The biggest misconception about psychopaths definitely is that they're all really clever. That is not true. You almost always see that they have a below average IQ. Yes, they're manipulative, but they're often also quite bad at being manipulative.
I'm Dr. Julia Shaw. I'm a criminal psychologist and expert witness on the topic of memory, and I am here to answer questions from the honesty box.
First question: what do criminal psychologists actually do? Well, it depends on the kind of criminal psychologist, but I work with police and on the investigation side, and I'm an expert witness. In other words, what I do is I look at criminal cases, specifically at witness evidence, and I evaluate whether or not leading or suggestive questions were asked by police along the way. So the question really is whether a specific memory is reliable and how it should be regarded by a jury during a court case. So that's what I do as a criminal psychologist, but there are other criminal psychologists who work in prisons or who do research or who do other things. It just really depends on where in the world you are and what it is you're interested in doing.
Why did you want to spend your career studying murderers? I am interested in why people do terrible things. I'm interested in the darkest sides of humanity. And murder for many people is the worst thing they can imagine, or one of the worst things they can imagine somebody else doing. The thing that I find interesting isn't just this idea that there's these murderers over here who are totally different from us, but how every one of us can move towards becoming a murderer ourselves. So, what makes me capable of doing the worst thing I can possibly imagine? So, that's why I'm interested in studying murderers.
What skills do you need to be a good criminal psychologist? You need humor. That's the main thing I would say. I think to be a good criminal psychologist, you need to understand that the stuff you're going to be dealing with, basically no matter which kind of criminal psychologist you are, is going to be really dark. There are certain kinds of murders and certain kinds of crimes, especially involving women as victims, where I really go and I go, 'This is the worst thing I can imagine for myself.' And to get through that and to get through the video footage, the skill is both having some humor, being able to make some pretty dark jokes when you're reviewing dark cases as a way of sort of coping with them, and also being able to say this is like a puzzle I'm trying to solve. Yes, there are real people involved, but ultimately I need to take one step back and I need to look at the bigger picture.
Are people born evil? No. I say no because there are two reasons. One is that I don't like the word evil for human beings. I think that that is a terrible and dehumanizing word. That almost always is the end of a conversation rather than the beginning of a really important conversation we need to be having. The other thing is that the idea that you could somehow be born with almost like this sin — it's almost a religious idea that you're brought into this world and you already carry this evil within you. And so ultimately it's just about trying to stop people from revealing their inner evil, or I don't know, it just really underestimates the role of environment and society and values and what else is going on in the world at that point. So I think people are capable of terrible things, and some people with some brains, like people who are lower on empathy, like people who are higher on sadism, are more likely to hurt people and not to make them feel bad, but beyond that, what they do with that is entirely dependent on everything else. So no, people are not born evil, and I think we should stop using the term evil to describe human beings.
Does everybody have the capacity to kill? It's something that I get asked all the time, right? Why did this person kill, and do I as an individual have the capacity to do the same thing? And the short answer is I think everybody does have the capacity, but not everyone has the capacity right now. So I don't think for me today, I think it's unlikely that I will be capable of killing somebody, certainly of murdering someone who isn't attacking me. But if I add a couple of risk factors in, things like suddenly maybe I've lost my job, maybe I'm suffering with poverty, maybe I get into drugs, maybe I meet some new friends who are making bad choices, maybe I get really bad at anger management because my life is starting to feel more complicated and I'm making more rash and more angry decisions. And so murder in particular is almost always because of a fight that gets out of control. It's not very common that someone like on TV is sort of sharpening their knives or polishing their guns waiting to kill a specific person. That's not really a thing that happens. And so it's that anger management, it's that mental health, it's the ability to work through struggles that matters more. So if those struggles enter your life, my life, I think yes, I am capable of killing people, and so are you.
What is a false memory? Oh, so I study false memories, and false memories are memories of things that never actually happened. So a false memory is when we have either partially changed a memory or we have completely misremembered something. False memories are incredibly common. The question is not just whether memories can be false, but how false are they? So every single memory you've ever had is at least partially false. And the question is, but is it false in a way that matters? Is it false in a way that is legally relevant? So if I misremember being the victim of a crime, or if I misremember being the perpetrator of a crime, or misremember witnessing — so I identify the wrong person. So I watched a heist maybe at a museum stealing big jewels with a ladder. Maybe I witnessed that and I point at someone and I identify the wrong person, but because I think that I saw them, because I think I remember it, that can obviously lead to a wrongful conviction. And so false memories can be particularly harmful in a criminal justice context, but they can also be harmful on a personal level. So if you misremember something that your partner did or your friends did, that can have negative impact because the other person goes, 'That's not true.' They can also have positive ones. And so you can also misremember things in a rosier way than they actually happened. So thinking that they were better than they actually were. And that's something that a lot of us do is that we look at our own lives, for example, with a slightly rosy reminiscence bias where we look back and things are slightly happier than they actually were. But that's probably a good thing from an evolutionary standpoint that mostly we think we had great lives even if our lives were quite hard.
How can I spot a narcissist? Oh, this is one of my favorites. So, a narcissist. People love this term right now, don't they? Narcissist. Oh, my mom's a narcissist. My therapist — even your therapist can be a narcissist. Your ex. It's almost always an ex for women is a narcissist. One of my favorite series of research studies is on narcissism, and research has basically tested various scales. So in psychology, what you often do is you develop questionnaires to try and standardize how we talk about diagnosis. And so narcissism is a personality disorder. And so you want to make sure that you're asking specific kinds of questions and seeing how people respond to see if they are in fact a narcissist. And so psychologists tried with 20 questions, and they're like, 'Well, you know, let's see if this works.' And then they tried 15 questions. They're like, 'Wait, actually, why don't we try one question?' And they developed what's called the single item narcissism scale, which is literally just the question, 'Are you a narcissist?' which was as predictive of whether people are narcissists as 20 or 30 items. And I think that is really funny.
And I also think it could potentially be useful. How do you spot a narcissist? Ask them. A narcissist would probably answer to this question: 'Are you a narcissist?' 'Uh, yeah, but like I am better than most people.' It's a realistic appraisal of myself because that's what narcissism is, right? It's that overconfidence. It's that thinking you're great and thinking you're better than you actually are.
I think part of it is a broader move to use therapeutic language in everyday contexts. And I think we need to be incredibly careful with that. Partly because it devalues the terms like narcissist in contexts that matter, like in criminal context. It's not useful because you're just angry at somebody in real life, in normal sort of everyday life. So I think we need to be incredibly careful not to use this therapeutic language in this really casual, overly confident, inaccurate way because it takes away from context where it really matters.
Are women or men more likely to be evil? Well, I think neither are evil because I don't like the term evil, but certainly in terms of crime, I mean, almost all crime is perpetrated by men and the victims are most likely to be men. So I think there it's pretty clear that there's a gender issue going on in terms of crime and rulebreaking and anger, and especially violent crimes, but all kinds of crimes really.
What is the biggest misconception people have about psychopaths? So I think one of the biggest misconceptions is that everybody who's murdered is a psychopath. Not true. The biggest misconception about psychopaths definitely is that they're all really clever. That is not true. So if you look at the people who have a diagnosis of psychopathy, you almost always see that they have a below average IQ. There's no such thing as this like psychopath who on average is just really clever and really manipulative. Yes, they're manipulative, but they're often also quite bad at being manipulative, and they're not manipulative in a clever way necessarily. So I think we need to stop thinking that psychopaths are really clever, intelligent geniuses, because most of them are not.
Can a bad childhood make a murderer? No. A bad childhood does not make someone kill people. A bad childhood can make people more vulnerable to other stressors in life. So, for example, if you lose your job, if you are in poverty, if you are addicted to substances, it can predispose you to being less good at dealing with stress. And it can also potentially give you bad ways of thinking about the world in terms of, for example, copying the things that your parents did, if your parents harmed each other or harmed you. Most people with bad childhoods don't go on to commit crimes, which is really important to say repeatedly, but having a bad childhood is more common amongst people who have committed crimes, including murder. So, it doesn't cause the murder, but it does present a risk factor overall for not dealing as well with society and with just interactions between people.
Do murderers ever feel guilty for killing? Basically always. So, something that doesn't get talked about very often is that not only do murderers typically feel guilty for killing people, which you kind of think is obvious — like even if you thought it was justified, even if you thought the person deserved to die, that doesn't mean that you don't feel guilty about the fact that you committed this crime. So, yes, most people who murder do feel guilty. The other thing that can happen, which happens really often, is offense related post-traumatic stress. Someone who has killed somebody else almost always has offense related flashbacks. They have intrusive thoughts. And I'm not saying that we need to sit here and go, 'Oh, good pity party for the offenders.' No. But it is a factor and it ties in with this whole remorse and guilt and this loss that offenders also have from the crimes that they themselves commit.
Why do we find it hard to believe good-looking people are evil? Because of something called the halo effect, which is that we think good-looking people are good.
