Instant Genius - Dr Julia Shaw: Why do we do bad things?

Episode Date: September 7, 2020

Everyone does bad things. We know deep down are wrong, but we do them anyway. Sometimes, people do things so bad that we call them evil. Criminal psychologist Dr Julia Shaw says there’s no such thing as evil. In her book Making Evil, she argues that we should ditch the idea altogether, and try to understand so-called “evil” people. In this week’s episode of the Science Focus Podcast, she talks about psychopaths, mental illness and why we do bad things. Let us know what you think of the episode with a review or a comment wherever you listen to your podcasts. Subscribe to the Science Focus Podcast on these services: Acast, iTunes, Stitcher, RSS, Overcast Read the full transcription [this will open in a new window] This podcast was supported by brilliant.org, helping people build quantitative skills in maths, science, and computer science with fun and challenging interactive explorations. Listen to more episodes of the Science Focus Podcast: Jack Lewis: Sin and why we do the things we shouldn't ASMR science: are 'brain tingles' more than just a feeling? Jesse Bering: What can psychology tell us about suicide? Pete Etchells: Are video games good for us? Helen Russell: What does it mean to be happy? Gary Barker: What does it mean to be a man? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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and high-end materials, delivering digital precision with analog warmth. So you can experience exceptional sound at home. Music just as the artist intended. Visit name audio.com to learn more. There was a time when I was worried that I was a psychopath. Yeah, I don't know, but I got into my head when I was doing my PhD that maybe I am

because I can deal with this difficult subject matter and that I'm much more interested in the perpetrators rather than the victims of crime because I'm interested in what motivates people to do these bad things. And so I thought maybe it's me. You're listening to the Science Focus podcast from the BBC Science Focus magazine team with the UK's best-selling science and technology monthly,

available in print and in several digital formats throughout the world. Find out more at sciencefocus.com or look out for us in your app store. Hello, I'm Alexander McNamara, online editor at BBC Science Focus magazine. Whether we choose to recognise it or not, everyone does bad things. We know deep down inside that they're wrong, but we do them anyway. Sometimes people do bad things, and we call them evil. However, criminal psychologist Dr. Julia Shaw says there's no such thing as evil.

In her book Making Evil, she argues that we should ditch the idea altogether and try to understand the so-called evil people. In this week's episode of the Science Focus podcast, she talks to online assistant Sarah Rigby about psychopaths, mental illness and why we do bad things. First of all, can you please tell us a bit about your research? So I'm Dr. Julia Shaw and I'm a criminal psychologist at University College London. I do research on false memories and the science of evil and a little bit of research on bisexuality now. So your book is called Making Evil. What is Evil? So as far as I'm concerned, evil doesn't exist. So the reason it's called making evil is because

I like the Friedrich Nietzsche quote, thinking evil is making evil. And so to me, evil is at most useful as a subjective concept, maybe as a philosophical or religious one, but it basically has no place in science. And usually when we use the term evil, we use it specifically to dehumanize others and to justify atrocity against them. So stop using the word. Instead, try to understand why people do bad things and why those people could be you, why you could be those people. Why is evil subjective? Why is it a subjective concept? Well, I mean, for one, I think we all think of ourselves as good and other people as evil. We don't usually use this term to describe ourselves. And within this process, I think what that does is it allows us to do mental gymnastics,

whereby we justify bad behavior, because we all behave badly sometimes. I mean, whether that's, you know, eating meat, even though you think that that's probably ruining the planet and bad for animal welfare, or acting aggressively or violently towards people you love or towards strangers, whether that's being a troll online or worse. I mean, all of us have a gradient, if you will, of bad behavior that we exist on. And it doesn't take that, it takes less than I think we assume to push us into really, really bad behavior. So the term I use in my book, Making Evil, is the banality of murder, for example. So stolen a bit from Hannah Arendt, talked about the banality of evil. Is there really nothing that we can all universally agree on as being evil?

No. Nothing. And the reason is, I mean, the saying that I think fits best with this is one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter. I mean, it's, it really is a matter of perspective in terms of when and why we justify behavior. And the worst things we can think of at the time that people were committing them, presumably what wasn't going through their mind is I'm doing this because I'm a horrible person and I'm evil. They found some way in the moment to either say it was necessary, that it was some sort of necessary harm or that it was even justified, that it was on the side of good, right? That they're fighting. This is the whole point of if you feel like you're fighting evil. I mean, you can yourself in that moment feel like a bit of a superhero because you've dehumanized this individual or these individuals so much. far that you feel like you're doing almost God's work to get to destroy these people. So,

no, I think any act in and of itself, there's nothing that is always going to be evil. So why do humans like the concept of evil so much? Why do we apply it to so many people and actions? Because it's easy. I think because our brains are lazy because we like, and we've been sold this idea of black and white, good and bads. I mean, from little on children's books are all about, you know, the good protagonist, usually fighting some sort of evil. I mean, this is such a fundamental way of looking at the world that it takes quite a lot of effort to deconstruct it. And instead to look at people.

So, for example, for me, some of the people who I would consider the worst and who I struggle the most, empathize with are racists and people who behave in really sexist ways, people who, you know, take to the streets and shout white supremacy. That, to me, is so hard to not dehumanize. I mean, it's really easy to dehumanize those who we perceive to dehumanize others, right? So I basically hate them because they are dehumanizing other people. But in the process, I am dehumanizing them. And that's a problem. And so, and it's in those moments where we all feel like our hatred is justified, you need to take a step back and go, wait, but what am I doing in this moment? And what's happening here and what might go wrong if I take this to sort of conclusions in terms of where I might go without thinking?

And so just just taking it back, trying to see the humanity in every single person, no matter what they've done or are capable of, and trying to connect with them. and ultimately prevent harm, hopefully. Lofty goals. Just want to prevent evil. That's all I want to do. So the concept of evil is often in our minds are closely linked to the idea of sin. Do you think sin is a meaningful concept,

psychologically speaking? I'm an atheist. So for me, I think sin is a problematic term. This is even more so the case because, I mean, being an atheist would make me a sinner in many people's eyes. Being bisexual and being attracted, so being queer, being attracted to people of multiple genders would certainly make me a sinner, would even make me a criminal if I act on it in many parts of the world. I think that this concept might be useful for some people who believe in gods or gods, but I think, again, it is very easy to, to, to obey.

abuse that concept and to shame people into, you know, denying or hating parts of themselves. And it's, again, easy to then use that to justify atrocity towards people. So I'm very cautious with these kinds of extreme moralistic judgments that we sometimes place on other people or ourselves. We can sort of think of sin as a concept as a way of setting up as sort of, sort of of sets of rules of right and wrong, good things and bad things. So why do you think that we do things that we know are bad? Why do we do things that we know are bad? Why are we hypocrites? It is an excellent question. It is in some ways the core question that I wrestle with in making evil.

So, I mean, and in bad people and in our new podcast on BBC Sounds. Why do we do things that we know bads, partly because it's really hard to make good decisions all the time. And again, going back to something like eating meat, why do I eat meat? Because it's tasty and because it's easy. Because it's there. Most menus, most friends, most people eat meat. And so eating meat is easier than not eating meat. And I mean, this speaks volumes as to why it's important also to create ethical pathways that are default. In other ways, so in other words, making sure that the path of least resistance, is the path where often most likely to go in society is one that is ethically cogent and hopefully results in positive outcomes. So making vegan options default, for example, rather than the abnormal

choice, rather than something you have to go hunt for, making, you know, products that are created in really problematic underpaid horrible conditions, making that harder to access more expensive, not the cheapest, easiest option. And so those are some of the systemic issues that I think ultimately cumulatively lead to the greatest harm in the world. It's not, you know, my individual decision, whether I'm going to lie to my partner. That's not going to make huge amounts of impact on the world necessarily. But those kinds of systemic issues do. And then on larger issues, so when we talk about politics and political divisiveness and rhetoric that's used to get people to hate other people there as well, it's just making sure

that there's safeguards in place that make that harder to do. So make it harder to spread hate and easier to spread love. That sounds so cliche. But ultimately, I do think the world can just benefit from that. So let's talk about something that has a bit more of a precise scientific meaning psychopaths. So what precisely is a psychopaths? Ooh. So a psychopath is a term that's used by psychologists and it's usually refers to someone who's diagnosed as a psychopath and you are diagnosed as a psychopath when you meet a number of criteria on a checklist. And those criteria specifically include behavioral and sort of emotional pieces. So there's the psychology internal piece, and then there's the external piece in how people

behave. And the one that most psychologists are interested in, the piece of the whole construct of psychopathy, is the lack of empathy. So it's an inability to connect with others and feel others pain specifically, but also joy. The reason why that's relevant is that if you don't have any empathy, it's easier to hurt people, basically, in a nutshell. It doesn't mean you're going to hurt people, but it makes it easier because most of us, that's a deterrent for our behavior is if you're sad, I feel sad, I don't want to make you sad. But if I don't feel sad when you feel sad, that doesn't have any effect on me, and there have to be other barriers to my bad behavior. So, and in kids, we call it conduct disorder or callous and emotional traits. So,

It's also a term we use exclusively for adults, sometimes teenagers, and we don't use it for kids. We use different terms, and that's on purpose. So psychopathic kids, if it's used, don't actually exist. The closest are kids with callous and emotional traits, which again is this lack of empathy, low emotions. Are psychopaths born or are they made by their environment? Do we know? Is it? It's hard.

We don't really know. We know that callous unemotional traits, these childhood, this childhood sort of core piece of psychopathy. We know that kids display these at a very young age. So in infancy already, we can see callous and emotional traits. We can see, you know, increased rates of aggression, for example, behavior problems, sort of what you might call a difficult kid. That is sort of, that can go in the direction of psychopaths. So they can grow into psychopaths. But most don't.

So this is also what's interesting is that question. Quite a lot of it does seem to rely on socialization. And so if you end up growing in a pro-social household, you are more likely to then learn the rules of social behavior, for example, learn that this is a good way to behave, what good behavior is and what the benefits are that come with it. And that can overcome some of these callous and emotional traits and they can go away. And so most kids who have chaos and emotional traits do not grow up to become psychopaths. But as far as I know, as far as I understand, all psychopaths have callous and emotional traits,

has had chaos and emotional traits in childhood. So how can we tell if someone's a psychopath? Is it just this checklist? Or are there any other ways to determine if someone is a psychopath? I mean, people sometimes joke that an ex is a psychopath. Also, while we're here, while we're on this concept, don't use the term sociopath. It's just not a term that psychologists really use.

It's antiquated, was sort of the predecessor to psychopathy doesn't have the same backing. So please, help calling people sociopaths, as far as I'm concerned. Not a thing. Psychopaths, I mean, if someone is, so again, this call is unemotional, so it has low empathy. So if they don't cry when they're sad movies, if you don't see any signs that they're picking up the emotional cues that others are giving, that can be a problem. Then there's, if they're manipulative or deceitful, if they have a parasitic lifestyle. So maybe they, this person is known for moving in with

people really quickly and taking advantage of people. These are all the kinds of things that can fall into psychopathy. But here there's also a really interesting piece of it is that there is antisocial psychopaths, which is what we think of. We think of serial killers. We think of, if you will, bad people, the epitome in some ways of bad people. But there's also something called pro-social psychopaths. And those are people who have the same lack of empathy and some of these other affective pieces, but they don't act in an antisocial way. And that I think is really interesting. And that is usually what you're more likely to see in, for example, business settings. So maybe if your CEO is a bit of an asshole, might be a psychopath. Right. So you were saying

that there were some children who displayed these traits of pre-psychopathic traits, but then they grew up in pro-social household. they ended up all right. Is it possible that they actually turn into these sort of pro-social psychopaths and we just don't diagnose it? Yes, quite likely, in fact, I'd say. So there has been some neuroimaging research on children with calous and emotional traits and psychopaths, and there do seem to be some structural differences. So you can quite reliably tell the difference between a psychopathic brain and a non-psychopathic brain. However, even that, psychopathy is on a scale. We also sometimes talk about subclinical psychopathy, but just basically your high. or up or somewhere on the scale of psychopathy, but you don't meet the sort of go over the threshold,

which would make you give you that label of psychopath. So it's all on a scale. And so that matters as well in terms of how we talk about the construct. But yeah, I mean, if you're a kid and you grow up and your empathy might still be low, but if you know the rules and you choose to, you know, be pro-socialal psychopath. Right. Okay. So there's not, it's not like a sort of binary thing, either you're a psychopath or you're not, you can be sort of a bit psychopathic. You can be a bit psychopathic. So in the literature and according to, a psychologist would say you do need to meet a threshold. Although even there, there's disagreement. So the number of criteria you need to meet is different in North America and in Europe, which is also fascinating.

But yes, so everything else we would call subclinical psychopathy. So we would say you're not a psychopath, but you're high on psychopathic trait or you're a lot. on psychopathic traits. Is there any way to cure someone of psychopathy? Is that even a meaningful question? Not that we know of. Again, you could change behavior, perhaps, by changing incentives or convincing people

that acting well towards others is better for them and for society. That you could do, but it doesn't seem to be the case that you can teach empathy in terms of the way the brain functions. So you can't make the brain feel empathy if it doesn't have the capacity to do that.

And this is where psychopathy sometimes also taken in the same context as sort of autism spectrum disorder sometimes, where there's just a piece missing in terms of the emotional component that you probably can't get back, but you can do workarounds. Have you ever met a psychopath that you know of?

I probably have met psychopaths. I mean, the estimate is that about 1% of the population meets the criteria for psychopathy, which is a huge number. That being said, 1% is sort of the number that psychologists use when it's more than zero and probably quite low. So, I mean, it is a very rough estimate. But I've definitely met people who are very low empathy and who are quite manipulative. There was a time when I was worried that I was a psychopath. Yeah, I don't know. but I got into my head when I was doing my PhD that maybe I am because I can deal with this

difficult subject matter and that I'm much more interested in the perpetrators rather than the victims of crime because I'm interested in what motivates people to do these bad things. And so I thought maybe maybe it's me, but I think I might, so that I did psychopathy test as you then do as a psychologist. And it's actually the opposite. And I think this is what I'm constantly advocating for others as well, is to be more empathetic. So specifically, to intentionally and repeatedly put yourself in the shoes of others and to try and feel what they would have felt in those situations. Because that's how we reintroduce humanity into people who we often strip of it. And so, yeah, but I never worked with offenders directly. I work with the police, the military. I work with sort of the people who do

interviews and interrogations. I don't really work with offenders. Okay. So I think you've mentioned already that psychopaths aren't necessarily perpetrators of violent crime, is that right? Correct. Most aren't. So we usually think of violent criminals as being men, but obviously that's not always the case. So is there any sort of different profile that we would see if we were looking at a female violent criminal as opposed to a male violent criminal? Yeah, so this stereotype that men are violent offenders is correct in that the overwhelming majority of violent crime is perpetrated by men in the world, but also in the UK.

On top of that, most victims of violent crime are also men. This is sometimes, I think, something, maybe because of how true crime stories are chosen and the disproportionate number of true crime stories that represent a man-killing a woman, And I think make it feel like this is really common. It's really not. It's obviously all this is more common than it should be. But that's, you know, that's obviously all murder, if it was bad, within this, especially when it's not within a sort of war context,

in which case it's not murder anyway. That's off track. But yeah, with female violent offenders, we do see a bit of a different profile. But what's particularly fascinating to me is that it could still be anyone. So anyone is, we are all capable of violence. I mean, in some ways our species is built for it, thinking about sort of ancestral environments and how we had to fight each other. We had to hunt.

We had to, you know, there was a lot of tribal situations where we were fighting over resources. This is very much in our DNA to be able to do this. And, you know, desperate situations can lead to desperate reactions and behaviors. But the way we talk about female offenders is dramatically different to men. So with a woman, we often assume there must be some sort of mental health issue. We assume maybe she was controlled by a man, maybe, especially when we're talking about murder. The assumptions are almost always that it must have been some sort of man who forced this woman to murder someone. Or she was so desperate, which we don't talk that way about men as much.

We don't give them context. We just say, oh, bad man is a bad man and deserves to go to prison. with women is like, oh, something must have gone horribly wrong. They must have had a horrible childhood or must have been provoked. And I very much wish that we did that sort of contextualizing of behavior for both men and women and not just for women. And we didn't infantilize women and assume that they aren't capable of making terrible decisions all on their own. What about children?

What makes a child become violent? So for children, the callous and emotional traits sort of pre-psychopathic tendencies can certainly lead to worse decision-making when it comes to interpersonal situations and often come with sort of worse control over aggression and anger as well. So in that sense, that can contribute to bad situations and those bad situations can escalate. mirroring social situations. So we do know that although the cycle of violence, I'm always really keen to deconstruct the cycle of violence,

just like the cycle of abuse. So there's an assumption in, I think most people have this assumption, that people who are abused themselves in childhood are likely to abuse later in life, whether that's physical or sexual abuse. That is not the case. So that direction isn't true. So most kids who grow up in terrible situations

don't go on to become sort of the people that hated the most, that most of them, that's the last thing people want. And I think it can make people worried about what they might do if we sort of stereotype victims of violence, especially children who are victims of violence in the home. We need to be very careful that people don't sort of worry

about themselves in that way. But the other way around is true. So for children who act out, if you will, or behave badly, they are disproportionately from violent homes and other abusive situations. And in some ways, you could see they're mirroring that behavior that their parents are demonstrating. So later on as well, a disproportionate number of people who go on to engage in domestic violence were themselves in homes where domestic violence was a reality. But again, it's sort of one, it's almost like with psychopaths.

Like a lot of kids have callous unemotional traits, but don't become psychopaths, but all psychopaths had chaos and emotional traits. Right. The same with this, is that most people who go on to perpetrate violence in the home themselves. loves experienced violence in the home, but most people who experience violence, the home do not go on to perpetrate violence. Is that make sense? Yes, I see. Yeah. There's quite a stigma around mental health, as you talk about in your book, and people seem to worry a lot that people with mental illness are likely to be violent, and when, you know, when you hear on the news about something terrible that's happened, people always say the perpetrator was mentally ill. But

I've heard before that mentally ill people are more likely to be the victims of violent crime than the perpetrators. So is that true? Is there any link between mental illness and bad behavior or a violent crime? Yeah, so you're absolutely right that we need to be very careful in how we talk about and potentially stereotypes, specifically certain kinds of mental health issues. So for one, most people who have mental health concerns are more likely to be victims than perpetrators. of any kind of crime, but specifically violent crime, the only link, in fact, between any kind of mental illness are specific symptoms of specific conditions.

And so, for example, what are called threat control override symptoms, which are common to paranoid schizophrenia, that's the idea that you're hearing a voice, for example, that's telling you to do something, that's controlling you and your behavior and your thoughts. that specifically is related to an increased risk of perpetrating violence. However, that is really rare. And needless to say, most people who have mental health concerns are not paranoid schizophrenics. So this is such a tiny subset. And quite often if, and certainly if that's managed properly, then it's also no longer a threat in the same way.

But the abuse and the stereotyping and the harassment and discrimination that people who especially have visible mental health concerns, so people who behave in a way that makes it clear that they have mental health concerns, that they experience is astonishing and needs to change. Do you think the media's portrayal of people with mental illness has an effect on how we, we see mentally ill people and how we perceive them as potentially being violent? Sure. I think that there for a long time was a trope of sort of a mentally ill, perhaps also psychopathic, but often all at once, sometimes even with physical disabilities. So villains who had all of these things at once.

And I think it's served to create and reinforce stereotypes. I mean, on top of that, it was often people of color or people who are foreign. So it was sort of xenophobic, ablest. I mean, movie villains. Oh, man. I do feel like we've gotten a bit better, but it's still a huge issue. And it does serve it, especially if that's the only representation if you've seen a particular kind of mental illness or a particular kind of person, that is, of course, going to be what comes to mind when you then think of that mental illness and you think of these villains. And that's horrible. And that needs to change. And what about the media's portrayal of psychopaths? Do you think that's generally accurate or does it, you know, does it accentuate certain things or make them out to be worse than they are? So the media portrayal of psychopaths, I think, is, well, it depends. So some are pretty good in that they do help us understand, like Dexter, for example, which is a TV show about a, I mean a psychopath.

and you sort of see into his head a bit, and he has these sort of internal monologues. And I think that can help to illustrate some of the facets of psychopathy. But the fact that he is a serial killer does reinforce that link between psychopathy and crime, which is just overstated. It's not that it doesn't exist. It does, but it's hugely overstated. Okay. You mentioned earlier that you also research false memories.

What has that got to do with crime? So as a criminal psychologist, memory is really important to many cases. So in many cases, the only evidence you have or a really important piece of evidence is memory. And so someone's a witness's statement or a victim statement, a defendant's claim as to what happened or didn't happen, their possibly even confession. And so memory plays a central role in all of these pieces of the criminal justice process. And particularly interesting to me are autobiographical false memories. So rather than facts, they're memories of our lives.

So again, like a crime, like watching a situation unfold. And it's shocking how wrong people can get even highly important emotional events. And in my research, I've actually implanted complex false memories of committing crimes. I convinced participants that they committed crimes that never happens. And 70% of my sample confessed to these crimes. Wow. And then I showed these videos to people of them confessing, and people couldn't tell the difference between the same person recalling a false memory and a true memory. It's...

That's quite scary. It is. It has tremendous implications for the criminal justice system. And it just means that we need to be careful with memory evidence. It's not that it's always all false. It's just that it's very easy for errors to creep in, particularly through leading or suggestive interviews. Have you ever encountered any of these situations where false... memories have played a big part in a case? Yeah, so I work as an expert witness, and so I've probably worked on about 40 to 50 cases, and in these cases, the issue of memories

always raised, and it's often a question of, did this even happen? And I'd say about half the time I come back, because my role in the UK especially is to educate the court. Well, in the first instance, to give a report to the lawyer who has hired me, but then if I am to go to court, it's to educate the judge and jury. So I'm not there to, you know, prove a point. I'm there to look at the case and see, is this evidence good or not? And I say about half the time, I say there's nothing wrong with this memory evidence. So it's half the time that potentially is. The half the time there potentially is. Yeah. Or there just is in terms of how it was raised, the situation. Sometimes it's textbook false memory cases where someone had no recollection of something happening or it was

impossible until they went into therapy, for example. So I had a case where someone claimed that they were six months old and they remembered in vivid detail, an event that happened. And that's just not possible. That's not memory. You don't, it's not possible. Your memory cannot be formed of a complex memory that that lasts into adulthood at that age. And so those are easy ones. And then the question is, how does it happen? Imagination exercises, bad therapy, leading questions, basically is the answer to that, unfortunately. But it can have tragic consequences. for people who think that terrible things have happened to them and their families. How do you go about picking apart whether something was a real memory or a false memory?

So you can never be sure unless it's impossible. So again, these sort of before birth memories, definitely not real. Before the age of one, definitely not real. Later, I would say up to the age of five because we have something called partial childhood amnesia. again, most of them are going to be questionable or problematic, but then we get into it's possible to have memories. And then it matters more about how they were recalled. So to tell the difference between true memory and a false memory, you could rule out the ones

that are impossible. Easy. And then it's really a matter of just saying, looking for red flags. And so there's a number of things you can point at and say this was good or this didn't go well. And good is, you know, was spontaneously recalled. wasn't prompted by anyone else, basically, or wasn't prompted by leading questions. And then bad is, you know, memories that generally grow over time.

So someone who claims they did, I also hate the term repression. The concept of repression also in public consciousness is just, again, that's just not really how memory works as far as memory scientists are concerned. It's an antiquated notion of memory that Freud developed, which has mostly been debunked. So there's the idea that we can have had some sort of traumatic event, which we've just sort of suppressed and forgotten about until someone brings it back again. Yes. So it's the idea that our memories, yeah, are hidden from us. It's that our brains are intentionally hiding a traumatic memory from us. That you cannot recover until you either work through it or have some sort of therapy typically. And that's just a really problematic assumption and can land you in territory where it's just really unclear. or whether what you've allegedly recovered is in fact a real memory

or is just the product of leading and suggestive or hypnotic interview methods. Right. So does everyone have false memories or is this not just in the case of like people who've been to therapists and sort of dug this stuff up? Everybody has false memories.

I'm 100% sure of in the statement. I'm 100% sure that everybody has false memories and not just that, but most of our memories are mostly false. So by that I don't mean that you don't remember your life at all. It's more that memories programmed to remember what scientists called gist memory recollection. So we remember in general the gist of, as the name suggests, the gist of what happened. But memories and brains are very bad at remembering verbatim details, which are specific, precise details, like exactly what something looked like.

I mean, if you close your eyes right now and try to describe the room you are literally sitting in, you are going to make mistakes. I mean, it just speaks volumes as to what you are even working with to begin with, right? So attention and perception, all these things matter hugely. And that's as good as it's ever going to be. And it only gets more distorted and worse from there. And the amount of things we forget and try to fill in later is astonishing. So false memories are a common, normal, healthy part of the brain. They sound like a fault.

They are not. They're just the brain working with what it can do and trying to retain only important information rather than all the little details. And false memories, the way that I create them in the lab and look at them in court settings are the product of a creative recombining

of existing memory fragments. Now, the other term we have for that is creativity, intelligence, problem solving. I mean, we call this process, this flexibility of the brain. Basically, we call that, being human and it's so important and false memories are a byproduct of that creative process. So is there any way to avoid creating false memories, either of misremembering something that

did happen or accidentally inventing something that didn't? So there's two ways you can avoid false memories. One is recording the situation. So either filming it, taping it, or as soon as possible writing down what happened. So we all have, well, most of us have phones. And so, for example, taking a voice memo, writing a note. I mean, I do this for everything. So assume you're going to forget. That's advice number one from a memory scientist. Assume you're going to forget, no matter how important, no matter how emotional, assume you're going to forget. And write it down. So record it outside of your brain. So that's the main thing. The second thing is if you don't have that option, And so I was working, for example, with some military guys who were working with warlords.

And they couldn't just record their conversation with the warlords. They were interviewing. They were trying to figure out where potential conflict could arise because warlords might, well, go to war with each other. And so it was an intelligence gathering exercise. And they couldn't sit there with their microphone, you know, and say, hey, Mr. Warlord, who do you hate? And so hand it over and come back. And who else do you hate? and where do you think you're going to, you know, that doesn't happen. And so instead with them,

it's, again, try to not come out and debrief because there's also a temptation to tell your story immediately to other people who were maybe there as well. Instead, write it down as soon as you can. And again, keep it outside your brain and then maybe talk to others and see if you remember additional details, but always keep the original version that you remembered on your own first as well. So I guess both piece of advice are write it down. So the best plan is always to sort of get it out straight away. Get it out of your brain. Oh, yeah, sorry.

And then in the meantime, that's what I was going to say. So in these warlord situations, the best piece of advice, until you can write it down, until you can get it out of your brain, is to try and really pay attention to the situation and basically be really mindful and present because attention is, you know, step one to making memories. and then trying to notice weird things, notice how things are connected and relate to one another, and how information relates to other information. So trying to make sort of mental maps, basically.

And then write it down. So does the brain have any sort of processing speed on this? Because I find that sometimes if I've been having a sort of a long, info-heavy conversation, if I come out with it straight afterwards and try and tell someone what I was talking about, I find it really hard. I find that I have to sort of sit with it for 10 minutes or so until I can sort of put it all together.

Is, you know, would that help me remember it better or is that a bit weird? Yeah. So my advice is usually to record things immediately on your own so that you have that time to process. Also because as soon as you enter a social situation where you're telling the story to someone else, that person has the ability to contaminate how you're telling that story and they're in your memory of it. So this is the same thing that I advise the military guys working with warlords is do make sure that you have a sort of virgin memory that is yours only yours that you've taken the time to process and record. Okay. And also realizing that it doesn't need to be a sort of straight narrative line either.

That's not how original memories don't work that way. It's not sort of starting to finish in the straight line. You bounce around a bit and that's okay. Okay. Okay. see. So yeah, I've been listening to your podcast, Bad People, it's you and the comedian Sophie Hagan, and that's a true crime podcast, which is really popular, I think, in the podcast genre. Why is it, do you think, that we like true crime so much? Oh, man, this is the topic

of episode one. You're going to have to listen to that then. So true crime, why are we so fascinated by true crime. So confession, I don't really like true crime. I think the reason I, well, I didn't like true crime better yet. The reason I didn't like true crime is because I think quite often it is sensationalized and it sort of misses some of the really interesting pieces. So to me, the interesting pieces are why and not then someone's speculative guess. I want the science, I want the research, I want to know why these things happen and why people do these things. I don't necessarily need a colorful description of this person's childhood. So for me, the interest comes from the people who are engaging in bad behavior, especially very bad behavior, and why.

I think for most true crime fans, there's also a piece of it that is sort of, I mean, there's an argument that we don't have as much negative emotional arousal in our lives. So again, if we go back to sort of thinking of what our ancestral environment would have looked like, there would have been a lot of danger, a lot of threats. There would have been a lot of ups and downs. And this might be, so true crime, might be sort of looking for that in a safe way. So you're looking for that excitement if you want to go in a very raw sense of it. You're looking for that excitement. You're looking for being scared safely. But there is the interest in trying to get into the mind of those people.

And then third, there is the desire, I think, to build a. community. So there is also a huge true crime community. And I think that part of that community is the identity that we, as the true crime community, are interested in something that's a bit dark, a bit dark. And so that can be something that feels sort of exceptional or unusual about you and helps you connect with other people who are also interested in that. So on a fundamental level, it's, you know, we want to be excited. We want to understand people's deepest, darkest thoughts, and we want to build community. So now I've got one last question.

So you pose this as a thought experiment in the book, but you don't actually tell us your answer to the question, which is, would you kill baby Hitler? If it was certain that he would become Hitler, then, yes, I would kill baby Hitler. From your perspective as a psychologist, Is it certain? No, it's not.

So given that it's not certain, given that, you know, whether babies do not necessarily grow up into genocidal, genocidal dictators. But so maybe befriending him, maybe intervening, maybe, you know, setting him on a different path, maybe taking away the book on eugenics that he read, not letting him read that, all seem like better options than killing him. And there is a piece of me always with that question that wonders if Hitler wouldn't have been who he was, would there have been a version of him anyway? Because he did very much embody a lot of the sideguise. And I mean, it was troubling times.

And some of those thoughts are back. So I think we do need to constantly be on the lookout for xenophobic and evil. People who claim that other people are evil. Gotta watch over those people. That was Dr. Julia Shaw talking about her book Making Evil. Her podcast, Bad People, is available now on BBC Sounds. In this month's issue of BBC Science Focus magazine, we take a deep dive into the science behind immunity to COVID-19.

We also look at the plan to develop a garden in Martian soil and the weird world of sea through animals. As always, there's much, much more inside. And if you liked what you heard, please leave us a rating or a review wherever you listen to your podcasts. That's all from me. Turrah!

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