If you get injured, someone else gets injured, you're in this sort of almost survival state. You can very quickly turn to very horrible acts. You don't go in just assuming I'm a good person, so I will make good choices, because that is not a given.
Hello and welcome to Instant Genius, brought to you from the team behind BBC Science Focus. I'm Jason Goodger, commissioning editor at BBC Science Focus. In today's episode, we're joined by Dr. Julia Shaw, a broadcaster, bestselling author, and psychologist based at University College London, to talk about the nature of evil. Please consider liking this episode and subscribing to the channel. So, Julia, welcome to the show. Thanks so much for joining us.
So, today we're talking all about the concept of evil. So, I bet if we went outside, stopped a hundred people and asked them what makes someone an evil person, they'd probably say it's murderers, rapists, war criminals, etc. If we pushed them, the vast majority of them would say, "Well, of course they are, because they've committed terrible acts." But that's not the way you see things, is it? You know, can you explain to us what you mean by that?
So, evil is a word that we use to other people. So we use it to create distance psychologically between ourselves and people who we think are capable of terrible things or have done terrible things. And I think it's a word that we need to stop using.
So then where does this tendency come from? And why do so many of us hold on to it so vehemently?
Oh, I mean you can trace it back to its religious connotations of course quite quickly and continued religious connotations. But moving beyond that, you go to the societal construct, which is this idea that there are people who often are also seen as born evil or born bad. That there's something fundamentally wrong about those people that is different from you and I, us being of course the good citizens, good people, and them being these evil bad people. And that's I think why as a psychologist who works with offenders and who works in criminal justice settings, it's really important to me that we deconstruct what we mean when we say the word evil. Because usually it's a lazy out. It's saying, I don't want to try and understand why this person is actually doing the things they're doing. I'm just going to pretend that there's something fundamentally broken about them. And that is almost never true and it's always unhelpful.
So, I think it probably varies from person to person, but most people might say there's a threshold that we can cross here. You know, say we hear some news that there's a young man robbing old ladies. You probably think, "Oh, no. What a scumbag." But you wouldn't say that person's necessarily evil. Do you think there's a tipping point by which we divide acts from being simply bad or wrong to being evil?
Well, subjectively and individually we do and to some extent you're right. I think there are some societal categories like child sex offenders, which is one of those categories. For a while terrorists were very much talked about as evil, evil terrorists, and then of course you get people who commit atrocities like genocide or certain kinds of war crimes, and those are the sort of obvious categories. Whether or not that's useful, again to use the word evil there, I would say not, because again, what you're doing is you're trying to glaze over the things that are actually interesting about how that person thinks, or that those kinds of people think, and why they behave the way they do. So I think the threshold for evil is personal, but ultimately it ends up being: am I capable of doing this thing? And if the answer is no, then that person is possibly evil. If the answer is yes, then oh well, they've got their reasons. And so for me, I guess it's trying to expand who we consider, you know, like us. And that's psychologically always important, I think, also because once we are able to dehumanize others by using words like evil to describe them, that's when we become capable, if you will, of evil, of terrible acts.
Yes. This sort of binary thinking about this is almost baked into our language. Like we have the phrase pure evil, like there's nothing good about that person or that act, which is really fascinating. You know, why is that so appealing to people?
I think it's appealing to people because we like to have this idea that we wouldn't be capable of committing these atrocities, and so it's easier to say this isn't who I am, and so I have this, I don't know, separation. And we have been sold this. And so one of the things that I find most frustrating right now in true crime, because I do true crime presenting, but I always try to make sure it's evidence-based and that we counteract stereotypes. And one of the things I find really frustrating with some of the well-meaning narratives in true crime is that there's this idea that childhood is the single most defining time of your life, which is, I mean, it's a little bit true but not really, and it's a very psychoanalytic Freudian concept. So Sigmund Freud basically taught us all that the only time that really matters is your childhood and your sexual development in particular during your childhood, and it just sort of stuck. And that doesn't have to be true. I mean, yes, that's where lots of things happen, but also lots of things happen later, right? That can be life-defining, identity-defining, change your morality. And because of that though, when you watch true crime or read true crime, you will often have an expert who comes in and says, "This person's childhood was like this." And it's usually what, the mother's fault, isn't it? So men kill people. Whose fault is it? The woman. And I find that that also reinforces that idea that there's this born evil, that there's this fundamental thing wrong that you can no longer fix because the childhood is in that person's past.
Yeah. So, we'll go into true crime and things like that in a little bit, but I think we need to ask the question there that you sort of brought up, which is: are we all capable of these sort of heinous acts?
Yes. Yeah. And I think that's one of the main things that we need to realize and have front of mind all the time is that there is no less in them. We are all capable of terrible things basically at all times, but especially when the circumstances align. And so if war breaks out, if you have deprivation, so something happens to you, you get injured, someone else gets injured, you're in this sort of almost survival state, you can very quickly turn to very horrible acts. And we see it happen all the time. And that's important to acknowledge in yourself because the only way that you're going to prevent yourself from going down that path and engaging in those acts is if you understand, especially when times are good. So when you're not faced with really hard decisions, how am I going to act when that happens? And so you have that mental planning and that projecting yourself into the future and these potential choices you will have to make so that you're able to make the right ones, because you don't go in just assuming I'm a good person so I will make good choices, because that is not a given.
So let's have a look at sort of character types then. So I bet if we say to somebody, you know, what sort of character type of person is most likely to commit, you know, in quotes, an evil act, they'll say, well, it's quite obvious, isn't it, a psychopath. So, you know, it's obvious the answer is obviously much subtler than that. So then what do we mean by psychopath clinically? What does that actually mean?
So psychopath first of all is not a medical term in the way that it's often assumed to be. So for example, you're not allowed to use a diagnosis or a label of psychopathy in British courtrooms. So in an English court, you can't come in as an expert witness or as a therapist and say this person is a diagnosed psychopath, or in any case, it's not really relevant. And so you can say other things. So obviously mental health profiles are important, especially when we're talking also about sentencing. So what happens with a person once they're found guilty. There's also the question around reality monitoring, which is do I understand what reality is and the consequences of my actions. So that's where we get into things like being not culpable by reason of insanity. And so that's when you might be exonerated or you might be sent to a mental health facility instead of to jail. And so that's important. But psychopath as a term, it originally was developed as more of a scientific tool really to understand people who are at particularly high risk of engaging in violence. So it's violence specifically, but other kinds of crimes as well. And there's something called the Psychopathy Checklist Revised, which is a 20-item scale which allows you to basically tick off the boxes as to whether or not people meet certain characteristics, and things like parasitic lifestyle, lack of empathy, lying, so being deceitful. But the more you have, the closer you get to the threshold. And there is a cut-off. There's like an official cut-off which also weirdly is different in Europe and the US. And so you need more tick boxes in some places than others. And everything below the threshold is called subclinical psychopathy. So that's probably too long an answer, but basically what you've got is you've got this threshold that you can meet and then you are officially labeled a psychopath. But even officially really only means it's a useful label given potentially to therapists but mostly to scholars really to understand how you can manage this person's risk.
So even given that, so psychopaths, you know, literal psychopaths are still living sort of normal lives, living amongst us. So in some cases even, [laughter] even, like aliens. So in some cases even very successful people meet these criteria, right?
Yeah. Oh yeah. There's lots of nonviolent psychopaths as well. So people with psychopathy are people who are less likely to have empathy, and that is one of the reasons they're more likely to engage in antisocial behavior. And so that can translate quite usefully into some contexts. For example, Robert Hare, who was one of the first people, who was the person who created the psychopathy checklist, the original version, he argued that there's quite a lot of people in corporate settings who would meet the criteria for psychopathy. And there was some early research on the fact that people in business schools, so people studying business at university as well, were scoring higher on subclinical psychopathy than people studying other fields like psychology. And so there's a little bit of evidence to suggest that that sort of cutthroat attitude, which is well in line with psychopathy, might actually be useful and adaptive in certain circumstances. And so what's important in many ways is that you understand the rules of society, and because you can't necessarily feel them. And so if I'm lacking empathy, right, if I don't feel bad when I hurt you, if it doesn't hurt me to hurt you, it makes it much easier for me to hurt you if I feel like that'll get me ahead in some way.
And so I need to instead understand that hurting you is bad and that that will lead to other negative consequences. And that's where the socialization comes in. That's where family environment, that's where school environment, that's where work environment, friends, family, that's where all that comes in to teach you: yes, but you shouldn't do that. Like, yes, you could do this, but you shouldn't be violent towards people. And so, that's where you get the nonviolent psychopaths. And you also get people who are what are self-identified as pro-social psychopaths. So, people who again don't have that empathy, but they choose to engage in pro-social behavior as a form of manipulation.
No, just, they're not all horrible people. [laughter]
So that's the other thing is again it's just that you're missing certain things that make it easier to be quote good in society, but you can still make the choice to not hurt people or to make people feel good and to help people.
Okay. So sort of based on that, one question that has come to my mind is that of negative intrusive thoughts. So this is really fascinating. So even, you know, normal, well-adjusted people might be, well, if there is such a thing, might be walking down the street and, you know, a parent comes walking alongside them carrying a pram, and for some reason into their head they just think, well, wouldn't it be interesting if I kicked that pram over? But of course the vast majority of people don't do that, but a lot of people do get these intrusive thoughts. You know, why?
Ooh, good question. So first of all, the difference I think between obviously someone who acts on an impulsive thought and someone who doesn't act on an impulsive thought is less likely to be related to things like psychopathy and it's more likely to be related to impulse control. And so that's also where if you look at prisons, I mean certainly when I was at university doing my degree in criminal psychology, one of the things that one of my professors would talk about all the time was that criminals are just bad decision makers. And specifically though, impulsive decision makers. And so the people who actually end up caught and in prison either do things so impulsively that it's so outrageously obvious that they've committed a crime, or they commit such horrible crimes which are obviously also bad in terms of getting caught, like murder, where you're going to get caught. And again, that is often, we think of murder as this like long planned thing, but almost always it's a fight that gets out of hand, which again is really a loss of control, if you want to put it in a sort of nicer way. And so someone who has low impulse control is much more likely to end up in prison. But intrusive thoughts are fascinating because not only do we have intrusive thoughts of harming people, some people have them every day. I mean, I probably have some version of an intrusive thought like that every day. And quite a lot of people also have murder fantasies, which are where they fantasize, as it sounds, about murdering people. And that can involve again sort of these spontaneous things like, you know, shoving someone in front of a train, you know, what would it feel like if, or I wish I could just, you know, launch my boss out the window when you're really frustrated. And maybe even picturing that because as you say, like your laughing is actually a correct indicator because I think that's what in people's minds is happening. And these fantasies, researchers have argued, are probably there so that we don't engage in that behavior because the difference between fantasizing about it and just doing it, as in being impulsive, is that one is in fact harmful and then carries really negative consequences. But fantasizing about it makes you realize that you don't want those consequences because if you play it through at all you go, "Oh no, no, I don't want what happens next." And so actually it is its own form of impulse control.
So another thing that a lot of people experience, and I'm kind of embarrassed to say this word as you're a German speaker, is Schadenfreude.
So, you know, what is that and, you know, why do we experience that, or some of us anyway experience that?
So Schadenfreude is a, I mean that depends on how you're experiencing it I guess. So the way that in German it's usually used is it's something that's relatively trivial. So someone trips but they don't actually get seriously injured and so you sort of enjoy the moment of that. You might also enjoy someone who, you know, is a competitor at work and you're maybe a bit envious of them and something negative happens to them, or like their book is a flop. I mean I'm an author so obviously I'm like, that rival's book sucks. You might have some Schadenfreude there where it feels like, yeah, it just makes you happy, I guess. And the reason for it is quite possibly because, well, for one, we do enjoy having obstacles being taken out of our way. And so the idea that like a competitor might be, you know, stopped can be pleasurable, but it's also in line with sort of a broader category of parodoxical displays of emotion. So when we for example have, you've probably been to a funeral where you've laughed instead of cried, or you're at something that's really awkward and again you giggle even though you're actually scared. You have these moments where your brain is outputting the opposite emotion of what you're actually feeling or manifesting with the opposite emotion. And one of the ideas behind why we react the opposite to what we feel like we should is sometimes that our brain is sort of overloaded with a certain feeling. And so it counterbalances it automatically. Now I've never found compelling neuroscientific evidence to say like exactly how that mechanism should work. But there's sort of an implicit idea there that too much of one thing can almost like overstimulate the brain and your brain guards against being damaged. And so it's like, ah, you're really, really sad, have a little bit of joy.
Yeah. So we mentioned true crime earlier. So let's have a look at this because this is really fascinating to me, the popularity of true crime. Not only fictional dramas but documentaries and fact-based dramas. So personally I can't, I just can't watch things like this. I'm far too sensitive to it. But they're enormously popular and yet like they're documenting and, you know, fictionalizing absolutely the worst aspect of humanity but they're so popular. So what's the appeal? Why are they so popular?
