Shaw, Julia

criminal psychologist; author of Evil, The Memory Illusion, Bi, and Green Crime

Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex

Lex Fridman Podcast · Oct 14, 2025

• criminal psychology
• dark tetrad
• serial killers
• false memory
• bisexuality
• BDSM
• monogamy
• environmental crime
• deception detection
• evil empathy

Core ideas

Shaw's organizing idea is that "evil" is not a category but a continuum: the Dark Tetrad (psychopathy, sadism, narcissism, Machiavellianism) are each scalar traits everyone possesses to some degree, and calling someone "evil" functions mainly as a conversation-ending act of dehumanization that lets the speaker avoid asking why the person actually did what they did. She argues nobody is born evil (using the "would you kill baby Hitler" thought experiment to illustrate that traits develop rather than being innate), and that genuine understanding requires "evil empathy" — extending empathy specifically to people whose acts we find most repellent, not to excuse them but because prevention requires understanding the actual psychological and social levers that produced the behavior. She links this to a broader claim that all humans are capable of the worst imaginable acts under the right conditions (citing research that ~70% of men and over 50% of women report having fantasized about killing someone), arguing that murder fantasies are a healthy "dress rehearsal" that lets people simulate consequences and choose not to act, and that cultivating a "heroic imagination" (deliberately imagining yourself intervening, per Philip Zimbardo, whose Stanford Prison Experiment she also discusses) is what actually inoculates people against sliding into complicity — whether as a bystander, a conforming citizen in a genocide, or a corporate employee going along with fraud.

On real crime patterns, she debunks the popular image of murder as calculated and psychopathological: most murders are unplanned overreactions to trivial disputes (owing someone money, a stolen bike), not premeditated acts by "master" villains, and this mismatch between the mundane cause and the catastrophic consequence — the "victimization gap" — is exactly why society gravitates toward more dramatic serial-killer narratives. She notes homicide recidivism is only 1–3%, arguing criminal justice systems are often "upside down": murderers (low reoffense risk) get the harshest sentences while fraud and sexual violence (high reoffense risk) are comparatively under-punished, and she favors restorative-justice models driven by what victims' families actually want. On serial killers specifically (using Robert Pickton, Jeffrey Dahmer as cases), she identifies chronic loneliness and the resulting collapse of "reality monitoring" — the lack of any social tether to check delusional or escalating thoughts against reality — as a recurring structural feature, alongside high scores on dark-tetrad traits. She also discusses lie detection research (police and lay people alike perform at chance despite high confidence, a finding she connects to jealousy, which she frames as almost always a red flag rooted in insecurity or control rather than love, and a documented precursor to intimate-partner violence) and fraud (using the "Tinder Swindler" case to argue victims are not "gullible" but ordinary people exploited via tailored narratives of love and urgency — a vulnerability she warns AI will make more efficient, not less).

On sexuality, Shaw — who publicly came out as bisexual within her book Evil — discusses the history of bisexuality research (Alfred Kinsey's scale, Fritz Klein's more granular grid spanning past/present/ideal identity, attraction, fantasy, and lifestyle), the specific stigma bisexual people face from both straight and gay communities (frequently framed as "a phase" or performative), and documented negative outcomes (higher self-harm, isolation, victimization) tied less to bisexuality itself than to lack of community belonging. She extends similar reasoning to kinks and BDSM, framing their appeal via the "disinhibition hypothesis" — both submissive and dominant roles offer relief from the burden of everyday decision-making and social performance — and stresses that "evil" and "kink" get culturally conflated in true-crime narratives despite having no causal relationship. The second half of the conversation covers her original false-memory research: in her widely-cited PhD study, using leading questions, an "imagination exercise," and manufactured rapport (a prior true memory established first), she got roughly 70% of participants to develop vivid, confident false memories of committing a crime (assault, theft) as teenagers that never happened — establishing that all autobiographical memory is reconstructive and gist-based rather than verbatim-accurate, a finding with direct implications for policing, therapy (she is critical of retroactive-trauma-hunting therapeutic styles), and — she argues at length — generative AI, which she calls "the ultimate false-memory machine" because chatbot interactions structurally resemble the same suggestive social exchanges that implant false memories, with almost no safeguards. She closes discussing Green Crime, her book applying criminal psychology (conformity, rationalization, diffusion of responsibility) to corporate and organized environmental crime (using VW's "Dieselgate" as a case study), and her company Spot, which uses a scripted, AI-administered version of the "cognitive interview" to help people record workplace incidents accurately and resist memory distortion.

Excerpts