Instant Genius - Why we need to rethink our concept of evil

Episode Date: February 2, 2026

If most of us are put on the spot and asked to name acts that we think would define a person as evil, it’s likely our minds would turn to murderers, rapists and war criminals, to name a few. But could it be that this commonly held conception of evil isn’t merely just an oversimplification, but rather a deeply flawed way of viewing the world based on a litany of personal biases, and one that is in dire need of readdressing? In this episode, we’re joined by Dr Julia Shaw, a broadcaster, best-selling author and psychologist based at University College London to talk about the nature of evil. She tells us why it’s vital that we accept that, given a certain set of circumstances, we’re all capable of committing terrible acts, explains the key differences between thought and action, and explains why so many of us are fascinated by true crime documentaries and dramas. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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I'm Jason Goodyear, commissioning editor at BBC Science Focus. If most of us were put on the spot and asked to name acts that we think would define a person as evil, it's likely our minds would turn to murderers, rapists and war criminals, to name a few. But could it be that this commonly held conception of evil isn't merely just an oversimplification, but rather a deeply flawed way of viewing the world that's in dire need of re-addressing?

In this episode, we're joined by Dr. Julius Shaw, a broadcaster, best-selling author, and psychologist based at University College London to talk about the nature of evil. She tells us why it's vital that we accept that given a certain set of circumstances, we're all capable of committing terrible acts, explains the key differences between thought and action,

and explains why so many of us are fascinated by true crime documentaries and dramas. Julia, welcome to the show. Thanks so much for joining us. Nice to see you. So today we're talking all about the concept of evil. So I bet if we went outside, stopped 100 people, and asked them what makes someone an evil person? They'd probably say it's murderers, rapists,

war criminals, etc. If we push them, the vast majority of them would say, well, of course they are because they've committed terrible acts. But that's not the way you see things, is it? You know, can you explain to us what you mean by that? So evil is a word that we use to other people. So we use it to create distance psychologically between ourselves and people who we think are capable of terrible things or have done terrible things.

And I think it's a word that we need to stop using. So then where does this tendency come from? And why do so many of us hold on to it so vehemently? The concept of evil. Yeah. Oh, I mean, you can trace it back to its religious connotations, of course, quite quickly, and continued religious connotations. But moving beyond that, you go to the societal construct, which is this idea that there are people who often are also seen as born evil or born bad, that there's something fundamentally wrong about those people that is different from you and I. us being, of course, the good citizens, good people, and them being these evil, bad people.

And that's, I think, why as a psychologist who works with offenders and who works in criminal justice settings, it's really important to me that we deconstruct what we mean when we say the word evil. Because usually it's a lazy out. It's saying, I don't want to try and understand why this person is actually doing the things they're doing. I'm just going to pretend that there's something fundamentally broken about them. And that is almost never true. And it's always unhelpful. So I think it probably varies from person to person.

But most people might say there's a threshold that we can cross here. You know, say we hear some news that there's a young man robbing old ladies. You probably think, oh, no, what a scumbag. But you wouldn't say that person's necessarily evil. Do you think there's a tipping point by which we divide acts from being simply bad or wrong to being evil? Well, subjectively and individually we do. And to some extent you're right,

I think there are some societal categories like child sex offenders, which is one of those categories. For a while, terrorists were very much talked about as evil, evil terrorists. And then, of course, you get people who commit atrocities like genocide or certain kinds of war crimes.

And those are the sort of obvious categories, whether or not that's useful, again, to use the word evil there, I would say not, because again, what you're doing is you're trying to glaze over the things that are actually interesting about how that person thinks or those kinds of people think and why they behave the way they do. So I think the threshold for evil is personal, but ultimately it ends up being a, am I capable of doing this thing? And if the answer is no, then that person is possible evil. If the answer is yes, then, oh, well, they've got their reasons. And so for me, I guess it's trying to expand who we consider, you know, like us.

And that's psychologically always important, I think. Also, because once we are able to dehumanize others by using words like evil to describe them, that's when we become capable, if you will, of evil, of terrible acts. Yes, this sort of binary thinking about this is almost baked into our language. Like we have the phrase pure evil. Like there's nothing good about that person or that. act, which is really fascinating, you know, why, why is that so appealing to people? I think it's appealing to people because we like to have this idea that we wouldn't be

capable of committing these atrocities. And so it's easier to say, this isn't, this isn't who I am. And so I have this, I don't know, separation. And we have been sold this. And so one of the things that I find most frustrating right now in true crime, because I do true crime presenting, but I always try to make sure it's evidence-based and that we counteract stereotypes. And one of the things I find really frustrating with some of the well-meaning narratives in true crime is that there's this idea that childhood

is the single most defining time of your life, which is, I mean, it's a little bit true, but not really. And it's a very psychoanalytic Freudian concept. So Sigmund Freud basically taught us all that the only time that really matters is your childhood. your sexual development in particular during your childhood. And it just sort of stuck. And that doesn't have to be true. I mean, yes, that's where lots of things happen, but also lots of things happen later, right? That can be life-defining, identity-defining, change your morality. And because of that, though,

when you watch true crime or read true crime, you will often have an expert who comes in and says, this person's childhood was like this. And it's usually what? The mother's fault, isn't it? So men kill people. Whose fault is it? The one. And I find that that also reinforces that idea that there's this born evil, that there's this fundamental thing wrong that you can no longer fix because the childhood is in that person's past. Yeah, so we'll go into true crime and things like that in a little bit. But I think we need to ask the question there that you sort of brought up.

Are we all capable of these sort of heinous acts? Yes. Yeah. And I think that's one of the main things that we need to realize and to have friend of mind all the time is that there is no us and them. We are all capable of terrible things, basically at all times, but especially when the circumstances align. And so if war breaks out, if you have deprivation, so something happens to you, you get injured,

someone else gets injured, you're in this sort of almost survival state, you can very quickly turn to very horrible acts. And we see it happen all the time. And that's important to acknowledge in yourself, because the only way that you're going to prevent yourself from going down that path and engaging in those acts is if you understand understand, especially when times are good, so when you're not faced with really hard decisions, how am I going to act when that happens? And so you have that mental planning and that's projecting yourself into the future and these potential choices you will have to make

so that you're able to make the right ones because you don't go in just assuming I'm a good person, so I will make good choices. Because that is not a given. So let's have a look at sort of character types then. So I bet if we say to somebody, you know, what sort of character type of person is most likely to commit, you know, in quotes, evil act. They'll say, well, it's quite obvious, isn't it? A psychopath? So, you know, it's obviously, the answer is obviously much subtle than that. So then what do we mean by psychopath? Clinically, what does that actually mean? So psychopath, first of all, is not a medical term in the way that it's often assumed to be. So, for example, you're not allowed to use a diagnosis or a label of psychopathy in British courtrooms.

So in an English court, you can't come in as an expert witness or as a therapist and say, this person is a diagnosed psychopath. Or in any case, it's not really relevant. And so you can say other things. So obviously mental health profiles are important, especially when we're talking also about sentencing. So what happens with a person once they found guilty? There's also the question around reality monitoring, which is do I understand what reality is and the consequences of my actions? So that's where we get into things like being not culpable by reason of insanity. And so that's when you might be exonerated or you might be sent to a mental health facility instead of to jail.

And so that's important. But psychopath as a term, it originally was developed as more of a scientific tool, really, to understand. people who are at particularly high risk of engaging in violence. So it's violence specifically, but other kinds of crimes as well. And there's something called the psychopathy checklist revised, which is a 20 item scale, which allows you to basically take off the boxes as to whether or not people meet certain characteristics and things like parasitic lifestyle, lack of empathy, lying, so being deceitful. But the more you have, the more, the closer you get to the threshold.

And there is a cutoff. There's like an official cutoff, which also weirdly is different in Europe and the U.S. And so different, so you need more tick boxes in some places than others. And everything below the threshold is called subclinical psychopathy. That's probably too long an answer. But basically what you've got is you've got this threshold that you can meet. And then you are officially labeled a psychopath, but even officially really only means it's a useful label given, potentially to therapists, but mostly to scholars really to understand

how you can manage this person's risk. So even given that, so psychopaths, you know, so literal psychopaths are still living sort of normal lives, living amongst us. So in some cases, even, even like aliens.

In some cases, even very successful people meet these criteria, right? Yeah. Oh yeah. There's lots of non-violent psychopaths as well. So people with psychopathy are people who are less likely to have empathy, and that is one of the reasons they're more likely to engage in antisocial behavior. And so that can translate quite usefully into some contexts. For example, Robert Hare, who was one of the first people,

who was the person who created the psychopathy checklist, the original version, he argued that there's quite a lot of people in corporate settings who would meet the criteria for psychopathy. And there was some early research on the fact that people in business schools, so people studying business at university as well, were scoring higher on subclinical psychopathy than people studying other fields like psychology. And so there's a little bit of evidence to suggest that that sort of cutthroat attitude, which is well in line with psychopathy might actually be useful and adaptive in certain circumstances. And so what's important in many ways is that you understand the rules. of society and because you can't necessarily feel them. And so if I'm lacking an empathy, right?

If I don't, if I don't feel bad when I hurt you, if it doesn't hurt me to hurt you, it makes it much easier for me to hurt you if I feel like that will get me ahead in some way. And so I need to instead understand that hurting you is bad and that that will lead to other negative consequence. And that's where the socialization comes in.

That's where family environment, that's where school environment, that's where work environment, friends, family, that's where all that comes in to teach you, yes, but you shouldn't do that. I guess you could do this, but you shouldn't be violent towards people. And so that's where you get the non-violent psychopaths. And you also get people who are what are self-identified as pro-social psychopaths. So people who, again, don't have that empathy, but they choose to engage in pro-social behavior.

As a form of manipulation? No, just not they're not all horrible people. So that's the other thing is, again, it's just that you're missing certain things that make it easier to be, quote, good in society. But you can still make the choice to not hurt people or to make people feel good and to help people. Okay. So sort of based on that, one question that has come to my mind is that of negative intrusive thoughts. So this is really fascinating. So even, you know, normal, well-adjusted people might be, well, if there is such a thing, might be walking down the street.

a parent comes walking alongside them carrying a pram and for some reason into their head they just think well wouldn't it be interesting i kicked that pram over but of course the vast majority of people don't do that but a lot of people do get these intrusive thoughts you know why oh good question um so first of all the difference i think between obviously someone who acts on an impulsive thought and someone who doesn't act on an impulsive thought is less like to be related to things like psychopathy and it's more likely to be related to impulse control. And so that's also where if you look at prisons, I mean, certainly when I was at university doing my degree in criminal psychology, one of the things that one of my professor would talk about

all the time was that criminals are just bad decision makers. And specifically, though, impulsive decision makers. And so the people who actually end up caught and in prison either do things so impulsively that it's so outrageously obvious that they've committed a crime or they commit such horrible crimes which are obviously also bad in terms of getting caught in your like murder where you're going to get caught and again that is often we think of murder as this like long planned thing but almost always it's a fight that gets out of hand which again is really a loss of control if you want to put it in a sort of nicer way and

And so someone who has low impulse control is much more likely to end up in prison. But intrusive thoughts are fascinating because not only do we have intrusive thoughts of harming people, some people have them every day. I mean, I probably have some version of an intrusive thought like that every day. And quite a lot of people also have murder fantasies, which are where they fantasize, as it sounds, about murdering people. And that can involve, again, sort of these spontaneous things, like, you know, shoving someone in front of a train. You know, what would it feel like if? Or, oh, I wish I could just, you know, launch my boss out the window when you're really frustrated. And maybe even picturing that because, as you say, like, your laughing is actually a correct indicator because I think that's what in people's minds is happening.

And these fantasies, researchers have argued, are probably there so that we don't engage in that behavior. Because the difference between fantasizing about it and just doing it as in being impulsive is that. is that one is in fact harmful and then carries really negative consequences. But fantasizing about it makes you realize that you don't want those consequences, because if you play it through at all, you go, oh, no, no, I don't want what happens next. And so actually it is its own form of impulse control. You're great at protecting your data, but lots of places could still expose you to identity theft. I thought it was safe.

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Visit focal powered by name.com for more information. So another thing that a lot of people experience, and I'm kind of embarrassed to say this word as you're a German speaker, is Schadenfreude. Mm-hmm. Pretty good, yeah. So, you know, what is that? And, you know, why do we experience that? Or some of us, anyway, experience that?

So schadenfreude is a, I mean, that depends on how you're experiencing it, I guess. So the way that in German it's usually used is it's something that's relatively trivial. So someone trips, but they don't actually get seriously injured. And so you sort of enjoy the moment of that. you might also enjoy someone who, you know, is a competitor at work and you may be a bit envious of them and something negative happens to them or like their book is a flop. I mean, I'm an author. So obviously I'm like, ha-ha, that rival's book sucks. You might have some shot in Frida there where it feels like, yeah, it just makes you happy, I guess. And the reason for it is quite

possibly because, well, for one, we do enjoy having obstacles being taken out of our way. And so the idea that like a competitor might be, you know, stopped can be pleasurable. But it's also in line with sort of a broader category of dimorphous displays of emotion. So when we, for example, have, you've probably been to a funeral where you've laughed instead of cried. Right. Or you're at a, something is really awkward. And again, you giggle even though you're actually scared. you have these moments where your brain is outputting the opposite emotion of what you're actually feeling or manifesting with the opposite emotion.

And one of the ideas behind why we react the opposite to what we feel like we should is sometimes that our brain is sort of overloaded with a certain feeling. And so it counterbalances it automatically. Now, I've never found compelling neuroscientific evidence to say it like exactly how that mechanism should work. But there's sort of an implicit idea there that two. much of one thing can almost like over-stimulate the brain and your brain guards against being damaged. And so it's like, ah, you're really, really sad. Have some, have a little bit of joy. Yeah. So we mentioned true crime earlier. So let's have a look at this because this is really fascinating to me, the popularity of true crime, not only fictional dramas, but documentaries and fact-based

dramas. So personally, I can't, I just can't watch things like this. I'm far too sensitive to it. But they're enormously popular. And yet, like, they're documenting and, you know, fictionalizing absolutely the worst aspect of humanity. But they're so popular. So what's the appeal? Why are they so popular? I think there's a bit of disaster tourism.

So that's when we go to visit disaster sites or sites of atrocity. And we sort of just enjoy the excitement, the feeling being part of. history that that sort of gawking at atrocity. I think there can be a little bit of that, that sensationalized rubbernecking that you get at accidents as well, right, where you have, but you really want to see what happened. Even though you in your head go, I don't want to see what happened with a car accident, for example. You still look because you almost feel compelled to do so. So I think there's a little bit of that, that disaster tourism, but psychologically. But I think even more, the fact that it's, I mean, it's mostly women who, who,

engage with true crime. And I think that's sometimes seen, it's sometimes weirdly gendered as this like, well, what does that mean about women or women like secretly dangerous? It's almost this like witchy undertone. Like what are they plotting? Or are they broken? Are they attracted to dangerous men? It's like, obviously not. We're just interested in psychology. And you also particularly want to be interested in psychology of people who behave in ways that are different than you. And guess who commits basically all crime, men? And so it makes. It makes, sense to me that women who are not committing these crimes, especially violent crimes, are, A, already interested in psychology more because of lots of reasons, but also that you would

want to particularly understand people who have this completely different experience of violence, of maleness. And so I think it's just an extension of what in society has manifested as a female disproportionate interest in the social sciences. Yeah, so as I mentioned, this is something that I find far too squeamish to watch. But recently, I don't know if you've ever heard of the story of D.B. Cooper. I mean, this is another reason why maybe women watch women. Women are just badasses. You say you're too squeamish to watch.

Yeah, yeah. Women are badasses, they can watch your grip. Sorry, you're going to say. Yeah, but I like other, so I recently heard about the story of D.B. Cooper. Okay. It's a criminal. And I don't know if you know. I don't know.

In the 1970s, he took a charter commercial aircraft plane. went on wearing like a business suit, very smart shoes. And once the plane was in the air, I said, sorry, you know, I've got a bomb on here. I'm going to blow this up unless you give me $200,000. And so eventually it came to being that he was given the $200,000. And then as the plane was flying somewhere in the north of the states, he, in his business suit and shoes,

put on a parachute and jumped off the plane in the middle of the night and was never found again. And I just thought, even though that's a crime and it's terrible, I just thought, what a badass. And, you know, I don't want him to be found. But, you know, that's my sort of version of that. But is there a sort of, do you think with these criminals, is there a certain, I don't want to say perverse, but sort of bizarre respect that we feel towards these people who just seem to do whatever they want? sometimes and there are murder groupies for example so there are women as well who having engaged with the true crime then meet people or see people who they take a fancy to and or take it sort of find interesting in some way and they write love letters or write letters to people in prisons and it's something that still happens I think it happens probably less than it used to but there's certainly that fascination with people who get away with things and who are able to outsmart the law, especially for some longer period of time. I think getting into a bar fight

and then getting caught immediately is probably not going to fall within that category. Yeah, that's not sexy. No, but being able to evade the law, I feel like there's the perceived cleverness to that, the outsmarting. And we value intelligence and we value skills, and that is a skillful thing to do. And so even though the reason for it is maybe perverse or bad, the circumstances can be interesting. Okay, so sticking with fictionalization and dramas, one interesting thing is the kind of depiction of evil people in movies and books, etc.

They always seem to have a certain kind of look or some certain qualities, which doesn't really align with the reality of the people that we see committing these terrible crimes. So where does that come from? I mean, the depressing answer to why fictional representations of people who commit murder, for example, are much more interesting and shiny and stereotypical in various ways.

The depressing answer to that is because pretty normal, often slightly sort of poor people, are committing those kinds of crimes. And so the reality is very much not shiny. It's impulsive decisions gone wrong. And so you don't have this planning handsome mastermind who's a psychopath. You don't have someone with, and this is the very cliche, shade negative depiction of people with disabilities, for example, which certainly was very prevalent when I was growing up, where the baddie was the person who had some visible disability, or looked different or had a walked differently. And so I think, or had a scar, right, disfigurements

were a big, big category for that. And that is in line with what psychologists call the devil effect. And so there's the halo effect and there's the devil effect. And the devil effect is when the assumption is that if you look good, you are good, and if you look bad, you are bad. And so it's also this almost like the idea that we should be able to tell. Like, I can just look at you and tell that you're a good person or not, which is nonsense, of course. But it's reinforced through fictional depictions of villains. And so you get either the like really shiny, attractive, incredibly manipulative, again, like psychopath, which is obviously a massive overgeneralization there, also because a lot of,

of people with psychopathy are not higher than average intelligence. They're not really suave intelligent people. They're normal or below average people. And so that is a stereotype there. But then there's, again, the other side of it, which is almost like villain who's trying to get revenge because societies mistreated them because they are unattractive or because they are whatever. And so you get those different kinds of stereotypes.

And then, of course, you get race stereotypes coming in as well. And during the war on terror, there was a lot of Muslims. tropes and those kinds of things. And so there is that creation of other. And the main thing that this other has to be, this evil person has to be, is to look not average. Because if they looked average, then we couldn't spot them and they could be us. And we can't have that. So let's sort of shift gears and come back into the real world then. So you mentioned the war on terror and things like that. So it seems to be that lots of sort of subgroups of people. are kind of pushed into this categorization of being, you know, evil or being monsters.

So where does that come from? And, you know, what makes it so pernicious? Well, it's perennially attractive to categorize people we don't like as evil. And we being, that's a very big we, that can be whatever it needs to be. And we can see this particularly in political contexts where there is a constant shift of who, if you will, the enemy is and accordingly who we, we, as in people in that nation, need to protect us our way of life from. And the rhetoric around evil

and the black and white thinking around evil is really helpful if you have a political motive because it allows you to say you go in or out. You're allowed in or you're not allowed in, right? You need to get kicked out of the country or you get a visa. You put up a wall or you don't. And so it's, it's in some ways, pragmatically really, you know, useful to have black and white divisions between who are we and who are they. But psychologically speaking, it's a line that just changes all the time.

And what I think is most frightening about it is that because of the fear-based narratives around evil and this idea that they, whoever they are, are coming to take things away from us, whether that's our way of life or our, I mean, the narratives of. of sexual violence are, of course, quite big often, or that they are going to take our resources, that they're going to take our women, and our children is another sort of catch-all. There's these fears that very quickly activate that protectiveness in us and that make us dehumanize other people very quickly. And what I worry about is that that is tapped in so easily and so quickly and that if we don't push back on the language, which this is why I'm so invested in not using the word evil, and pushing back and asking, what do you mean?

when you use that word whenever it falls. Because if you allow that kind of language to infiltrate your way of thinking and your politics and the way that the news covers categories or individuals, you end up falling into that kind of thinking and it can really damage the way the world works, I think. So having said that, are there any sort of techniques or strategies that we can employ to guard ourselves against these effects? The biggest things we can do are to engage,

our creative imagination. So the intrusive thoughts that we were speaking about, I would say lean in and think them through. Like think through situations where you would hurt others and the consequences of them. Because I think that makes you overall probably less likely to engage in them. That being said, if you start ruminating and you start like, all you can think about is hurting someone or yourself,

please talk to someone about these thoughts. But up to that point, I think overall it's helpful for us to go through the psychological moves of like what would it be like if. And that's true both for our own behavior but also for what society would look like or what would happen if we start using the word evil to describe all people of, you know, you're listening to a politician speak. What if we extended that? What if this talk about small boats?

What if this talk about refugees? This talk about whatever it is. And what if we took that to the extreme? What would that world look like? And so I think it's important for us to visualize also the catastrophic versions of that. And this is something. I really like science fiction. And so I'm used to looking into dystopias and utopias and constantly re-evaluating what society could be and making sure that we're preparing for the best but also the worst.

And so, yeah, that use of language, making sure that you yourself don't get lazy. So I find evil a lazy word. And that's why when people drop it, always ask, what do you mean by that? What exactly about it? What about that person do you mean by evil? and then you will find people almost always unraveling and they will come back to a point of humanity and then including in yourself

like if you ask stuff what is it I'm so angry at this person for or why am I so appalled by what this person has done ask yourself why what is it about that that is touching something in you because probably what you're going to find is if you keep pulling at that string it's a fear that you have about yourself and it's actually not about the other person So how about current times then now? What's the situation there? Are people committing more and more evil acts? Ooh, I mean, that depends on where you're talking about and what kind of acts. But if you look, for example, at the crime survey for England and Wales, which is not just police recorded statistics of crime, but also self-reported. So, you know, asking people in the general public, have you been attacked or have you been the victim of a crime this year? And if so, what crime? The thing that I find most interesting is that people,

often, this is a psychological phenomenon, that people basically always think that right now is the most dangerous time, and that is a really violent time, that there's a knife crime epidemic, that's really, it's really hard to be a woman right now, like all these things.

And they don't check the statistics, though. And so if you look at the crime survey for England and Wales, when do you think was statistically the most dangerous time to be alive? In England and Wales? In England and Wales. I'm going to go late 80s,

Late 80s. Oh, why? That seems to be where there was a lot of sports-related violence in my experience. So hooligans, you're thinking like sports hooligans? Yeah, football hooligans and things, yeah. So according to the Crime Survey for England and Wales, it's 1995. Oh. And it's interesting because you actually, you can see the graph and it goes up. And then it basically just like plummet.

And what? So my guess as to why 1995 it started to turn around is that the internet, became mainstream. And so the way that it displaced where we live our lives and also where we can commit crimes is quite radical. And I think that tracks with what quite a lot of criminologists also think that there's this change in who victims are, changing where crimes are being committed. But even if you look at what are called computer facilitated crimes, which is its own category

now, even those have been dropping because overall we're getting better at using the internet, So we're less scullible in some ways. And yes, things like AI are going to open of a whole new world of ways of offending and new categories of victims. But it's not violence. People are not getting attacked nearly at the same rights.

It's basically been a straight line down from 1985 to today. Thank you for listening to this episode of Instant Genius, brought you from the team behind BBC science focus. That was Dr. Julia Shaw. To discover more about the topics we've just discussed,

check out her book, Making Evil, the science behind humanity's dark side. If you liked what you just heard, then please do consider subscribing to InsinGenius on your preferred podcast platform. If you'd like to see our guests and hosts in person, then why not check out our YouTube channel, at Science Focus. The current issue of BBC Science Focus magazine is out now. Pick up a copy wherever you buy your favourite magazines, or download us on your app store of choice.

You can also find us on Apple News or unlikely as ScienceFocus. Focus.com. This podcast is sponsored by Name, Audio and Focal. The texture and emotional depth of music can be lost through digital sources or poor signal. Name Audio believes you can have digital precision with analog warmth. Alongside French acoustic specialist focal, name creates high-end audio systems combining innovation with craftsmanship, so you can listen to music, just as the artist intended.

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