Julia Shaw

So if someone can destroy others, torture others, hurt others, I work as a criminal psychologist, so I work a lot on...

sexual abuse cases, on rape cases, on murder trials.

And so in those contexts, that word evil is used all the time to go, this person is evil.

And if we're doing that, then we need to go, okay, but what we actually want is we don't really just want to label people.

We want to stop that behavior from happening.

And the only way we're going to do that is if we understand what

led that person to come to that situation and to engage in that behavior.

And so that's why evil empathy, I think, is crucial, because ultimately what we want is to make society safer.

And the only way we can do that is to understand the psychological and social levers that led them to engage in this behavior in the first place.

I think it's important to speak with people whom we or who a lot of people dehumanize, including myself.

I mean, I also speak with people who I think are or have I know have committed terrible crimes.

And I have spoken to these people because as a criminal psychologist, that's often part of my job.

So what's interesting, I think, when you're speaking to people who have committed really terrible crimes or certainly who've been convicted of terrible crimes, is that not only is it potentially insightful because they might give you a real answer and not just a controlled narrative about why they committed these crimes.

If they are either maintaining their innocence or they're more reluctant to do that, I think even the narrative that they are controlling, that they're being very careful with, still tells us a lot about them.

So I think certainly my research on environmental crime as well, what we see is that people use a lot of rationalization and they say things like, well, everybody's doing it.

And if I hadn't done this first, somebody else would have done this waste crime or this other kind of crime.

And so there's this rationalization, there's this normalization, there's this diminishing of your own role and agency.

And that still tells us a lot about the psychology of people who commit crimes, because most of us

are very bad at saying sorry and saying i messed this up and i shouldn't have done that and instead what our brains do is they try to make us feel better and they go no you're still a good person despite this one thing and so we try to rationalize it we try to excuse it we try to explain it and there is some truth to it as well because we know the reasons why we engage in that behavior and other people don't have the whole context so we also do have more of the whole story

But on the other hand, we need to also face the fact that sometimes we do terrible things and we need to stop doing those terrible things and prevent other people from doing the same.