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

We all have the capacity to kill people and murder people and do other terrible things. The question is why we don't do those things rather than why we do 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: The Psychology of Murder and Sadism, The Memory Illusion, about false memories, Bi about bisexuality, and her new book that you should definitely go order now called Green Crime, which is a study of the dark underworld of poachers, illegal gold miners, corporate frauds, hitmen, and all kinds of other environmental criminals. Julia is a brilliant and kindhearted person with whom I got the chance to have many great conversations with on and off the mic. This was an honor and a pleasure. This is Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description where you can also find, uh, 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, uh, explain this continuum?

Yeah. So each trait on the dark tetrad as it's called, which is the four traits that are associated with dark personality traits, so things that we often associate with the word evil, like sadism, which is a pleasure in hurting other people, Machiavellianism, which is doing whatever it takes to get ahead. Narcissism, which is taking too much pleasure in yourself and seeing yourself as superior to others. And then there's psychopathy. Psychopathic 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 low on each of those traits or you can be high on each of those traits. And what the dark tetrad is, it's actually a way of classifying people into those who might be more likely to engage in risky behaviors or harmful behaviors and those who are not. And if you score high on all of them, you're most likely to harm other people. But each of us score somewhere, so I might score, 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 i- 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.