Instant Genius - Psychology of evil, with Dr Julia Shaw

Episode Date: October 17, 2021

Criminal psychologist Dr Julia Shaw tells us how false memories can sway a trial and whether evil truly exists. Once you’ve mastered the basics with Instant Genius, dive deeper with Instant Genius Extra, where you’ll find longer, richer discussions about the most exciting ideas in the world of science and technology. Only available on Apple Podcasts. Produced by the team behind BBC Science Focus Magazine. Visit our website: sciencefocus.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Music just as the artist intended. Visit name audio.com to learn more. Welcome to Instant Genius, a bite-sized mass class in podcast form. I'm Amy Barrett, editorial assistant at BBC Science Focus magazine. And in this week's episode, I talk to criminal psychologist Dr. Julia Shaw. She's the host of the true crime podcast, Bad People, on BBC Sounds with comedian Sophie Hagen. Julia tells me today everything I need to know about the psychology of crime, from how false memories can sway a trial to whether evil truly exists.

Hi, Julia, thank you for joining me today. We're going to be talking about evil. And I wonder if, you know, psychologically speaking, is there such a thing as evil? is, you know, can science determine what evil is? That's an excellent question. I am Dr. Julia Shaw. I'm a criminal psychologist and I am a research associate at UCL and I have written a book on evil.

So I try to disentangle this concept and to see whether there's a scientific foundation for this thing we call evil. And I think the answer is psychologically speaking, at least the answer I've come to is no, there's no such thing as evil in the scientific standpoint. There is, however, the perception of it. And so I think I'm really interested in what people see to be evil or how people perceive others as bad. And I think the way in which I think it's the most interesting to think about is that evil is something that other people are. So very few people think of themselves as evil.

Evil is reserved for this othering phenomenon as we talk about psychology. There's this outgroup, this villain over there. And what I think psychologists and criminal psychologists are often keen to do is to say, okay, well, how much of that do you have inside yourself? and how do you get from who you are right now to those perceived monsters? And do they exist at all? You know, as a criminal psychologist, what do you actually do? What does that kind of title involve? That's a good question.

So I am a researcher mostly, and at this point I also do a lot of popular science. And so I talk about criminal psychology, and I try to apply it to, well, to either cases. So in bad people, which is a podcast on BBC. sounds. Myself and Sophie Hagen, who's a comedian, we approach different cases that we find interesting. And I try to bring in research from just various fields, frankly. So that can include stuff from psychology, it can include stuff from other social sciences. It includes things about individuals behaving. So I hadn't psychology, right? So why do I have murder fantasies, for example? Or why am I violent? And so, what does violence actually mean? Or things about sexual

fantasies and, you know, at what point do we live out sexual fantasies and where are the lines around things like, you know, what's consent actually mean? And so I think that's interesting from a psychological standpoint. And then there's lots of legal stuff. Like what are human rights and what does the law say about this? And then there's ethical stuff and there's philosophical stuff, you know, how should we approach this? And in some ways, your question about evil fits into this, right? Is there such a thing? And so how do we deal with it? So that's part of what I do. But in terms of my academic work, I focus on the issue of false memory. And so that's how did my PhD in as well, which is I convince people that they committed crimes that never happened. Wow. And is that

something that anybody could be kind of tricked into thinking? Yeah, probably. So the research is, I mean, it's limited in that there hasn't, haven't been many studies doing sort of extreme autobiographical false memories. Mine's one of the few still. So there are, a few others who've done other kinds of emotional false memories. But there haven't been a huge number of studies. However, in practice, we see them a lot as well. So any lawyer you meet will be like, yeah, of course, false memory is important emotional events because we see them all the time. You see the facts of the case and you see evidence and you'll see what people say sometimes can be a completely different story. And it's not necessarily that they're lying to. It's that they have become to,

They've come to believe this completely alternate reality. And that can come from a malicious actor, like someone like me in a study, saying, you know, believe this thing, trying to convince you and manipulate you. I mean, fake news can have a rule on this as well, right? So trying to convince you and manipulate you of a reality that isn't true. And, but it can also come from yourself. You know, we have creative brains and we make connections between things that aren't supposed to be connected or that weren't connected in the original instance when we experience something. And so that's, yeah, so false memories is something I found really interesting because it touches on psychology, crime, and it touches on reality. Gosh. And, you know, if we say that evil is perhaps something that's subjective, how does that actually work when you're trying to, you know, uphold the law or trying to prosecute a criminal?

How does that subjectivity actually impact what the outcome is? Yeah, the quote I really like, and that is actually inspired the name of my book. So the book in the UK is called Making Evil. And that comes from a Nietzsche quote, which is that thinking evil is making evil. And it's this, it's sort of that it, if you will, sort of exists only in that, you know, once you've thought of it, it becomes this thing that can consume you, frankly, as, you know, in terms of like the sort of idea like witch hunts almost, sort of the like looking for someone, looking for this monster whom you've created. So the same with witches. Witches didn't exist. But yet, people hunted them and people killed people who they thought were witches. And those had real consequences. And so in that sense, evil existed. In terms of speaking of witch hunts and speaking of sort of hunting people, right, the police are often also looking for monsters or who they perceive to be monsters. And I've regularly, on a number of occasions, I have reprimanded police officers who I've worked with. So when I work on cases in sort of the real world, so not just in popular sites, I get hired as an expert usually to comment on the issue of memory.

And so that can be at various points. So that could be at the sort of before. So how do we interview this group of people? So let's say there's a big inquiry that's starting or a big, you know, you're about to interview 150 people about something that happened quite a long time ago. You need to structure your questions. You know, how to ask things that aren't leading, for example. How do you make sure the information you're getting as reliable as possible, at least not contaminated by the interviewers? And so I can help at that point. And that's often where you're ready to get people saying, you know, we're going to try and get these monsters, especially when we're talking about things, you know, like historic child sexual abuse, which are those are some of the cases that get involved in as an expert. And you need to remind people that you're at the stage where you're trying to figure out what's happened. So, A, you don't even know if, you know, whatever you have,

your mind is true and you don't know who those people necessarily are. Never mind calling people monsters. It's just, I mean, that's going to give you tunnel vision for sure. You've decided before you've even started gathering the evidence properly what this person is. And then, of course, in terms of once you're at trial, the same thing can happen, that people can be seen as monsters in a courtroom, including me, because I usually work for the defense. And so the sort of, you know, my role in some ways is undermining or questioning witnesses. And so, And of course, I do that in the sense that I go, you know, there's red flags here in terms of how this memory was recorded. I don't say someone, you know, it's true or it's not.

I can't say it's a true memory or false memory even. I can just say there's lots of red flags or there's no red flags. There's only a few red flags when it comes to how this memory was recalled. And yet, again, I can be the monster in that court case. So there's, I think in policing, the hunt for the bad guy or the bad human can be all-consuming and it can be misleading. And in the end, we need to be very careful not to call people monsters, no matter what we think they've done or what they've actually done. And how can that kind of language, you know, once a trial is going on, or especially on cases

that are in the media, how can that actually have an impact on the outcomes? Have you seen cases where this kind of language has influenced the sentencing? Yes, also because it can influence judges. So especially when there are high-profile cases. So I was asked to be an expert on something that I actually rejected because it was too high profile recently because I was worried about the consequence for my own career. And so this is me coming in as an outsider, never mind the people involved in this case. And there as well, there is so much media attention around this case. And everybody has already come to an opinion that it's going to be incredibly hard to find experts. It's going to be incredibly hard to find people who are willing to work on the case because you will be, like anyone who touches this case is going to, you know, gets media attention and unwanted attention and online trolls and all kinds of things. And in terms of sentencing and in terms of sort of deciding moral culpability,

you know, a jury is going to, finding a jury who doesn't have access to this constant barrage of, you know, of information that is obviously contaminating their view of these people is going to be incredibly difficult. And that threatens the course of justice because you want people who come in, you know, as neutral as possible really to make these kinds of. decisions. And judges, judges are humans too. And I, on bad people, we regularly discuss how annoyed I am with a judge calling someone in a judgment, like a monster or something. They use these words. And I'm just like, you should know better. That is not a legal construct. Could anyone commit or is anyone capable of doing serious crimes or is there something inherent

in some people that makes them more likely to do it? Anyone is capable. And that's something that I is really important to me to say over and over again is that I think everybody should assume that they're capable of basically any horrible crime however how likely you are to engage in it differs dramatically and what we want to do as human beings I think one of the reasons I'm so interested in talking about you know this thing we call evil and trying to deconstruct people we call monsters and trying to deconstruct these issues and bring in research is that I think we need to constantly be thinking about what we are capable of doing so that we can prevent it from happening. And I think the only way we can prevent ourselves from going and becoming, if you will, those monsters we fear,

is by recognizing that we have that potential in us and to sort of recognize when we start going on a dark path and we start dehumanizing others. And we start, you know, maybe having, behaving in ways that are more and more antisocial. We start doing, you know, you need to catch yourself. And sometimes you don't need many steps to get from, you know, where you are. are now to what you might call a bad person, but you might, once you get there, forget, not realize that you've arrived. So I think, so doing thought experiments and constantly thinking about, like, what could make me commit a horrible crime? So like, what could lead me to murder somebody, for example? And let's take self-defense out of it, right? That's not murder

anyway. So, you know, what could be those situations or what could be the situations where you might harass somebody or what could be the situations where you bully someone at work? Or what could be the situations? Because, again, we, those conversations we usually have about these other people over there. And obviously those other people are also people. And if everybody thinks that, then, well, that's, it's impossible. And so I think, yes, we're all capable, but no, not everyone's equally likely. And certainly things like your environment and, you know, poverty and upbringing and all manner of other things are relevant for whether you're likely to do terrible things.

And is there like a genetic element to the factors into that? There's been a search for what's called the e-gene. Evil gene. Scientists love this term too. It's a sexy term. Evil's a sexy term. It just carries so much weight with it, right? Everyone knows what you mean.

You mean something really, really bad, like almost more than or less than human. So the e-gene has been hunted for. And no, there's no e-gene. there's also been attempts to find in brain scans differences between, for example, psychopaths in prisons who have murdered people and to see whether we can distinguish the brain of a psychopath from a not psychopath. And there seems to be some merit to that. So it's a bit possible to do that.

So there's some research which supports that idea that yes, possibly, or maybe even probably, I would say people who are psychopaths and murderers have different looking at. brains and different functioning brains slightly than people who don't. But then again, we all have different functioning brains from one another. But there does think you something systematically different about also maybe the capacity to not really have the same kind of empathy as someone. So it makes it much easier to hurt people if you don't feel what they're feeling. And so with psychopaths, that's almost the idea of the sadistic psychopath is almost misguided in its core because a sadist enjoys someone else's pain. To do that, you need empathy. So,

I feel like with psychopaths, the problem is often that they don't feel what other people feel. So it's not a barrier as it is for most of us. So in that sense, I think empathy, so a physiological difference in empathy can make it more difficult to behave well. That doesn't mean you can't. So there's also prosocial psychopaths, for example. Can we see that before a person becomes a psychopath, if that's the right terminology, is there a way to intervene and help teach empathy or stop that path before it starts? Well, so the idea is with psychopathy is that most people are born with the, like, if you become a psychopath as an adult, you're probably born with that brain. And we see from usually quite a bit young age, the tendencies that are associated with that, especially when we're talking about sort of antisocial psychopsy. So if we're, you know, in kids, we don't, we don't call little kids psych path. We don't, genuinely, because psychologists are really worried about labeling and stigmatizing correctly because, you know, psychologists, we don't, you know, psychologists, done a lot of labeling and stigmatizing over the years. And we continue to do that to some extent.

And so I think it's good that we're conscious of that. But for little kids, we use things like conduct disorder we talk about. So if you hear your kid has conduct disorder or has callous and emotional traits, that should be real. If you bring your kid to a psychologist because you're, you know, you're struggling with their behavior or some, you know, maybe their teachers are struggling with their behavior. And then the psychologist comes back and says, oh, that's some really strong callous unemotional traits. That's code for, I think this might be, your child might be a psychopath. So watch for that. But the thing is that most kids who are said to have callous unemotional traits in childhood, if you will, grow out of them. And so you can see in the one direction, if, you know,

in a good environment, I think it does matter a lot. And, you know, teaching how to behave well and, you know, what, you know, maybe teaching the rules of pro-social living rather than relying on people feeling the rules and feeling the empathy, I think can really help. And so we see most of those kids don't go on to become diagnosed as psychopaths later on. But almost all psychopaths as adults, people with that kind of diagnosis, had calcium and emotional traits and childhood.

So you can see it in one direction, but not the other. And are there more occurrences of this now than there have been in the past? Are we getting more evil? I don't think so. I don't think so. I think if anything overall, I mean, certainly if we're comparing right now to human history, we seem to be less violent than most other points in history. We seem to have been slightly more violent again over the last couple decades.

But that was after a long period of a lot of war and a lot of killing and a lot of harm to one another. And even things like human rights, you know, I think the understanding has evolved around who should have what kind of rights, and including the rights of women, the rights of queer people. And I think that helps. So I think having frameworks in place that protect vulnerable people, including legal frameworks, encourages people to behave well because it also shows, like, we agree that this is important. And so that changes our mindset around harming others. And so I think in that sense, no, I don't think we've become more evil. I certainly don't think we've become more psychopathic. There's some research that suggests we're maybe becoming more narcissistic,

but I question whether maybe the term narcissist is a bit outdated in the way it's defined. Really? What's that? Oh, I, um, I, so because of things like social media, that obviously didn't exist when the concept of narcissism was first established. And I think that the way we live our lives now is very visual. And, and we share our face, frankly, a lot. And we share a lot of content and because of, you know, the democratization of the internet and knowledge sharing. And frankly, we can, we can share things in a way that absolutely were never possible before. And I think that in terms of the definition of narcissism, sort of a lot of that is inherently meets the definition of narcissism because you're sort of like elevating your own view and ideas

or trying to sort of scream them from, you know, the internet platforms. But I don't know that that's right. And so that's where I think that the concept sort of falls down of it. in that narcissism. I mean, and that's why it's sort of when you say everyone's becoming more narcissistic, it's like, well, yeah, with a sort of 1950s definition. Yeah, we need a 21st century. Yeah, and I wonder if what researchers would find

if they completely changed how they thought about the construct and questioned the construct itself and saw whether it was still relevant in terms of predicting negative outcomes. When we look at social media, especially, you know, recent crimes since the democratization of the internet, as you say, Has there been any pattern between access to the internet and social media and more crime? Well, there is, I mean, a cybercrime. So in that sense, yes.

There is, I mean, there's sort of, I think the term is technology facilitated crimes. Basically, the idea behind that is that there's certain crimes that you can only commit online. There's no equivalent in real life. Because, I mean, there's things that are equivalent, like stealing something. that's equivalent, because you could steal something in your life, you could steal something online. But then there's things like, you know, hacking into someone's social media that doesn't really have an offline equivalent. Because breaking into someone's house really isn't the same thing, is it?

And so, you know, or writing on their wall for them, you know, sharing things via someone's channel and hacking them that way. That doesn't, I mean, unless you consider sort of putting billboards up on someone's house outside, even that wouldn't have the same reach or the same impact, potentially. So I think in that sense it's interesting to think about cybercrime. And what's also interesting, from a psychological standpoint, is that psychologists have been incredibly bad. His, like, over the last 20 years, let's say, 30, but it's certainly since 1995 on the internet sort of went mainstream in actually accepting that. So criminologists and psychologists are only just, I would say, sort of waking up to cybercrime being crime and committed by human beings and not just sort of anonymous tech people.

and that the same kinds of things that might motivate crime offline might motivate crime online, but also that there might be differences and that we should absolutely take it seriously because it's the single largest type of crime at the moment. And it's likely to grow because we spend so much of our time online. Both perpetrators and victims are potential victims hang out there. And so there's likely to be a lot of it. And so when I was a, I mean, I finished university about, oh, how long is it goes now, 15 years ago? No, not yet. Not quite. My PhD I finished 10 years ago, is. I had, I'd never had a module on

cybercrime. Not one, not even one lecture on cybercrime. And I did like 10 years of university. So I think that is, that's changing. And there's a British Psychological Society cybercrime unit now as well, which I think will help. But it's amazing how we class. classify online stuff as somehow less evil or does not in the same category as other kinds of crime and that needs to change. And just the spaces that crop up in the internet that, you know, connect people that otherwise wouldn't before, that actually does lead to then in-person crime, like the spread of ideologies. And are we going to have the power at any point to prevent these kind of online communities actually taking real-world action?

Well, as you say, I think we also do need to be careful as sort of the real world versus online, because online is the real world. And so, you know, if you're harassed in person or online, that doesn't necessarily feel that different. It can feel worse because it can be harder to get away from someone online. So I think that you're right that some of those can transcend borders as well in terms of, you know, having real world impact. I mean, hacking hospitals is another example where if you shut down a hospital's server, you have real world implications in that. If you're shutting down functionality, people might die in the hospital, in the quote-unquote real world. I mean, this isn't an abstract thing that only happens online. The more and more we move things. You know, the internet of things is also this massively complicated thing now.

Never mind that we rely so heavily on computers and computer networks to organize our lives and our information. That is the real world now. I mean, it's not this other thing. And so I think they're becoming inextricably linked. But the question around the internet, I think, that worries me the most is the potential for dehumanization. I just think it's much easier to dehumanize others online. And we see differences on different platforms. I mean, even as users, I like Instagram, for example, much more than I like YouTube. YouTube is the worst.

I recently had a conversation about this with someone about YouTube comments. The amount of times I've had to shut down YouTube comments because people, just like pile on and say frankly illegal things about what they'd like to do to you, for example. You keep having to shut them down. But then on Instagram, and I think it's different because it feels more personal because you're sharing so much more of you. It's much harder, I think especially for someone who follows you to dehumanize you in the same way because they see so much more of your life. And so they see you as a human being, whereas if they just see a video of you or they just see a tweet, it's much easier to just be like, you know, this is the only thing about them.

And this person isn't really a full human being, or at least not thinking about them. So I'm worried about dehumanization online. But I think probably even that's getting better as we use more video calls, as we use more dynamic technologies as part of that. Thinking about the factors that lead to criminal acts, we've talked a little bit about sort of that there's not a genetic element. But in terms of the environmental, factors, you know, are there kind of patterns that we can see in terms of gender, race?

I say this, I mean, there is a genetic element in that we're all genetically predisposed for lots of things. And so in that sense, you know, your cluster of genes is going to matter and how likely you are to engage in various kinds of crime. So just to be clear, it's just not that there's this one thing that, let's say, if we could design or baby people and we could just like genetically modify them, yeah, we can't just like take out the e gene. So that's more what I'm trying to away from that. That doesn't, can't happen. Just like actually the gauging doesn't exist. Oh, that's a whole other conversation. But.

We took a little bit more episodes. Yeah, the researchers who brought us the gauging took it away recently, as did a number of their colleagues basically saying, actually, it's more complicated. It's not just one thing. So in terms of environments, certainly how many connections you have matters. So feeling supported, feeling like you have a network of people, and then who that network is. So if you have a network of people who engage in antisocial behavior, you might be more likely to do the same. And I mean, we see the same. We're just talking about the internet. The internet is a great, great sort of case study of this, where there's been lots of research done, and we've all

seen it happen in real life, in real life online. You know, pylons. You know, one person says something, and other members from that person's group start writing similar things and behaving really badly because they sort of feel justified in a group of their peers for people they perceive to be their peers. They might be bots, but we don't know. But people they perceive to be their peers. And so they'll sort of pile in and also behave in a similarly negative manner. And that can escalate as well. So I mean, the same thing is true in lots of human context.

So, yeah, environment matters a lot and things like poverty, systemic issues around, you know, how we see people as similar and give people resources to live their lives as, fully functioning human beings, that is a state issue as well. And it matters. And, and, things like access to guns. We had a whole episode on gun laws. In terms of the knowledge that you've gained, how do you actually put that into practice in in order to catch a criminal or rather to find out whether a person accused of doing a crime did actually do that crime? So the main thing, I think, from a police standpoint, is help helping police with psychology or research or just by chatting with them to not get into a state

of tunnel vision. So to remember, and we see this, we saw this with the Yorkshire Ripper, we saw this, we see this with basically every serial killer, is that at some point the police get kind of locked into someone who they think did it, or they get locked into the kind of person they think did it. And so they're convinced that this person has this kind of accent, for example, because of something they found, or in the Yorkshire Ripper's case, and misleading, piece of information that they were sent by someone who's tampering with basically playing a joke. That sort of hoax information is then taken on and the police get sort of pushed in that direction and they go all in. And so I think I think that's something that police are

aware of. It's not that police have absolutely no idea of anything, you know, from psychology. They're not stupid. Just that I think we all need to be reminded of this and it's even easier perhaps to get sucked into that kind of tunnel vision if someone's really hard to find. And you need to narrow it down somehow. And so it can be very easy to sort of start ignoring information that is just disconfirming your hypothesis. And to sort of be like, hey, actually, wait, this witness says something very different. And, oh, wait, but that, you know, maybe we should listen to this woman who said something completely different about the Yorkshire Ripper. That doesn't currently fit with our idea.

But maybe it does, right? And so how could it fit? So I think that's the main thing for police and not assuming that they can spot. lies. So again, the UK's a bit better than this than places like the US, but like human beings are bad at detecting lies and the same is true for police officers. And yet, I think sometimes because people feel like they're good at detecting lies, that can also make them make very bad decisions about who to trust and yeah, and what kind of information is correct. At least from police standpoint, I think that's, those are some of the things that we need to bring from

psychology towards catching criminals. And you mentioned the case of the Yorkshire Ripper. And actually it was obviously, you know, there was a lot of tunnel vision going on and kind of accepting things that confirmed pre-believed biases. But of course, you know, it was a case of there were women telling the police these things. And it was perhaps the women that weren't getting believed or listened to or, I mean, that must happen again. again. Yes, and we see it, so we see sexism policing, especially when it comes to, well, especially at the time of New Yorkshire Ripper, people who were seen as lesser. And so the people who were seen as lesser, in particular, were women who are sex workers. And I think that's something that socially,

we always need to question, sort of why do we perceive certain people to be sort of beneath other people? And we really need to tackle that. So sex workers, I mean, I mean, sex workers work, so, you know, pretending that these women are somehow lesser is itself hugely problematic, but it's certainly even more problematic when police and also dismiss their statements and just sort of say, ah, nah. Or dismiss the statements of women in general for various reasons. And I mean, we see similar kinds of things with other marginalized communities and people. And so, of course, issues of sexism are problem in policing as are issues of racism, of course. where, you know, the police have called themselves basically institutionally racist.

And that is, I mean, we're aware of that, as in the police are aware of that. But there's so much that needs to happen. And the main thing you need to happen in most industries, this is true in policing. It's also true in other industries that are dominated by certain kinds of people, is that you need to bring in people from those communities to be working with you. And so, you know, having black police officers, having female police officers, having female police officers, having detectives who are from various kinds of communities, is going to be, I think, one of the only ways to solve that.

But the problem is, if you're institutionally racist, why would, you know, a person of color join your organization? Why would you do that? And so it can be really difficult to shift that. And yet, it is currently undermining sort of police processes in terms of being able to catch people because it just don't have enough breadth of sort of perspective, I think, sometimes, never mind the ability to interview certain kinds of people who might be more willing to speak to someone who's more like them. Yes, that's a really good point. But from a psychological

standpoint, how does, you know, having more black police officers or having more gay police officers, how does that actually change the perhaps white police officers' minds? Well, for one, having those police officers there means that you don't necessarily have to change all the white people's minds because you just have, because if you're in charge, then you bring your perspective with you, whoever you are, and you bring your questions with you, and you bring your cultural sensitivities with you, and you bring that with you. And then in terms of sort of a carryover effect and sort of an institutional change, that then all your colleagues may be benefit as well, for one, from a contact hypothesis, so contact theory and psychology is this idea that basically

if you have contact with people from groups who you perceive to be different from yourself or members of those groups, then you are less likely to have prejudicial and stereotypical views. In other words, if you know people who are women or female police officers, then you're less likely to have sexist views, especially if you have lots of contact with them and it's positive contact. If you have contact with people who are Muslim, you're less likely to have prejudicial views about people who are Muslim because you know some of people from that community. And so in that sense, it's really important to sort of de-escalate stigma and prejudice

that, you know, police officers bring from outside of policing into policing. It's not that policing itself has made people this way necessarily. It's that they come from society, and society has these problems in terms of how we categorize people and think of people, and so they bring it with them. So I think the main thing is sort of shifting who's there, and who's making the rules. So again, it's the if you've got people, especially in leadership roles, who are from different kinds of communities, they are going to make different decisions to one another because they will have different things that are top of mind.

and that is going to impact policymaking. That is going to impact policing decisions. And that is going to have repel on effects. That makes the whole process better and hopefully more likely to catch people who are doing terrible things and to better deal with them once we have them. Which we'll probably talk about in our extra podcast episode in a bit. But finally, for this, can you tell me the three things that our listeners really need to know in order to understand the criminal mind?

Just three. The criminal mind. One, I think we all have, if you will, a criminal mind in the sense that we're all capable of committing horrible crimes. So there's nothing unique about offenders in that sense. Two, I think we need to stop calling people evil or calling people monsters because it's dehumanizing. And I think as soon as we start dehumanizing people, it makes it much easier to do terrible, terrible things against them. I think the world's worst crimes, including things like genocide, rely heavily on dehumanizing people. And so that should be prevented.

You know, should be like, number one, don't dehumanize people. No matter what they've done. And that can be difficult, but it's important. And then number three, be conscious of your reality. And that comes from a memory standpoint. So don't assume that all your memories are correct. because they're not. Don't assume that your beliefs are correct because they probably have things, parts of sexism and racism and classism and all these things. And your beliefs about who

maybe committed a crime, for example, as a police officer again, might also be biased. So don't allow yourself to get to tunnel vision based on your own beliefs and question your reality and how you got there. Thank you for listening to this episode of Instant Genius. That was criminal psychologist, Dr. Julia If you want to know more about the psychology of crime, do check out the podcast Bad People on BBC Sounds. Or to hear her tell me more about crime and punishment, head over to the Instant Genius Extra podcast. The October issue of BBC Science Focus magazine is out now. Do pick up a copy in store or visit sciencefocus.com.

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