't just around empathy, but they're more around almost learning the rules of society and convincing people that actually being pro-social is a better way to get what you want in life. And so there's a real need for tailored treatments to deal with especially certain kinds of personality traits, dark personality traits, to try and convince people basically actually being pro-social is the better path rather than just going hard on, you know, empathy and things that they don't maybe also see as faults with themselves.”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Definitely some research to support the idea that people psychopathy are better at lying. There's also some research specifically on faking good in, for example, parole decisions. So when it comes up to someone who is, there's a legal decision to be made as to whether this person is going to be released from prison or released from just detention in general, and then the person will act in a particular way, sort of mimic a good prisoner, mimic someone who's safe to be released into society. then the committee goes, oh, well, you know, this person's doing great. And so they're ready to be released. And then they make the wrong decision because that person's been faking it. So I think with psychopathy, it's a bit complicated. There has been some sort of historically as well some concern that certain treatment for psychopathy, especially empathy-focused treatment, makes people with psychopathy more likely to fake empathy and to weaponize it.”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not just policing and relationships and in lots of other contexts as well. I mean, a lot of jealousy is born out of uncertainty. Jealousy isn't, I know for sure that you have done something that is threatening our relationship. A lot of jealousy is what's in my head because I am assuming that you might be thinking or doing X. And that is also”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They, because of their vast experience, can in fact tell whether the person across in them was lying to them, this witness, this suspect. And the answer to that, even that, if you take them into experimental settings, they are no better than chance at detecting lies, and yet they think they are. And so again, you get into this path where you're going to miss people who are actually lying to you potentially, and you're going to potentially point at innocent people and say, I think you're guilty of this crime, and you go hard on that person in a way that might even lead to a wrongful conviction.”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we also don't trust people potentially who are too attractive. But again, deviation from the norm. And so if you're deviating in any way, that can lead to, well, your assessment being more wrong, but also you assessing people as more negative. And so with creepiness, the main thing that bothers me as a criminal psychologist is that tangential to creepiness is a general idea of trustworthiness and that you can tell whether somebody is lying. And I've done research on this, as have lots of other people, like Aldert Fry is one of the leading researchers on deception detection, and he has found in so many studies that it's really hard to detect whether someone is lying reliably and that people, especially police officers, people who do investigative interviewing, they have this high confidence level that”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Way. We know that people are more like to keep a distance. There was one study where they literally had a waiting room where they also had people with Chairs, and the question was how many chairs would you sit away from someone you know has a severe mental illness? And the answer is you sit more chairs away. And there's a physical and psychological distancing that's happening there. not because people with severe mental illness are inherently more violent or more dangerous. That is not actually what the research finds. It's that we perceive them as such because we perceive them as weird, basically. We go, this isn't how you're supposed to be behaving. And so I'm worried about this, and so I'm going to keep my distance. And so creepiness is much the same. And that's where you can totally misfire whom you perceive as creepy just because they're not acting in the way that you expect people to act in society.”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People used to not smile on photos as well. So I think looking at historical photos of children, or sometimes even kids in other cultures, it's like, oh, why are they all so serious? But our creepiness raiders are also way off. So this is something that I've been interested in for a long time as well, is that we have this intuitive perception of whether or not somebody is trustworthy. And that intuitive perception, according to Ample studies at this point, is not to be trusted. And one thing in particular is whether or not we think someone is creepy, including children, but usually the research is done, of course, on adult faces and with adults. And there's only recently did we even really define what that vague feeling of creepiness is. And it has a lot to do with just not following social norms. And this is something we see that transfers to other contexts, like why people are afraid of people with severe mental illness and psychosis. If you're on the bus or the tube in London and someone's talking to themselves and they're acting in an erratic”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And if I hadn't done this first, somebody else would have done this waste crime or this other kind of crime. So there's this rationalization, there's this normalization, there's this diminishing of your own role and agency. And that still tells us a lot about the psychology of people who commit crimes because most of us are very bad at saying sorry and saying I messed this up and I shouldn't have done that. And instead, what our brains do is they try to make us feel better. And they go, no, you're still a good person, despite this one thing. And so we try to rationalize it and we try to excuse it. We try to explain it. And there is some truth to it as well because we know the reasons why we engage in that behavior and other people don't have the whole context. So we also do have more of the whole story. But on the other hand, we need to also face the fact that sometimes we do terrible things and we need to stop doing those terrible things and prevent other people from doing the same.”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's important to speak with people whom or a lot of people to humanize, including myself. I mean, I also speak with people who I think are or have, I know have committed terrible crimes, and I have spoken to these people because as a criminal psychologist, that's often part of my job. So what's interesting, I think, when you're speaking to people who have committed really terrible crimes or certainly who have been convicted of terrible crimes, is that not only is it potentially insightful because they might give you a real answer and not just a controlled narrative about why they committed these crimes. If they are either maintaining their innocence or they're more reluctant to do that, I think even the narrative that they are controlling, that they're being very careful with, still tells us a lot about them. So I think certainly in my research on environmental crime as well, what we see is that people use a lot of rationalization and they say things like, well, everybody's doing it.”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is evil. And if we're doing that, then we need to go, okay, but what we actually want is we don't really just want to label people. We want to stop that behavior from happening. And the only way we're going to do that is if we understand what led that person to come to that situation and to engage in that behavior. And so that's why evil empathy, I think, is crucial, because ultimately what we want is to make society safer. And the only way we can do that is to understand the psychological and social levers that led them to engage in this behavior in the first place.”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My case for empathy or evil empathy, as I sometimes call it, so empathy for people who we often call evil. Also, the title of my book is Evil or in the UK market. It's Making Evil, which is a reference to a Nietzsche quote, which is thinking evil is making evil, the idea being that evil is a label we place onto others. There's nothing inherent to anything that makes it evil. And so I also think that we need to dismantle that and empathize with people we call evil because if we're saying that this is the worst kind of act or worst kind of manifestation of what somebody can be. So if someone can destroy others, torture others, hurt others, I work as a criminal psychologist, so I work a lot on sexual abuse cases, on rape cases, on murder trials.”
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. And on top of dehumanization, there's 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 gives you a sense of also the cloak of justice, the cloak of morality, even when 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.”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Do those things rather than why we do 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.”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, and 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, in fact, I think 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.”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And actually, in his early life, he didn't showcase quite a lot of the traits that later he sort of defined the horrors that he was capable of. So would I go back in time and kill BB 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.”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“About whether you think that people are born evil? And so the question of would you kill BB 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 question of sort of was he mad or bad. And with 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”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 scores 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.”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 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”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source