Speaker
Julia Shaw
Appearances over time
1 episodes
Episodes
1
Podcasts
Quotes & moments
In Julia Shaw's PhD research, 70% of participants were led to believe they had committed a crime that never happened and confessed to it using suggestive interview techniques.
People who commit homicide have an extremely low recidivism rate of only 1–3%, making lengthy imprisonment a poor fit for societal risk reduction.
Research finds approximately 70% of men and more than 50% of women have at some point fantasized about killing someone, suggesting murder fantasies are a normal, adaptive phenomenon.
Alfred Kinsey's landmark postwar study found roughly half of men fell somewhere between exclusively heterosexual and exclusively homosexual on his 0–6 scale.
Today twice as many women identify as bisexual compared to men, a reversal of the pattern seen in mid-20th-century sexuality research.
Shaw's false memory protocol required only three interview sessions to convince the majority of participants they had committed a crime — demonstrating how quickly memory can be manipulated.
Volkswagen's defeat devices allowed diesel cars to emit nitrous oxides at up to 40 times the legal limit for a decade before the fraud was uncovered.
A recent UN climate survey found that 85–90% of people worldwide think about the climate crisis on a regular basis, contradicting the myth that climate concern is a minority view.
A study co-authored by Elizabeth Loftus found that AI-generated videos of yourself doing something make you significantly more likely to falsely believe the event actually happened.
When partners independently estimate what percentage of housework they each do, their totals reliably exceed 100%, showing how self-serving memory distortion is universal in relationships.
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.
Researchers find bisexual people are more likely to self-harm, be victims of sexual violence, be isolated, and be stalked — largely because they are least likely to be plugged into a supportive community.
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.
Serial killers are not born with a kill-switch. What many share is profound loneliness and a lack of social networks that perform 'reality monitoring' — the everyday checks that keep thoughts tethered to reality. Without that tether, dark ideation spirals unchecked toward violence.
The true leading cause of murder is embarrassingly mundane: a fight over $4, a stolen bike, a bad moment. Premeditated psychopaths are the exception, not the rule. Society obsesses over the dramatic edge case while ignoring the boring, preventable majority.
Society locks up murderers for decades, but murderers almost never re-offend (1–3% recidivism). The real recidivism risks are fraud, elder abuse, and sexual violence — crimes that get lighter sentences. If the goal is genuinely reducing harm, we've got our punishments backwards.
In the 1940s, Alfred Kinsey — a biologist who studied wasps — sold out auditoriums talking about human sexuality. His Kinsey Scale showed that roughly half of men are not exclusively heterosexual, demolishing the binary model of sexual orientation decades before the modern conversation began.
In just three interview sessions, Julia Shaw convinced 70% of participants they had assaulted someone or committed a crime as a teenager — events that never happened. The method used nothing more than leading questions, social reinforcement, and guided imagination. This is how innocent people end up in prison.
Generative AI systems are structured as social conversations — the same format that Shaw has spent decades studying for its power to distort memory. When AI tells you what you want to hear, it's running the same psychological playbook as a leading police interrogation. The result is a machine that quietly rewrites your sense of reality.
Close your eyes and picture a red apple. Most people see something. Julia Shaw sees black. She has aphantasia — the inability to form mental images — and only recently discovered it. It explains why memory palace techniques never worked for her, and may be more common among analytically-minded people than anyone realizes.
Julia Shaw almost became a painter. What redirected her was growing up with a father who had paranoid schizophrenia — someone who literally saw and heard a different reality. That destabilizing experience became the engine of her entire career: an obsession with what is real, across crime, memory, and human perception.
Volkswagen engineers knew exactly what nitrous oxides do to human lungs. They created a device to hide emissions 40 times the legal limit and lied about it for ten years. The psychology is not psychopathy — it's conformity, rationalization, and market pressure. This is how normal people commit massive crimes.
Around 70% of men and more than half of women have fantasized about killing someone. Far from being a warning sign, Shaw argues this is adaptive: mentally rehearsing the worst-case scenario is how the brain stress-tests its own moral limits and ultimately reinforces them.
The Tinder Swindler succeeded not because his victims were dumb but because he weaponized the most human desire of all: to be loved. Fraud doesn't exploit stupidity — it exploits hope. And there is a perfectly tailored version of the con for every one of us.
Jealousy feels like love, but it's actually a desire to control and possess. Research consistently shows jealousy is a precursor to intimate partner violence — and much of it is based on imagined threats, not real evidence. Shaw's view: persistent jealousy is almost always a red flag.
Analysis
What they talk about
- Science 33%
- Society & Culture 33%
- Health & Fitness 17%
- Technology 9%
- True Crime 8%
