Quote · Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Where this was said
Dark Tetrad – Psychopathy, Narcissism, Machiavellianism, Sadism
At 12:41 · chapter starts 8:16
Shaw opens by defining the dark tetrad: psychopathy (low empathy, parasitic lifestyle, deceptiveness), sadism (pleasure in hurting others), narcissism (inflated self-view), and Machiavellianism (doing whatever it takes to get ahead). Crucially, every person scores somewhere on each trait — the goal is to understand where people fall on these continuums rather than sorting the world into monsters and non-monsters [1] — Julia Shaw "Evil is not a category you're in or out of. The dark tetrad traits — psychopathy, sadism, narcissism, Machiavellianism — each exist on a sp…" 08:43 . The 'baby Hitler' question becomes a vehicle to argue that nobody is born evil and that the environment is the primary shaper of dark behavior. Shaw is emphatic that the word 'evil' is dangerous — it ends conversations rather than starting them, and enables dehumanization that has historically made mass atrocities possible [2] — Julia Shaw "When we call somebody evil, we say this person is so different from me that I don't even need to bother trying to understand why they are c…" 12:41 . Lex and Shaw discuss dehumanization and deindividuation as the twin engines of war violence, and Shaw makes her case for 'evil empathy': understanding perpetrators not to excuse them but to prevent future harm. She addresses the Nietzsche concern (does gazing into the abyss corrupt you?) and describes how she maintains clinical detachment by treating each case as a puzzle. The chapter ends on the question of whether studying dark figures risks platforming them, and Shaw's nuanced take on how coverage of notorious criminals should be handled.
Evil is not a category you're in or out of. The dark tetrad traits — psychopathy, sadism, narcissism, Machiavellianism — each exist on a spectrum, and every person scores somewhere on all four. The monster-versus-good-person binary is a fiction that stops us from understanding how violence actually happens.
Would you kill baby Hitler? Julia Shaw says no — because people are not born evil. Even Hitler didn't display the worst of his traits in early life. Evil is not inherited; it manifests through environment, social context, and a cascade of choices and experiences.
Mass atrocity runs on two psychological fuels: dehumanization (the other side is not really human) and deindividuation (you lose yourself in the group). Remove either one and the machinery of mass violence stalls. Every war, every genocide, has required both.
Research by Albert Vrij and others shows that even experienced police officers are no better than chance at detecting lies, despite high confidence in their ability to do so.
