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 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.

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 personalities specifically often lack 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 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.

Well, it's about whether you think that people are born evil. So the question of "Would you kill baby Hitler?" is 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, sort of manifests over time. With Hitler, we know from certainly psychologists who have pored over his traits over time and looked at who he was over the course of his life, there's always this question of, "Was he mad or bad?" And 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 no. And actually, in his early life, he didn't showcase quite a lot of the traits that later defined the horrors that he was capable of. So would I go back in time and kill baby 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.

Well, and I'd 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. In fact, I think it makes us capable of perpetrating horrendous crimes against those we label evil. So for me, that word is the end of a conversation. 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 do those things rather than why we 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.

That's right, and on top of dehumanization, there is also this other thing called de-individuation, which is where you see yourself as part of the group, and you no longer see yourself as an individual. 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, you know, 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.

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. And so, in those contexts, that word evil is used all the time. So, this person 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.

I think it's important to speak with people whom we or who a lot of people dehumanize, including myself. I mean, I also speak with people who I think are or have... I know have committed terrible crimes, and I've 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've 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. They say things like, "Well, everybody's doing it," 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, 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.

Well, people used to not smile in photos as well. So 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 radars are also way off. 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 only recently did we even really define what that vague feeling of creepiness is. It has a lot to do with not following social norms. 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 way, we know that people are more likely 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. And it's 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.

It depends. If they're too attractive, it can be. So there's... there's effects that interact there.

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 this 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 Vrij 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 they, because of their vast experience, can in fact tell whether the person across from them is lying to them, this witness, the suspect. And the answer is 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.

Not just policing, in 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 basically an exercise in lie detection. And there as well, we are very bad at it.

There's definitely some research to support the idea that people with psychopathy are better at lying. There's also some research specifically on sort of 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 can 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. And then the committee goes, "Oh, well, you know, this, this person's doing great," and so they're ready to be released. And then they make the wrong decision because that person has 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. But then there's other research which finds that if you use other kinds of interventions, so like Jennifer Skeem 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.

I don't think so. I think that's what people fear. So, a lot of the Nietzsche quotes I use as well are... Some of them I like because they speak to the chapters I write about, but... 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, 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, you know, huge amounts of witnesses, huge amounts of potential victims, and so in these cases there are very visceral victims, and so in these cases there are very visceral descriptions sometimes of heinous crimes. And I 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 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. I worry for my own brain that when I confront people and see them as a puzzle, which I do. I see the beauty in the puzzle. All the puzzles look beautiful to me. I'm sometimes like a Prince Myshkin character from The Idiot by Dostoevsky, where you just see... It's not the good in people, but the beauty in the puzzle. And I think you can lose your footing on the moral landscape if you see the beauty in everything a bit too much. Because, everyone is interesting. Everyone is complicated. 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, you know, giving me existential crisis." And scientists instead go, "Oh, wow!" And you can sort of see the delight in discovery as well. And I think sometimes scientists read as callous because we enjoy this discovery of knowledge and the discovery of insights. And 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, quote 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. 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?" The answer is no, I'm not trivializing. I'm just trying to understand. Also, sympathizing or being empathetic towards people whom others have written off is always going to get that response from some people. 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 cover those cases but in a different way, or should we anonymize the... So, it doesn't mean that you should never cover that case. It just means that you need to think about it.

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 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 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 I found it so interesting, and I loved Stephen Hart as a person, and he seemed to have this 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, so kind, so wonderful, and be an expert witness for these kinds of people. And so that's one of the reasons I went into the field is because of this case as well. And so we had him on the show. So he came onto Bad People and we interviewed him for it.

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. And Elizabeth Loftus has also been a recent expert for the Ghislaine Maxwell case. She was in the press. 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.

The psychology about Robert Pickton? 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 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. And so for these kinds of cases, if you don't have someone intervening, whether that's a family member or a 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 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. So with serial killers, we find this reality monitoring problem, and I think part of that's related to the lack of social networks that people have.

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 ways 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 awful." 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 of 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.

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 in to 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 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 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 likely 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.

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 is a great dress rehearsal for also how we don't want to live our lives. And only if you are able to fully think through, "What would I actually be like if I was engaging in this? What would I be thinking? Who would I be with? What would be my... the group that I'm charging against this other person? You know, who am I there with?" As you said, like really putting yourself in the shoes of these people who have 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's 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 in 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 in one day you had these thoughts, that is totally healthy, I would say.

Yeah, so it's also been called the heroic imagination. Someone who has studied evil, quote unquote, at length is Philip Zimbardo. He did the Stanford Prison Experiment, and that was an experiment which is... I mean, it's 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. And so Philip Zimbardo 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, to say it in a tacky 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's how 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? How do I not become a bystander? And actually, the bystander stuff is interesting because there was a really famous case, the murder of Kitty Genovese, 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, 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 heroism. 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 that we as humans do celebrate, and we should. And I think often we should celebrate those incidents more and not the, you know, the bystander moments where we didn't intervene. We should be normalizing intervening.

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. 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 bike. This person owed me..." 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 psychopath sharpening their knives, waiting for months to try and kill this person. And we don't like that because there's something called the victimization gap, which is that the impact of this extreme situation on the perpetrator, there's a huge gap between that and the impact on the victim and their family. So the victim loses a life, whereas the perpetrator, sure, they get imprisoned, but that... 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 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, that's one version where it's, you know, an eye for an eye kind of. You know, 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, well, 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... That's a really low risk in terms of recidivism, actually. And high 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 there's, there's big fundamental questions about how we organize our justice systems and what we want them to be for.

I think forgiveness is up to the victims' families, and quite often, when you speak with victims' families, there is this divide where you have some who are much more keen on something called restorative justice, which is where they... what they want is for the person to apologize, the perpetrator to apologize, to explain how it happened. Also, quite often, I mean, you look at some of the other consequences in the other context, it's sort of, like, teenage boys who are part of gangs, for example, is the other context. And it's a teenage boy killing another teenage boy. These are kids, and the parents of a teenage boy understand that. This isn't... they don't think of this other perpetrator as this grown man who has... I don't know. I think we think of it as this fight between the parents of both teenage boys in that case, but really, often what parents want is to just understand how this could happen and, in some ways, to allow the other teenage boy to still have a life and to not steal theirs as well, or his as well. So there's that restorative justice model where forgiveness, I think, belongs to the families. Some families, of course, want the most extreme punishment. That's also... I can understand how that would be a response that's triggered if you've suffered a severe loss. But if we're looking to make society safer, putting people who've killed in prison is not actually the answer, right? Because if we want society to be safer, it should be based purely on what is most likely to deter crime and who is most likely to engage in it, and that's where I think we've got it upside down.

So that episode was all about what it means to espouse certain kinds of views, especially about women, and what it means to be in an environment that is fueling the fire of... well, hatred of gender. And so, and the idea of entitlement. So I think one thing that we see often in crimes, of all sorts actually, is this sense of entitlement that drives the perception that I'm allowed to engage in X because of something else. And I deserve to have a life that looks like this, but I don't, and so I'm going to go take it, or I'm going to go do something to show my dissatisfaction in life. And so if you think that all men deserve to have a happy life, sort of a Disney version with a woman at home who's taking care of the kids, and it's the sort of white picket fence ideal that we've been sold. We have been told that that is what we should have. Like, I understand where it comes from, and the question though, is, are we entitled to that or is that the idea that that's something we should strive towards? And I think the answer is no, nobody's entitled to a good life. I would like to see freedoms and rights manifest in such a way that everyone is able to achieve the kind of life that they themselves want. But you're not entitled to it. And so that's where I think it can get a bit crossed and we can be sold these lies that are basically impossible for everybody in society to achieve. And understandably people get angry, and if you're angry and if you feel entitled and if you're in this group where everyone else is thinking the same way as you, yeah, that can make you dangerous.

And it can reinforce that worst self. You see other people saying, "Yeah, I feel the same way. Do you want me to help you?"

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. And he would simultaneously be building up the story of a future together. You see this in people who are really problematic in relationships in a lot of ways. I mean, this is not just in scams or in criminal settings, but problematic relationship styles often involve someone who is creating this idea of a future together that you can just see it now. You know, "Our kids in the garden running around. You're the only one for me." That kind of language, like almost planning your wedding on the third date. That kind of thing is what he would weaponize. And she, Cecilia, was looking for love. She wanted all of those things, and so it worked really well. He ended up doing is defrauding her of lots of money, and she ended up taking out loans, and her family were giving her money to help what he was saying was this critical situation. Very classic fraud. It's a critical situation where he was being followed, he was under attack, and he needed her to pay for some things. He needed her to pay for some flights, until she ran out of money. And then she realized that this all was a big fraud. This was a love scam. So, the reason that we spoke with her is partly to show how it can happen, and I think it's really important to remind people that this is something everybody is capable of believing. Fraud works because people know what we want to hear, and they tell us the things we want to hear. And so, I think all of us, there's a tailored version of fraud that could appeal to basically everybody if they have enough information about you.

Yeah, because you're playing with people's emotions, and you know that they're vulnerable in that way. And most people want to be loved and want to love, and so it's a really manipulative way in, and I think it's really horrible, but it's also something that we all almost underestimate. So we think, "I would identify fraud. I would know if someone was trying to scam me of money," until it happens to us, and then we go, "Oh, wait. That did just happen." And then we get really embarrassed. And so I think talking about it is really important, and seeing it as not this thing that happens to dumb people, because that is sometimes how it's framed. It's like, "Oh, such an idiot." "She was so gullible." Was she? Or was she just a nice person who wanted to believe that this person was capable of loving her, which I would hope we all are.

Yeah. Yeah, that's right, that's right.

Well, and coercive control is becoming more of an issue, where that's when somebody, for example, in a relationship takes control of the finances, and that's often a man in a relationship. That's sort of traditionally because it falls often along these gender lines. But the problem is if that person then starts to weaponize the fact that they're controlling the finances and starts using words like, "I'm going to give you your allowance," instead of going, "You've paid as much into this as I have, and so this is our shared money," and starts using that and controlling things and controlling how the other person lives in that relationship, that's when you get into things that are called coercive control. And things like jealousy can also be used in that way.

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. As in, not all jealousy leads to violence, of course, but all violence is the jealousy as a precursor. And quite a lot of that is imagined things that the partner is doing, not even based on reality. Then we go back to our deception detection research, where we're bad at telling whether someone's lying or not. And so if you're basing how you're interacting with that person on a faulty lie detector, you're going to make bad decisions. So, the research also bears out that most people are really bad at monogamy. So, most people either have cheated on a significant other, maybe not their current significant other, but a significant other or have cheated multiple times, and that's just consistently found in the research.

I think it's the other way around. I think monogamy is setting us up to fail. So, I think monogamy is a social construct. That's a nice idea for some people, and I think that at least based on the research on how people actually behave, they're not actually behaving in a monogamous way. If you're cheating on your partner, that is not monogamy. That is polyamory, potentially. So, the love of multiple people. And it's lying, and it's... It doesn't have to be that way. So, I'm polyamorous, and I believe that you can love multiple people. I don't know that everyone is always going to meet lots of people at the same time that they're going to love. But I think that there's been a move towards more people embracing open relationships and non-traditional relationship structures, and I think that is healthy to at least have as an option. I think the idea that there's just one size fits all for relationships is really harmful to a lot of people, and it just doesn't really work for everybody.

And I guess with jealousy, what I'm thinking of is actually not an instance of jealousy, so where you have a feeling of, "I feel left out," or, "I feel..." It's more that sort of persistent feeling of, "I am a jealous person." And that's where I would say that is usually a red flag. And you're right. It might... It's a red flag partly because it means the person's probably bad at communicating, or you are as a couple. It's not necessarily just the jealous-person's fault. It's just that there's something happening in this dynamic that is bad psychologically, and that should be addressed, or maybe it's not the right relationship.

That's exactly what psychologists do all the time. Yeah.

We make sweeping statements.

But why deny yourself the beautiful spectrum of human experience? It's like eating one meal for the rest of your life. Like, why? You don't have to do that. You could...

Just... You can have lots of beautiful people around and...

I think it's more that I want people to feel like they have a choice, and that's the important thing. And I think all we see is monogamy everywhere, all the time, and it's just one version of how we can live our lives, and I think it's not the only. And I think that having conversations with your partner as well, especially early. It's harder to bring this up later on, but to have it early and say, you know, "How do you actually want to structure your life?" And I think, "How do you want to restructure your relationship?" is part of that. And especially if you're going to commit yourself to one person, one primary person, or one exclusive person, that's part of it. And I think then you also, you know, don't have to lie to each other if you do cheat. Or you can talk about it in a different way if you feel like there's, you know, certain capacity to be honest about whom you're attracted to and how that might impact your life more generally.

It can be. I mean, all relationships can be difficult to navigate.

I think it's the same. And the same respect, so if you're going in because you're trying to fix something about yourself, you're going to have a hard time.

Much like if you're dating a single person. If you're trying to fix something, and this is going to be the solution to the thing that you feel is broken about yourself, it's going to be hard. But if you're going in, coming from a good place, and you're going, you know, "I want to be open, and I want to connect with people, and I want to love people or a person," then you're going to have a better time.

I think so. You can love people in different ways. Also, you can love lots of people deeply, I think. And I think, again, it's... So, research on bisexuality, so I'm bi, has also found that people who are bi are more likely to be in non-traditional relationships. And one of the reasons for that is probably also because we constantly get asked to justify our sexuality as well. And so if constantly you're being asked if one person's enough for you, if one gender's enough for you if you're in a relationship with one person, for example, you know, if I'm in a relationship with a man, do you miss women? And it's like, I don't ask you that if you're in a relationship with a woman. Do you miss women? Like, you probably do. But that's just other women than your partner. It has nothing to do with being bi. And so I think there's this constant barrage of questions of what does it mean? Is it real? How do you choose? What does a relationship look like? Do you constantly want threesomes? There's this constant hypersexualization also, especially of women that we find in the research that can also lead to really negative outcomes for mental health and for things like risk of sexual violence. But on the other hand, you've got bisexual people themselves saying, "Yeah, but I feel like I also have this superpower that I can love more widely, and gender doesn't really matter in terms of whom I'm capable of loving." And so relationship structures almost come with that conversation. It's not that we need to be non-monogamous or that we need to be in these kinds of relationships. It's more that I think if you've engaged so deeply with your sexuality partly 'cause society's forced you to, then you're also going to be thinking about relationship structures more generally and going, "Actually, I'm going to choose this one."

Or thinking they're lying. So with men... 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 sex or you can change, and so they're bisexual.

Yeah, which is different entirely. And so I think partly out of that, researchers started using words like plurisexual, and omnisexual is another one. And so if you're looking for research on this, plurisexual is probably the word. But

It's just the same. It's just another-

another word where it's all. Sometimes pansexual is also used. And again, the idea being that it's all genders.

I think the right way to think about it is that I'm not attracted to most people, but I can be attracted to people regardless of gender, much like you're probably not attracted to most people, but you are attracted to people of a certain gender, maybe. And so that's... It's the same as being heterosexual in terms of potentially my pool of people whom I might be interested in. It's just that the gender is irrelevant.

The biggest thing that researchers find people misunderstand about bisexuality is that it's a phase and that it's this idea that it's transient, that it's always changing, and that it's a stepping stone. So, I think a lot of people still see bisexuality as on the way to Gay Town, sort of like you're on your way, but you haven't quite committed and you're still stuck in expectations of society. You haven't quite let go yet, but really you're gay. And that's especially true for men. So when you look at research on bisexual men, which is actually how the research started. So, I think now when we think of bisexuality, we think of women. And it's true that today twice as many women identify as bisexual as men. But if you look at the history of this and the research on bisexuality over time, it was the other way around. So someone called Alfred Kinsey was one of the first sexuality researchers in recent history certainly, and he, after World War II, did this really big study of Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, it was called. He was a biologist himself, so he thought of taxonomies, and he was doing research on gall wasps, so insects. And this idea of human sexuality was sort of thrown at him after the war because there's also this whole move to get people to, well, reproduce and to rebuild America. So sexuality was partly, and sex, specifically, was becoming more of an area of interest, both in terms of research and in terms of policy and funding. So Alfred Kinsey was asked, "Do you want to do a class on human sexual behavior?" And he was like, "I know nothing about this." So he spent about a year just listening to students' questions about what they want to know about sex, and he realized that he was looking for research to try and build up this course that he was probably going to teach, and he realized that he couldn't answer most of their questions because the research hadn't been done. So a lot of the questions were around, "What is normal?" You know, "If I feel this during sex, is that normal? How often do people have sex? Should I want these? What about these fantasies? What does it mean? What if I have homosexual fantasies? What if I engage in this kind of..." And so he was looking at all of these questions and collating them, and then he went out and did these huge studies, and he interviewed thousands of people himself, but also had all these research assistants who were out there interviewing people in America about their sexual behavior, which, I mean, just picture the time. This is the 1940s. This is quite a conservative time. I mean, certainly more than we might expect now. And here's this researcher asking incredibly personal questions about thousands and thousands and thousands of people, and he ended up finding, and this is one of the big findings in this book that he published called "Sexual Behavior in the Human Male," which was a best-seller for an entire year. He sold out auditoriums. They had to sometimes add the room next to the room he was in because there was so much desire to go to his lectures about sex that they had to connect radios to other halls to give people enough space to sit down. He was basically a rock star. And again, I think this challenges the misconception we have about sexuality, that we think of it as this sort of woke thing now, that the rainbow flag and all this stuff is sort of this modern invention almost. But this is the '40s. This was happening. People were going to these talks. People were having these conversations, and he created something called the Kinsey Scale. And so the Kinsey Scale is from zero to six, and he found that it was not useful to apply a binary to people's sexual desires and sexual orientation. It was more useful to put them on a continuum because most people were not exclusively homosexual or exclusively heterosexual. Most people were somewhere in between. And so zero was exclusively heterosexual tendencies, and six was exclusively homosexual, and he would place people based on all of the things they told him somewhere on the scale, and about half of men were somewhere in the middle, not exclusively either, and about a quarter of women. Now, think about the time.

Well, and it's post-war though, so I think that mattered as well. So there's something called a homosocial environment, which has nothing to do with being gay. That has to do with being in a situation where you are with people of the same gender as you. So a homosocial environment are things like prisons, where you only have men or only have women, war, which, at that point, they just had. And so you have a lot of men who are exclusively in the company of men, and maybe looking around going, "Well, now that my options are different, maybe I'm going to choose from this pool." Anyway, so he found that it was that way around, that a lot of people have these fantasies or actions that they've engaged in. And then there are other researchers, other male researchers, who found similar things, and then at some point in the '70s, it swapped, and it felt like maybe more people, more men were identifying as gay, and there were maybe fewer people who would have called themselves bi, and suddenly this became a thing more for women. So I think that there's some social things going on. There's some research things going on that actually bi men have been studied for a long time as well.

Definitely.

Definitely, and I think that research consistently shows that bisexual men are more likely to identify as, well, as gay or straight. And gay, well, it depends. So if they have what we might refer to as a homosexual lifestyle, so they engage in sort of going to queer parties, maybe go on Grindr or other gay apps, that would be much more a lifestyle thing, where you've embraced and you see this as part of your identity, that you are part of this queer community. It's much easier to say you're gay than bi, most often, also because there's queerphobia within the queer community. And so you might get gay men saying to a bi man, "Oh, come on, you're... I was bi once." That's a classic. "I was bi once," or "Come on, you're actually gay." It's the same that you get the other way around with bi women, is that because it's seen as performative, the idea being that bisexual women are doing it for attention, but the attention of men, specifically, that, well, they're all going to go back to men anyway and they're just doing it. It's a phase. It's this thing that they're doing actually to be sexy to men, not because they're actually interested in women. And so there's this lesbian-bi thing going on, which is often quite hostile. Not always, but often. And there's this gay male bi thing going on, which is different in nature but is also potentially hostile. So in both, saying you're bi can be problematic, but for men more so.

The Kinsey Scale's a good start. And the Klein Grid, I think, is much more fun in some ways. So the Klein Grid came out of research by Alfred Kinsey and others like Havelock Ellis, but we won't get into him. And Fritz Klein was a male researcher doing research also on sexuality. He was specifically a therapist, and he was looking at people who were struggling with their sexuality. And so people would show up in the 70s and 80s in his practice, and they would say, "I'm struggling with my sexuality." And he would say, "How can I help you?" And they would say things like, "I wish I wasn't interested in men, and I'm a man." And he would then work through what that means. Does that mean you don't want to have these feelings? Does that mean that you don't want to have these attractions? Does that mean that the implications of how your friends and family will see you, that's the problem? And so he created this much more complex scale, which I think is really interesting for everybody to do, no matter what their sexuality is. Because what it is is it gets you to think about things like, yeah, your sexual identity, easy. Not just that, but in past, present, and ideal. And so if you say, "Well, I used to identify as straight. Now I identify as bisexual." And then I have in my head... This doesn't mean that other people think this. In my head, I have an ideal, which could be straight, because that's what maybe society's told us we should be. But it could also be something else. So I've also had friends who've gone, you know, past, present, straight, straight, but ideal bi. So you get into these interesting dynamics where sometimes people just wish they were a different sexuality than they were for other reasons. And then there's other things in the scale that ask about your lifestyle. So, for example, if you are going to parties, queer parties, if you have queer friends, then you might have a homosexual lifestyle, even if you're straight. But then again, it's how much lifestyle would you like? And so for me, that was a real moment where I was looking at that going, "Wow, my lifestyle's really straight. And maybe I need to change this." And so he was using these attractions and fantasies and identities, and the past, present, ideal, to help people to think through all these complicated feelings we have around our sexuality, and to identify sticking points.

Right. And so he would look at especially the ideal and the present. And if those were different, so if you said, "I wish I was bi but I'm straight," or "I'm bi but I wish I was straight," or "I'm homosexual and I wish I was straight," he would say, "Let's talk about that," and he'd try to work through it. And the term he used for bisexual people who were uncomfortable in their own sexuality was being a troubled bisexual. And so I think you can... I think any sexuality can be troubled. I think you could be a troubled straight person, a troubled homosexual person, a troubled asexual person. And just thinking about why and which aspects are maybe missing, I think is really healthy for people to do.

I don't really like talking about honesty with yourself. I think that's a high bar. And I think it's also often weaponized against people, especially by men, where it's this idea of you're not really being honest, you're actually gay. So I think this idea of we're not being honest with our own sexuality, that's a big word. I think it's more that maybe you haven't had the right framework or the right words to think about aspects of your sexuality that are troubling to you.

I think the sign is smaller than we think it is. I think that there are... There's this tendency to assume that sexuality is something that we find, and keep, and consolidate from our teenage years, maybe early 20s. You maybe get university thrown in, sort of if you get your experimental year as an undergrad. But you kind of have to choose. And that is a difficult requirement, I think, for a lot of people, because you can't possibly know all of the things and all the people you might be interested in at that point. And we change in every other way. Why wouldn't we change in this way? So I think giving ourselves also the ability to reappraise where we're at with our own sexuality, our own desires, our own relationship status, all these things, is important to keep us happy and healthy and to not run into issues that we know are faced by a lot of homosexual but also bisexual people. Research has found that bisexual people are more likely to self-harm. They're more likely to be the victims of sexual violence, more likely to be isolated, more likely to be stalked. There's lots of different aspects of being bi that are negative. The reason for that is mostly because bi people are least likely to be plugged into the community. So when you're going through stuff like this, and you feel different, and you're constantly being asked about your sexuality, if you're open about it, or you're hiding it, that's also troubling. You're going to have these negative consequences, especially if you don't feel like the queer community is really a place for you. So that's where also finding your people really matters.

So 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." It's like that is not related to this crime at all, unless, you know, one of the partners was killed. But people see this as a defect of character, and kink is very much seen as a defect of character in many circles, especially in sort of broader society. And that is wild to me because if you look at research on sexual fantasies and kinks, a lot of people have at least one. So a lot of people, BDSM being the most common, are engaging in or interested in BDSM. So things like choking or things like restraints or being degraded or doing the degrading of other people in bed, consensually of course, that is something that a lot of people fantasize about and a lot of people engage in. And so these kinks and these fetishes, they are much more commonplace than we sometimes think about them as. Now, on the other hand, we obviously need to be careful not to assume that because in pornography BDSM is almost ubiquitous, it feels, that that means everybody wants this. That is absolutely not the case, but we also don't want to marginalize it and say it's almost nobody. It's somewhere in between, and the main thing is always just to ask and to have open conversations about what it is that people actually want in bed and to make sure you have things like safe words, so, you know, putting in the restraints to make sure that these interactions are safe and consensual and then being able to explore. And, I mean, there's everything from, you know, pup play where you dress up as a puppy and you engage in either just general frolicking or sexual behavior to other things like blood play, which is when you pierce the skin to release some sort of blood. That can be scratching. That can be cutting. That can be of yourself or your partner. That can be this idea of, you know, I don't know, it's this taboo thing you're doing together, and it's sexy in its own way. And so everybody has their own versions of what they find attractive and rubbing up against people, you know, sort of unsuspecting, pretending that someone's sleeping. There's this wide range of things, and I think people also feel often deeply ashamed about the things that they are interested in. And I think that is also really sad because it makes it more likely that people are going to not be able to live that part of themselves and also that they think there's something wrong with them. And that can spiral into things like, "Am I evil? Am I bad? Am I a bad person because I have these fantasies?" And that ties in, unfortunately, with homosexuality and bisexuality and the way that certainly historically and in most parts of the world still today, these queer lives and queer identities are still villainized. They're still seen as lesser, as bad, as a sign of a defect of character. And if people see that within themselves, they're going to think differently about themselves, and we... Well, society is going to treat them differently. So it's all about destigmatizing.

Right, and that's what research has found on fetishes, especially on BDSM, is that the reason that people say they like it... I mean, it's hard to explain why you have a fantasy. But if you go into the finer questions and really dig deep, you can find that people will explain a version of, "Well, I can really let go, and I don't have to... If someone is telling me what to do, then I don't have to make any decisions, and I've spent all day making millions of decisions, and I don't have to in this context. And I really like that because it's freeing." And so that's that disinhibition hypothesis is that the reason that we often go to things in the bedroom that in other contexts we don't like or even find repulsive, like I don't in normal life potentially want to be told what to do. But maybe when you move into the bedroom, you go, "Yeah, but this is a different context, and I kind of want the reverse of what I want in my day-to-day life." And so I can also understand, like, furries and that sort of completely living as another species of it, even is... It's a really interesting psychological phenomenon of release and of letting go of social pressure.

It's the being free, and the juxtaposition there is that you are free because of the fiction. Like you're playacting, but it's touching at something deep inside you psychologically. And so that's where it sort of feels weird, but it also makes sense. I mean, this is also why we like fiction, because it allows you to maybe be somebody else, have someone else's thoughts in your mind for a while, and you really get to live as that for a bit. So I think, yeah, the truth and fiction sort of circle is always an interesting one.

So, the research on human sexuality, I think, is interesting, because we keep finding that people have these desires that they feel weird about, that they... Unless they have a community or an app that you can go to to live those fantasies, they can feel quite troubling to the individual and they can make you unwell. And that's true whether it's about your sexuality, so being gay and being unable to live as a gay person, or if that's wanting to engage in BDSM and not having an outlet for that. So that can just make you unhappy. So I think that the stigma there is that that unhappiness is going to lead to some sort of horrible manifestations of crime. I think that is mostly nonsense, but it's more that I'm concerned about the mental health consequences for the individual who's unable to explore those sides of themselves. And in research on kinks and sexuality, it's just about also making sure that we have visible representation of certain kinds of communities. And so that's one of the reasons I ended up writing Bi. I came out in Evil. Making Evil is the UK title, Evil in the US. I came out because I was writing about all the things we associate with the word evil, and homosexuality certainly is one of those things.

Yeah. Yeah, I came out as bisexual. And I came out as bisexual in the book, and I did it specifically, and I wrote it this way, as well, because I was talking about the importance of visibility, and how it's through visibility that you realize that the people around you, people you already know and love, are part of this community that otherwise feels other. It feels foreign, it feels abstract, and maybe it feels scary. But if you realize that actually you've got gay friends or you've got friends who are into certain kinds of fetishes, or you've got friends who are whatever sexuality aspect you're talking about, you suddenly go, "Oh, it's gonna be much harder to dehumanize these people." And this is where all of this kind of comes for me from a really sad place is the... You could talk about Bi as this project of love and how I was finding the community. I was trying to write something that would sort of bring us all together. But it's also because I'm constantly terrified that my rights are going to be stripped back. And we know that the laws around homosexual behavior and the rights around bisexual people as well, they're in flux. There's no straight line of acceptance. And just because right now I happen to live in a time and place where I'm allowed to be openly bisexual and I can engage in homosexual activity, that doesn't mean that that's gonna stay, not even necessarily in my lifetime. And so I think, much like writing Evil at a time when you're not at war and you're able to think really deeply about these important issues, I think we also need to be thinking about things like sexuality and other issues that are important to us. And if we want to preserve our rights, we need to normalize these issues and make sure that they're visible so that people find it harder to dehumanize those communities. And so I'm always terrified that bisexual people are gonna be hypersexualized, dehumanized again, and that there's going to be laws against basically just who I am.

Yeah. A lot of people felt seen by the book. So it was really beautiful, the fan mail I got and the sort of responses to the book. And I got them from all over the world. And so in the book, I also spoke with some researchers who were stationed or doing research in countries where bisexual behavior specifically is illegal, or homosexual behavior was illegal. For a long time, bisexuality was, especially in women, well, actually, homosexuality in women in general was sort of seen as... it was a blind spot, 'cause what counted as sex is sex with a penis. And so women can't have sex with one another. And so a lot of laws around homosexuality are specifically applying to men. And certainly, historically, that's the case. So we're talking about like sodomy and that involves men and not women. And so if you 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 so 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 that those people were particularly writing saying, some of them also saying, "Can I translate this into this other language, on the DL, like on the down low? And just, like, distribute this to my friends?" I had people sending me messages saying, "I'm at X airport or in X country where this is, this would be considered contraband." Like this book, my book is a banned book, fun fact.

It was banned. I sold the rights to a foreign publisher, and right after it was sold, the laws changed and they sent me this really sad email saying, "Unfortunately, we can't publish your book because it's now considered part of the, like, gay agenda, sort of promoting gay and homosexual lifestyles. And so we can't publish it anymore." But there's, I take like 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.

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 you're, you know, 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.

So the benefits are that you can, well, 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. And so I'd already published two books. I was already an established scientist. I think if I tried bi first, I, A, 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've been taken seriously as a scientist. And so having the other stuff first and then bi as sort of a side project, that was acceptable. But I think the other way around wouldn't have been.

There still is, but I actually find that it's done the opposite most of the time. So I think, as a woman, especially a young woman 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 bi, A, you get allies who suddenly are like, "We're on your side. We're going to help you fight the hypersexualization." And people get almost more weird about it in a good way. They get a bit quiet about it because they're like, "Oh, now it's an identity thing. So maybe I shouldn't comment on what she's wearing." And it sort of, it almost disarmed some of the more sexualized comments. So for me, I have to say it was mostly a positive experience.

Exactly. Like, "Ugh."

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 study art at undergrad, and then my grandfather intervened and was like, "Being an artist is a really hard life. Maybe you should reconsider."

Uh, painting.

Yeah, I am, but I also really like surrealism, and I really like messing with the sense of reality, which again, is obviously something that then wove its way into my academic work. Um...

But he was also right. I've always been very intellectual, let's just say. I skipped a couple grades in school. I was part of the chess club. It was very much I was the clever kid. And so, but there's also a 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 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 that... 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 abilities and 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 that people quite literally 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 into criminal psychology is because I could have gone into any other, but the criminal psychologists were the most fun. I feel like lots of psychologists take 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, they had this gallows humor. They were doing 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.

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 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. 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? Because well, or at least without contaminating it 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 and generative AI in general, is that it's structured as a social interaction. It's structured as a conversation most of the time now, and that is what we do. I mean, 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. 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.

Yes. 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, and then it's uncritically giving that to you. Or sometimes, of course, there are other things where it's 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 that not only is AI potentially distorting people and their memories, never mind the factual basis on which they're relying, but it's also the other way around: that potentially by asking leading or problematic questions, 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." 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.

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 people, most police officers don't spend a long time, and they 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, 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 shifted. 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.

Yeah. We do all the time in experiments.

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.