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

Julia Shaw replaces the division between monsters and ordinary people with four dimensions: psychopathy, sadism, narcissism and Machiavellianism. Sadism concerns pleasure in another's pain; Machiavellianism instrumental advancement; narcissism superiority and excessive self-regard. Her account of psychopathy includes low empathy, deception and a parasitic lifestyle. People can score differently across these dimensions, and a related trait need not meet a clinical threshold. High scores across all four indicate greater likelihood of harm in her account, rather than establishing that every person with a trait commits crimes.

The question of killing Hitler as a baby tests whether harmful adulthood is treated as destiny. Shaw says no: she does not see a straight line from infancy to the adult, and says his early life did not display many later defining traits. This is her developmental interpretation, not evidence that upbringing alone explains him. More broadly, she resists calling people evil because the label can end inquiry and license mistreatment: the speaker imagines an absolute difference between a good self and a fundamentally alien offender.

Fridman's example is war, where opposing sides can each portray their violence as a struggle of good against evil. Shaw adds de-individuation to dehumanization: identification with a group can dissolve individual responsibility while supplying a feeling of moral legitimacy. Neither mechanism establishes which side is right in a particular conflict. They explain how the experience of righteousness can coexist with grave harm.

Shaw's defense of empathy is practical. In sexual abuse, rape and murder cases, naming an offender evil does not identify the psychological and social conditions that enabled the behavior. Understanding those conditions may help prevent repetition. She distinguishes that inquiry from merely attaching a label. Fridman raises a difficulty for public interviews: capable storytellers can present themselves as good and misunderstood. Shaw replies that even a controlled or self-exculpatory narrative can reveal patterns of rationalization.

Claims that everybody does it, that somebody else would have done it, or that one's own contribution was small diminish agency. Shaw connects them to an ordinary human reluctance to admit wrongdoing. Context can contain real explanatory information without removing the obligation to stop harmful conduct. She also warns against trusting an intuitive impression of creepiness: apparent strangeness and deviation from social expectations need not identify danger. These are reasons to examine behavior and evidence rather than infer a person's moral nature from a face.

Shaw describes physical distancing from a person known to have severe mental illness, including a waiting-room study in which people choose more distant seats. Her point is about perceived unpredictability: behavior that violates expectations can be mistaken for danger. She does not treat mental illness in general as evidence of violence. Similarly, attractiveness can interact with trust rather than furnish a simple rule that an attractive person never seems creepy.

She extends the warning to lie detection. Investigative experience can produce confidence that a witness or suspect is lying without producing corresponding accuracy in experiments. Overconfidence risks both missing deception and targeting an innocent person. In relationships, uncertainty and assumptions about what a partner thinks can become an unreliable private lie detector. These examples concern the limits of intuition, not a claim that particular allegations must be false.

Psychopathy complicates intervention because some people may imitate good behavior or empathy. Shaw mentions concern that empathy-focused treatment could teach better performance rather than concern for others. She contrasts this with Jennifer Skeem's tailored programs, which teach social rules and present prosocial behavior as a better means of pursuing goals. The proposed distinction is between demanding an emotion and changing incentives and conduct; no success rate is supplied here.