Julia Shaw

What would I be thinking?

Who would I be with?

What would be my the group that I'm charging against this other person?

You know, who am I there with?

As you said, like really putting yourself in the shoes of these.

people who've done terrible things, that is how you also realize that you do not want those consequences.

And so, yeah, you maybe want to murder this person, but you don't really want to murder this person.

That's that intuitive sort of animalistic brain coming in.

But then, luckily, we have higher reasoning that goes, actually, if you think this through, that's a pretty terrible consequence for yourself.

So the better thing to do is not to murder this person.

So I think it's adaptive to be able to fantasize and think about these things.

Obviously, if you start getting to a point where you're ruminating and you're going in these circles where you're constantly fantasizing about doing dark things, especially to a specific person, I'd always advise seeing somebody to talk to a psychologist, for example, because that then does become a risk factor for acting on those dark fantasies.

But up to that point, if it's just a fleeting thought or something that sort of in one day you have these thoughts, that is totally healthy, I would say.

Yes, it's also been called the heroic imagination.

So someone who has studied evil, quote-unquote, at length is called Philip Zimbardo.

He did the Stanford Prison Experiment, and that was an experiment which has now been torn apart in various ways.

It was absolutely influential for psychology.

It's where participants were randomly assigned whether they would be prisoners or guards in a mock prison experiment.

And then for a number of days, they were told to...

do various things and it got out of control and the guards went way over what they were supposed to be doing and they effectively started pseudo-torturing some of these inmates or these pretend inmates and the whole thing had to be stopped prematurely but it was really fundamental in showing how just by randomly being assigned into guard the person in charge or inmate you can within a matter of days have a completely different way of thinking about one another