Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex | Lex Fridman Podcast #483

We all have the capacity to kill people and murder people and do other terrible things. The question is why we don't do those things rather than why we do those things quite often. Most men have fantasized about killing someone—about 70% in 2 studies—and most women as well. More than 50% of women have fantasized about killing somebody. So murder fantasies are incredibly common.

You wrote the book Evil: The Science Behind Humanity's Dark Side. Lots of interesting topics to cover here. Let's start with the continuum. You described that evil is a continuum. In other words, the Dark Tetrad—psychopathy, sadism, narcissism, and Machiavellianism—is a continuum of traits, not a binary, zero-one label of monster or non-monster. Can you explain this continuum?

The Dark Tetrad, as it's called, consists of 4 traits associated with dark personality traits—things that we often associate with the word “evil.” Sadism is a pleasure in hurting other people. Machiavellianism is doing whatever it takes to get ahead. Narcissism is taking too much pleasure in yourself and seeing yourself as superior to others.

Then there's psychopathy. Psychopathic personalities specifically often lack empathy, and it's usually characterized by a number of different traits, including a parasitic lifestyle, so mooching off of others; deceptiveness; lying to people; and, again, that empathy dimension, where you are more comfortable hurting other people because you don't feel sad when other people feel sad.

All of those traits—psychopathy, sadism, Machiavellianism, and narcissism—have a scale. You can be low on each of those traits, or you can be high on each of those traits. The Dark Tetrad is actually a way of classifying people into those who might be more likely to engage in risky or harmful behaviors and those who are not.

If you score high on all of them, you're most likely to harm other people. But each of us scores somewhere. I might score low on sadism but higher on narcissism, and in all of them, I'm probably subclinical.

This is the other thing we often talk about in psychology: there are clinical traits and clinical diagnoses, like someone being diagnosed as having narcissism. Or they're subclinical, which means you don't quite meet the threshold, but you have traits that are related and are so important for us to understand in the same context.

Early in the book, you raised a question that I think you highlight as very important: If you could go back in time, would you kill baby Hitler? This is somehow a defining question. Can you explain?

It's about whether you think that people are born evil. The question “Would you kill baby Hitler?” is meant to get people chatting about whether or not they think that people are born with the traits that make them capable of extreme harm toward others, or whether they think it's socialized—whether it's something that, maybe in how people are raised, manifests over time.

With Hitler, we know from psychologists who have pored over his traits and looked at who he was over the course of his life that there's always this question of, “Was he mad or bad?” The answer to “Was he mad?” is that he certainly had some characteristics that people would associate with, for example, sadism. This idea that he was lower in empathy is probably also showcased in his work.

But in terms of whether he was born that way, I think the answer usually would be no. In his early life, he didn't showcase quite a lot of the traits that later defined the horrors he was capable of. So would I go back in time and kill baby Hitler? The answer is no, because I don't think it's a straight line from baby to adult, and I don't think people are born evil.

So you think a large part of it is nurture versus nature—the environment shaping a person to manifest the evil that they bring out into the world?

I'd be careful with using the word “evil,” because I think we shouldn't use it to describe human beings, because it most commonly others people. In fact, I think it makes us capable of perpetrating horrendous crimes against those we label evil.

For me, that word is the end of a conversation. It's when we call somebody evil and say, “This person is so different from me that I don't even need to bother trying to understand why they're capable of doing terrible things, because I would never do such things. I am good.” That artificial differentiation between good and evil is something that, certainly in the book, I'm trying to dismantle.

That's why introducing continuums for different kinds of negative traits is really important, and introducing this idea that there's nothing fundamental to people that makes them capable of great harm. We all have the capacity to kill people and murder people and do other terrible things. The question is why we don't do those things rather than why we do those things quite often.

I think humanizing and understanding that we all have these traits is the most important thing in my book, certainly.

I think a prerequisite of doing evil—I see this in war a lot—is to dehumanize the other. In order to be able to murder them on a large scale, you have to reformulate the war as a fight between good and evil. The interesting thing you see with war is that both sides think it's a battle of good versus evil. It almost always is like that, especially in large-scale wars.

That's right. On top of dehumanization, there's also this other thing called deindividuation, which is where you see yourself as part of the group and no longer see yourself as an individual. It's this fight of us versus them.

You need both of those things. You need that sort of collapse of empathy for the people who are on the other side. And you need this idea that you can be swallowed by the group, and that gives you a sense of the cloak of justice, the cloak of morality, even when maybe you're on the wrong side.

Getting into who's on the right side of each war is always a more complicated issue. But certainly calling other people evil, calling the other side evil, and dehumanizing them is crucial to most of these kinds of fights.

You promote empathy as an important thing to do when we're trying to understand each other, and a lot of people are uncomfortable with empathy when it comes to folks that we traditionally label as evil. Hitler's an example. To have empathy means that you're somehow dirtying yourself with evil. What's your case for empathy, even when we're talking about some of the darker humans in human history?

My case for empathy—or “evil empathy,” as I sometimes call it—is empathy for people whom we often call evil. The title of my book is Evil, or, in the UK market, Making Evil, which is a reference to a Nietzsche quote: “Thinking evil is making evil.” The idea is that evil is a label we place onto others. There's nothing inherent to anything that makes it evil.

I also think that we need to dismantle that and empathize with people we call evil, because if we're saying that this is the worst kind of act or the worst kind of manifestation of what somebody can be—if someone can destroy others, torture others, or hurt others—I work as a criminal psychologist, so I work a lot on sexual abuse cases, rape cases, and murder trials.

In those contexts, that word “evil” is used all the time: “This person is evil.” If we're doing that, then we need to ask what we actually want. We don't 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 engage in that behavior.

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

On a small tangent, I get to interview a bunch of folks whom a large number of people consider evil. How would you give advice about conducting such interviews when you're sitting in front of a world leader whom millions of people consider evil? Or if you're sitting in front of people who are actually convicted criminals, what's the way to conduct that interview?

I want to understand that human being. They also have their own narrative about why they're good and why they're misunderstood, and they have a story in which they're not evil, and they're going to try to tell that story. Some of them are exceptionally good at telling that story. So, if it's for public consumption, how would you do that interview?

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

I also speak with people who I know have committed terrible crimes, and I've spoken to these people because, as a criminal psychologist, that's often part of my job. 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 it can be 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're controlling, that they're being very careful with, still tells us a lot about them. Certainly in my research on environmental crime as well, what we see is that people use a lot of rationalization. They say things like, “Well, everybody's doing it,” and, “If I hadn't done this first, somebody else would have committed this waste crime or this other kind of crime.”

So there's this rationalization, this normalization, and this diminishing of your own role and agency. 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.” Instead, what our brains do is try to make us feel better. They go, “No, you're still a good person despite this one thing.” So we try to rationalize it, excuse it, and explain it.

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. We do have more of the whole story. But, on the other hand, we also need to 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.

I find these pictures of World War II leaders as children kind of fascinating, because they ground you. They make you realize that there's a whole story there of environment and development through their childhood and teenage years. You just remember they're all kids—except Stalin. He was looking evil already when he was young.

People used to not smile in photos as well. So looking at historical photos of children, or sometimes even kids in other cultures, it's like, “Why are they all so serious?” But our creepiness radars are also way off.

This is something that I've been interested in for a long time as well: We have this intuitive perception of whether or not somebody is trustworthy. According to ample studies at this point, that intuitive perception is not to be trusted. One thing in particular is whether or not we think someone is creepy, including children, although usually the research is done on adult faces and with adults.

Only recently did we really define what that vague feeling of creepiness is. It has a lot to do with not following social norms. This is something we see transferring to other contexts, like why people are afraid of people with severe mental illness and psychosis. If you're on the bus or the Tube in London, and someone's talking to themselves and acting in an erratic way, we know that people are more likely to keep their distance.

There was one study where they literally had a waiting room with people and chairs, and the question was, “How many chairs would you sit away from someone you know has a severe mental illness?” The answer is that you sit farther away, and there's a physical and psychological distancing happening there. It's not because people with severe mental illness are inherently more violent or more dangerous. That's not actually what the research finds. It's that we perceive them as such because we perceive them as weird, basically. We go, “This isn't how you're supposed to be behaving, so I'm worried about this, and I'm going to keep my distance.”

Creepiness is much the same, and that's where you can totally misfire in whom you perceive as creepy just because they're not acting in the way that you expect people to act in society.

What are the concrete features that contribute to our creepiness metric? Is that meme accurate—that when a person is attractive, you're less likely to label them as creepy?

It depends. If they're too attractive, it can be. There are effects that interact there.

That's hilarious.

We also potentially don't trust people who are too attractive. But again, it's deviation from the norm. If you're deviating in any way, that can lead to your assessment being more wrong, but also to you assessing people as more negative.

With creepiness, the main thing that bothers me as a criminal psychologist is that tangential to creepiness is this general idea of trustworthiness and that you can tell whether somebody is lying. I've done research on this, as have lots of other people, like Aldert Vrij, who is one of the leading researchers on deception detection. He has found in so many studies that it's really hard to detect reliably whether someone is lying.

People, especially police officers and those who do investigative interviewing, have this high confidence that, because of their vast experience, they can tell whether the person across from them—the witness or the suspect—is lying to them. The answer is that even if you take them into experimental settings, they're no better than chance at detecting lies, and yet they think they are.

Again, you get into this path where you're going to miss people who are actually lying to you, potentially, and you're going to point at innocent people and say, “I think you're guilty of this crime.” You go hard on that person in a way that might even lead to a wrongful conviction.

So it's the fact that it's very difficult to detect lies, combined with overconfidence in policing, that creates a huge problem.

Not just policing—in relationships and in lots of other contexts as well. A lot of jealousy is born out of uncertainty. Jealousy isn't, “I know for sure that you have done something that is threatening our relationship.” A lot of jealousy is, “What's in my head because I am assuming that you might be thinking or doing X?” That is also basically an exercise in lie detection, and there as well, we are very bad at it.

Is there a combination of the dark tetrad and how good you are at lying? Are people with certain traits, maybe psychopathy, better at lying than others?

There's definitely some research to support the idea that people with psychopathy are better at lying. There's also some research specifically on faking good in, for example, parole decisions. When there's a legal decision to be made as to whether this person can be released from prison, or released from detention in general, the person will act in a particular way. They'll mimic a good prisoner, mimic someone who's safe to be released into society. Then the committee goes, “This person's doing great,” and decides that they're ready to be released. They make the wrong decision because that person has been faking it.

With psychopathy, it's a bit complicated. Historically, there has been some concern that certain treatments for psychopathy, especially empathy-focused treatment, make people with psychopathy more likely to fake empathy and weaponize it. But then there's other research that finds that if you use other kinds of interventions—Jennifer Skeem in California does research on people with psychopathy who have committed severe crimes, and she specifically creates treatment programs that aren't just focused on empathy—they're more about almost learning the rules of society and convincing people that being prosocial is a better way to get what you want in life.

So there's a real need for tailored treatments to deal with certain kinds of personality traits, especially dark personality traits, to try to convince people that being prosocial is the better path, rather than just going hard on empathy and things that they may not see as faults in themselves.

Is there a psychological cost to empathizing with so-called monsters? You referenced Nietzsche in the book: “Gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes into you.” If you study, quote unquote, “evil,” or study monsters, might you become that? Is there a danger of that?

I don't think so. I think that's what people fear. A lot of the Nietzsche quotes I use are ones that speak to the chapters and the issues I write about. But some of them I also like because they reflect how people think about evil and people who are labeled evil.

With gazing into the abyss and the abyss gazing back, you're trying to find it. That's why, in some ways, that doesn't work, actually, because it isn't a total blank. It isn't the abyss. There are, in fact, things that you can see, even if it's just superficially, and patterns you can recognize to help you and key decision-makers, especially in legal settings, make better decisions around people like this. When they see these patterns, they act in a better way.

I get asked a lot as a criminal psychologist, “Do you carry the cases that you deal with around with you?” Some of the cases involve huge numbers of witnesses and potential victims. In these cases, there are very visceral descriptions, sometimes, of heinous crimes.

I think that as someone who does this work, you can't be someone who sees it as anything other than a puzzle. You have to look at it and go, “Here are the different pieces of information.”

What I am doing is pattern recognition. I'm not here to emotionally invest in each of these victims or potential victims. That's not my role. There are therapists for that. There are other people who do that work. I am here working with the police and lawyers, looking at it more objectively to see how this all fits together.

I think that's how I engage with it. I see it as this puzzle that I'm trying to figure out. I worry for my own brain when I confront people and see them as a puzzle, which I do. I see the beauty in the puzzle. All the puzzles look beautiful to me. I'm sometimes like a Prince Myshkin character from “The Idiot” by Dostoevsky, where you just see… It's not the good in people, but the beauty in the puzzle.

I think you can lose your footing on the moral landscape if you see the beauty in everything a bit too much. Everyone is interesting. Everyone is complicated. It's also the classic scientist response to what other people in society go, “Ooh.” They go, “This is horrible,” or, “This atrocious thing has happened,” or, “This shocking, existential-crisis-inducing thing I've just found is giving me an existential crisis.” Scientists, instead, go, “Oh, wow!” You can see the delight in discovery as well.

I think sometimes scientists read as callous because we enjoy this discovery of knowledge and the discovery of insights. It feels like this little light bulb has gone off, and you go, “Oh, I understand a tiny bit more about the human experience or about the world around us.” I think it must be similar. I don't know that I feel or worry that I become more, quote-unquote, “evil.” I think it's more that you add this nuance, which I guess sometimes can be estranging to other people. So, there's that.

When you speak with others, sometimes, even when I say, “We shouldn't use the word evil,” people go, “No, but you have to. Does that mean you're trivializing things?” The answer is no; I'm not trivializing. I'm just trying to understand. Also, sympathizing or being empathetic toward people whom others have written off is always going to get that response from some people.

There are real questions around whom we're platforming, what that means, and what role we have as content creators—both of us—in how we cover the people we talk about. I often come across this in the true-crime work that I do, because I get asked to do TV shows. I host TV shows, and I host BBC podcasts.

There's always the question of whether sometimes people commit murder to become famous. Should it be a blanket ban that we don't cover those cases, or should we cover those cases but in a different way? It doesn't mean that you should never cover that case. It just means that you need to think about it.

Speaking of which, you've done a lot of really great podcast shows. One of them is the “Bad People” podcast. You co-host it. It has over 100 episodes, each covering a crime. What's maybe the most disturbing crime you've covered?

One of the most disturbing crimes that we covered on “Bad People,” and just to be clear, “Bad People,” much like the title “Evil,” is tongue-in-cheek. The idea is that it's about people whom we refer to as bad people. Then it's always a question of who these “bad people” are and whether we're all capable of doing these terrible things.

One of the most problematic, dark cases that we covered was the Robert Pickton case. The episodes are called “Piggy's Palace,” because that was the nickname for the farm where Robert Pickton brought victims whom he had kidnapped. Then he killed them and did terrible things to their bodies. Rumors have it, certainly, that he fed some of these victims to pigs.

One of the reasons I covered that case is that it was influential in my own career. Robert Pickton is one of the most famous Canadian serial killers of all time. As I was doing my undergrad at Simon Fraser University in Canada, I was being taught by someone called Stephen Hart. Stephen Hart was an expert witness on the Robert Pickton trial, and he was keeping us abreast of some of the developments of what he was covering.

I found it so interesting, and I loved Stephen Hart as a person. He seemed to have this sense of humor, this gallows humor, around it all, despite being faced with one of the arguably worst people in Canadian history. I thought that it was so interesting that someone could be so nice, so kind, so wonderful, and be an expert witness for these kinds of people. That's one of the reasons I went into the field as well, because of this case. We had him on the show. He came onto “Bad People,” and we interviewed him for it.

All right. He has done, I imagine, a lot of really difficult cases.

Yes, he's done a lot of difficult cases, as have other researchers like Elizabeth Loftus, who's one of the main founders of the area of false-memory research, which is what I also do. I do research on memory, false memory, and witness statements.

Elizabeth Loftus has also recently been an expert in the Ghislaine Maxwell case. She was in the press, and she has worked with lawyers to educate the court on memory in lots of really controversial cases. The way she would explain it is that it's still her role to train and teach people how memory works. She's not there to decide whether people are guilty or innocent, but she is there to help people distinguish between fact and fiction when it comes to how our memories work or don't.

So what kind of person feeds their victims to pigs? What's interesting about that psychology?

The psychology about Robert Pickton? He was a tricky person because I think he was profoundly lonely, and this is something we see with a lot of serial killers: they have this loneliness, which I think not only contributes to them committing the crimes in the first place, but also allows them to get away with things because they don't have as much of a social network—or any social network—that is helping them do what's called reality monitoring, to understand what's true and what's not.

When you see people get radicalized in their own thoughts, whether that's in the sense of things like schizophrenia, where you've got psychosis, delusions, and maybe command hallucinations—that's when you think you're hearing voices and someone is telling you that you have to do something, usually something harmful to other people. If you don't follow those voices, you will hear them forever. They're profoundly distressing, and they are one of the aspects of schizophrenia that, if you have them, does make you more prone to violence.

For these kinds of cases, if you don't have someone intervening, whether that's a family member or a therapist saying, “How can you tell whether this thought is real? Maybe you're not hearing that voice, right? Maybe that aspect of what you're thinking isn't true,” and bringing you back closer to reality, you can just wander off to whatever alternate universe you might live in in your head.

It's the same with radicalization in other contexts. You see that people who drift more and more into a certain group that has certain beliefs that are maybe divorced from the evidence, divorced from reality, can get more extreme over time. Unless you have a tether that brings you back, that allows you to do reality monitoring, it's going to be very difficult to find your way out of that. With serial killers, we find this reality-monitoring problem, and I think part of that is related to the lack of social networks that people have.

That's fascinating. That's one important component of serial killers. What else can we say about the psychology? What motivates them? If you look at some of the famous serial killers—Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, Jeffrey Dahmer—is there anything else we could say about their psychology that motivates them?

The tether to reality is interesting. Loneliness is a part of the human condition. One of its side effects is that you can get untethered. Then, with some of these brains, I guess the untethered goes to some dark place.

The untethered goes to a dark place, and it is then often combined with some of these other Dark Tetrad traits. You've got someone who maybe is high on psychopathy and low on empathy, someone who's high on sadism, someone who thinks that it's okay to pursue your own goals. Your own goal can be, like with Jeffrey Dahmer, wanting to create the perfect partner, which in some ways seems to be what he was trying to do by killing people, piecing them together, and sewing up a sort of new version.

There's something in that where I can't help but go, “That's so sad.” I don't go, “Oh my God, how awful.” Of course it's atrocious. Of course it's heinous. But I have this real sympathy for that, and I think that's important for us to have, though—not to say, “I can't relate to this person at all,” but to say, “That is an extreme manifestation of something I have felt, and the difference between me engaging in that and this person engaging in that are these other factors.” But the core is in all of us.

Do you think all of us are capable of evil, of some of the things we label as evil?

I think all of us are capable of doing basically the worst things we can imagine. One of the reasons I think that is because you can see neighbors turning on each other, especially if you look historically at the start of wars or big political moments, where you have people who would have called each other friends turning each other in to the police, killing each other, and doing terrible things.

I think all it takes is becoming convinced that the people you think are your friends are actually your enemies, whether that's just in your own world or in a larger political or national landscape. I don't think it takes all that much for us to be capable of doing terrible things.

But that's also why it's really important, when things are good, when you're not at war, and when you have the capacity to think deeply about important issues, to train your mind on these thoughts, knowing that things like loneliness can manifest in these extreme ways. Things like jealousy and aggression can turn into murder; they can turn into these horrible versions. And then you can also spot the red flags if you start going down that path. I think if we don't rehearse evil, if you will, we are much more likely to engage in it, especially in those moments where we don't have much time or energy to really think about what we're doing.

Yeah, I really appreciate the way you think and the way you talk about this. Listening to history, when I'm reading history books, I imagine myself doing the thing I'm reading about, and I almost always can imagine that, when I'm being honest with myself.

And it's important to admit that to ourselves. Research on murder fantasies finds that most men have fantasized about killing someone—about 70% in 2 studies. Most women have as well. More than 50% of women have fantasized about killing somebody.

Murder fantasies are incredibly common, and certainly according to some researchers, that's a good thing. Being able to rehearse and think through doing the most terrible things is a great dress rehearsal for how we don't want to live our lives. Only if you are able to fully think through, “What would I actually be like if I was engaging in this? What would I be thinking? Who would I be with? What would be my group that I'm charging against this other person?”—really putting yourself in the shoes of these people who have 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, animalistic brain coming in. But 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 going in these circles, where you're constantly fantasizing about doing dark things, especially to a specific person, I'd always advise seeing somebody, talking to a psychologist, for example. 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—in one day—you had these thoughts, that is totally healthy, I would say.

And also, I think it's useful to simulate or think through what it would take to say no in that situation. Meaning, once you're able to imagine yourself doing evil things, you have to imagine the difficult act of resisting.

A lot of people think they would resist in Nazi Germany. Well, most people didn't, and there's a reason for that. It's not easy. The same reason—I've seen this—if something bad is happening on a public street, most people, because of the bystander effect, just stand there and watch. I've seen it once in my life.

Yeah, this is humans. So you actually want to simulate stepping up.

Yeah, so it's also been called the heroic imagination. Someone who has studied evil at length is Philip Zimbardo. He did the Stanford Prison Experiment, and that was an experiment which is now, I mean, it's been torn apart in various ways. It was absolutely influential for psychology.

Participants were randomly assigned to be either prisoners or guards in a mock prison experiment, and then, for a number of days, they were told to do various things. It got out of control, and the guards went way over what they were supposed to be doing. They effectively started pseudo-torturing some of these inmates, or these pretend inmates. The whole thing had to be stopped prematurely, but it was really fundamental in showing how, just by randomly being assigned to be a guard—the person in charge—or an inmate, you can, within a matter of days, have a completely different way of thinking about one another.

Philip Zimbardo has also spoken at length about evil, and that all of us are capable of it in the right circumstances. But he also is a big proponent of what he calls the heroic imagination.

And the heroic imagination is really what the purpose of everything I do is. The purpose of what I do isn't just to go, “Ooh, this is curious,” and to stop there. The point is to then prevent it, and to prevent it in ourselves, because that's, I think, ultimately what has to happen.

You can't do a top-down, government-level approach to trying to be so tough on crime that no one will ever commit crime. That's impossible. But you can change, to say it in a tacky way, the hearts and minds of individuals to recognize the pathways towards evil and to go, “Wait, I'm off track. I don't want to go this way, and I'm going to stop myself here, and here's how I can find my way back.”

And so the heroic imagination is exercising that. I see someone on the street. How do I make sure that they're okay? How do I not become a bystander?

Actually, the bystander stuff is interesting because there was a really famous case, the murder of Kitty Genovese, and there were all of these both earwitnesses and eyewitnesses. An earwitness is someone who just hears things, and an eyewitness is someone who sees the crime happening. They didn't intervene in the murder of this woman.

This case was often taken as this example of, “Look how terrible human beings are. We just walk by. We don't care about what's happening to strangers on the streets.” Actually, since then, there have been lots of other bystander experiments, and they have not substantiated this.

So we need to be very careful with looking at these extreme cases and going, “How horrible that this happened to this one person.” It is horrible, but that doesn't mean that that's always how it happens. What we find in bystander research is that most of the time, bystanders do intervene.

It's just when there has already been a crowd that has accumulated, you read the room and assume, “Well, nobody else has intervened yet, and so it must not be a real problem.” That desire to not stand out in a negative way is often what hinders heroism.

I mean, that's why we look at heroes—people who especially risk their own lives to save others, especially strangers—with a sort of respect that nobody else gets. That's because we recognize that we might not be capable of that.

If I saw a stranger drowning in a river, would I really risk my life jumping in the river to maybe save them? I think that's a big question mark. And so when people do that, especially when people almost have this inherent reaction that they just jump in, they just go for it, that is something that is a really admirable quality that we as humans do celebrate, and we should.

And I think often we should celebrate those incidents more, and not the bystander moments where we didn't intervene. We should be normalizing intervening.

And again, this idea of heroic imagination—actually simulating, imagining yourself standing up and saving the person when a crowd is watching, when they're drowning, to be the one who dives in and tries to help.

You mentioned 70% of men and some large percentage of women fantasize about murder, and I also read that you wrote that recidivism for homicide is only 1% to 3%. So that raises the question: Why do people commit murder?

Murder is a really interesting crime because most of the time, it's perpetrated for reasons that we don't like as a society.

As a person who talks a lot to the news and also to producers who are trying to make true-crime shows, who come at you with myths, you go, “Oh, no, we're not going to talk about that. We're not going to talk about whether or not the mom is to blame for this person killing somebody.” I hate that. The trauma narrative—that all people who do terrible things must have had a terrible childhood—I think is really problematic.

What really happens in murder most of the time, which is not what you see on TV because it's really boring, is that it's a fight that gets out of control. If you look at the real reasons stated, it's things like, “This person owed me $4, so I killed him. This person stole my bike. This person owed me...” It's these really stupid reasons.

It is just this bad decision in the moment, an overreaction to a fight or an argument, and it wasn't planned. It's not some psychopath sharpening their knives, waiting for months to try and kill this person.

And we don't like that because there's something called the victimization gap, which is that the impact of this extreme situation on the perpetrator is separated by a huge gap from the impact on the victim and their family. The victim loses a life, whereas the perpetrator, sure, they get imprisoned, but that is, at best, the consequence for them, in terms of justice.

They don't have the same kinds of consequences, and we don't like that. We like things that have extreme consequences to have extreme reasons. That's why I think there's this real desire to show serial killers and people who are, in fact, planning murders for a really long time and then engaging in them, rather than a fight that goes out of control, someone drinking and driving, or someone who is—

Unfortunately, intimate-partner homicide is also one of those situations that is common, one of the top 4 reasons for murder as well.

But that's not the almost-glamorized version that we see of murder online or in the news. So I think it's always important to talk about murder as something that is rarely inherent to an individual. Very few people want to murder. They might fantasize about it, but they don't want to go through with it. Very few people who do engage in murder wanted to do it in that instance, never mind again.

In general, I think the way that we look at lots of crimes is upside down. So we put murderers in prison for a really long time because we think that's justice. Sure, that's one version of an eye for an eye: life for life. There's obviously the more extreme version of that, which is the death penalty, which I don't adhere to, but I could see the rationalization of, “Well, you stole somebody else's life, so you don't deserve to have one.” But there's also the other side: if we're looking at prevention, people aren't going to go out and murder again.

So murder is actually a really low risk in terms of recidivism. High-risk crimes are things like fraud, elder abuse, and sexual violence. In some ways, our sanctions are upside down in terms of how we can actually make society safer, and they're more in line with how we perceive justice to work. So there are big, fundamental questions about how we organize our justice systems and what we want them to be for.

Can you just linger on that a bit? How should we think about everything you just described in terms of how our criminal justice system functions? If they are very unlikely to murder again, how would you reform the criminal justice system?

I think forgiveness is up to the victims' families. Quite often, when you speak with victims' families, there is this divide: some are much more keen on something called restorative justice, where what they want is for the person—the perpetrator—to apologize and explain how it happened. Also, quite often, if you look at some of the other consequences in the other context, it's teenage boys who are part of gangs, for example. It's a teenage boy killing another teenage boy.

These are kids, and the parents of a teenage boy understand that. They don't think of this other perpetrator as a grown man. I think we think of it as this fight between the parents of both teenage boys in that case, but really, often what parents want is to just understand how this could happen and, in some ways, to allow the other teenage boy to still have a life and not steal theirs as well—or his as well.

So there's that restorative justice model, where forgiveness, I think, belongs to the families. Some families, of course, want the most extreme punishment. I can understand how that would be a response that's triggered if you've suffered a severe loss. But if we're looking to make society safer, putting people who've killed in prison is not actually the answer, right? Because if we want society to be safer, it should be based purely on what is most likely to deter crime and who is most likely to engage in it, and that's where I think we've got it upside down.

If I could just stick to the Bad People podcast, there's an episode on incels called “Black Pill: Are Incels Dangerous?” So, are they dangerous? What's the psychology of incels?

That episode was all about what it means to espouse certain kinds of views, especially about women, and what it means to be in an environment that is fueling the fire of—well, hatred of gender. It was also about the idea of entitlement. One thing that we see often in crimes of all sorts is this sense of entitlement that drives the perception that I'm allowed to engage in X because of something else. I deserve to have a life that looks like this, but I don't, and so I'm going to go take it, or I'm going to go do something to show my dissatisfaction in life.

If you think that all men deserve to have a happy life, a Disney version with a woman at home who's taking care of the kids, it's the white picket fence ideal that we've been sold. We have been told that that is what we should have. I understand where it comes from, and the question, though, is: are we entitled to that, or is that something we should strive toward? I think the answer is no: nobody's entitled to a good life.

I would like to see freedoms and rights manifest in such a way that everyone is able to achieve the kind of life that they themselves want. But you're not entitled to it. That's where I think it can get a bit crossed, and we can be sold these lies that are basically impossible for everybody in society to achieve. Understandably, people get angry, and if you're angry, if you feel entitled, and if you're in this group where everyone else is thinking the same way as you, that can make you dangerous.

The internet gives you a mechanism to be your worst self.

And it can reinforce that worst self. You see other people saying, “Yeah, I feel the same way. Do you want me to help you?”

Oh, the internet. So, in one more episode, you interviewed the lady Cecilia, who got Tinder-swindled. Can you tell me what happened with the Tinder Swindler situation?

The Tinder Swindler was a person who pretended on Tinder to be a rich guy with a lavish lifestyle. He would match with women on Tinder and, very quickly, love-bomb them. He would send them all kinds of messages and immediately start being very emotional and sharing, pretend that he was messaging from his private jet—or actually message from his private jet—but pretend that he was in love with this person very quickly. Then he would invite women, in this case Cecilia, to very expensive, luxurious dates.

He would whisk them away to Paris, show them his private jet, or take them to a really expensive restaurant, almost to prove that he was this really wealthy guy. He would simultaneously be building up the story of a future together. You see this in people who are really problematic in relationships in a lot of ways. This is not just in scams or in criminal settings, but problematic relationship styles often involve someone who is creating this idea of a future together that you can just see now: “Our kids in the garden running around. You're the only one for me.” That kind of language—almost planning your wedding on the third date—is what he would weaponize.

Cecilia was looking for love. She wanted all of those things, and so it worked really well. What he ended up doing was defrauding her of lots of money. She ended up taking out loans, and her family were giving her money to help with what he was saying was this critical situation. It was a very classic fraud: a critical situation where he was being followed, he was under attack, and he needed her to pay for some things. He needed her to pay for some flights, until she ran out of money. Then she realized that this was all a big fraud. This was a love scam.

The reason that we spoke with her is partly to show how it can happen, and I think it's really important to remind people that this is something everybody is capable of believing. Fraud works because people know what we want to hear, and they tell us the things we want to hear. I think all of us have a tailored version of fraud that could appeal to basically everybody if they have enough information about you.

Yeah, and by the way, now in the modern day, AI could probably do that kind of thing better and better: the tailored version of the story that you want to believe. Love is a topic on which that would be especially effective.

Yeah, because you're playing with people's emotions, and you know that they're vulnerable in that way. Most people want to be loved and want to love, so it's a really manipulative way in, and I think it's really horrible, but it's also something that we almost all underestimate. We think, “I would identify fraud. I would know if someone was trying to scam me out of money,” until it happens to us, and then we go, “Oh, wait. That did just happen.”

Then we get really embarrassed. I think talking about it is really important, and seeing it as not this thing that happens to dumb people, because that's sometimes how it's framed. It's like, “Oh, such an idiot. She was so gullible.” Was she? Or was she just a nice person who wanted to believe that this person was capable of loving her—which I would hope we all are?

Yeah, and I hope she and others who fall victim to that kind of thing don't become cynical and keep trying.

Yeah, that's right.

Those kinds of things can really destroy your ability to be vulnerable to the world. It sounds like this same kind of thing is just commonplace in all kinds of relationships. That's the puzzle: if you find yourself inside a toxic relationship with, quote, “love bombing,” it could involve a lot of manipulative, fraud-type things inside a relationship in this spectrum.

Well, coercive control is becoming more of an issue. That's when somebody, for example, in a relationship takes control of the finances, and that's often a man in a relationship. That's traditionally because it often falls along these gender lines.

But the problem is, if that person then starts to weaponize the fact that they're controlling the finances and starts using words like, “I'm going to give you your allowance,” instead of saying, “You've paid as much into this as I have, and so this is our shared money,” and starts using that to control things and control how the other person lives in that relationship, that's when you get into things that are called coercive control.

And things like jealousy can also be used in that way.

Is there any way out of that? Maybe jealousy is a vicious downward spiral, where whenever there are any signs like this, it means you're screwed and should get out. Or is this just the puzzle of the human condition—humans getting together and having to solve that puzzle?

I have nontraditional views on jealousy. I'm not a jealousy researcher, but I have done some research on sexuality, and I personally think that jealousy is basically always a red flag. What it means is that the person who is jealous isn't secure in the relationship, and the reason that they're not secure in the relationship is either because the relationship is wrong for them or because they are insecure in themselves.

I don't think it is a sign of love. I don't think it is a sign that you want to protect your mate. I think it is mostly control, and it's the desire to control and to possess.

Jealousy, we know, is a precursor to intimate partner violence almost always. Not all jealousy leads to violence, of course, but all violence has jealousy as a precursor. Quite a lot of that involves imagined things that the partner is doing, not even based on reality.

Then we go back to our deception-detection research, where we're bad at telling whether someone's lying or not. If you're basing how you're interacting with that person on a faulty lie detector, you're going to make bad decisions.

The research also bears out that most people are really bad at monogamy. Most people either have cheated on a significant other—maybe not their current significant other, but a significant other—or have cheated multiple times. That's just consistently found in the research.

So, maybe there's justification to be jealous?

I think it's the other way around. I think monogamy is setting us up to fail. I think monogamy is a social construct. That's a nice idea for some people, but based on the research on how people actually behave, they're not actually behaving in a monogamous way.

If you're cheating on your partner, that is not monogamy. That is polyamory, potentially—the love of multiple people. And it's lying. It doesn't have to be that way.

I'm polyamorous, and I believe that you can love multiple people. I don't know that everyone is always going to meet lots of people at the same time that they're going to love, but I think that there's been a move towards more people embracing open relationships and nontraditional relationship structures, and I think that is healthy to at least have as an option.

I think the idea that there's just 1 size fits all for relationships is really harmful to a lot of people, and it just doesn't really work for everybody. I think having conversations with your partner, especially early, is important. It's harder to bring this up later on, but to have it early and say, “How do you actually want to structure your life?” And I think, “How do you want to restructure your relationship?” is part of that.

Especially if you're going to commit yourself to 1 person, 1 primary person, or 1 exclusive person, that's part of it. Then you also don't have to lie to each other if you do cheat, or you can talk about it in a different way if you feel like there's a certain capacity to be honest about whom you're attracted to and how that might impact your life more generally.

If you could just focus in on 1 component, it seems to me one of the problems is honesty as a hard requirement, and good communication is another hard requirement, because that feels like the prerequisite for avoiding all these problems.

With jealousy, what I'm thinking of is not actually an instance of jealousy—

Oh, yeah.

—where you have a feeling of, “I feel left out.” It's more that sort of persistent feeling of, “I am a jealous person.” That's where I would say that is usually a red flag.

You're right. It's a red flag partly because it means the person's probably bad at communicating, or you are as a couple. It's not necessarily just the jealous person's fault. It's just that there's something happening in this dynamic that is bad psychologically, and that should be addressed, or maybe it's not the right relationship.

So, the fact that a lot of people cheat, does that mean every single person who cheated is probably not going to be good at monogamy? I guess if you can just analyze all of human civilization as it stands and give advice that's definitively true for everyone. Not—

That's exactly what psychologists do all the time. Yeah.

Okay. Generalize.

We make sweeping statements.

This is great. No, I think it's really interesting because I see all those things as romantic: choosing not to cheat, choosing to dedicate yourself fully to another person. It's all just romantic, and then some people do cheat, and your heart is broken. You write a song about it, and then you move on. You try to repair yourself and be vulnerable to another human being and all that.

But why deny yourself the beautiful spectrum of human experience? It's like eating 1 meal for the rest of your life. Why? You don't have to do that. You can have lots of beautiful people around.

Well, for me, actually, focusing on a single thing, you get to explore. You mentioned the puzzle. Over time, you get to see the nuance, the beauty of the puzzle. You realize it's an infinitely long project to really understand another human being. If you focus, you don't get distracted.

That applies to food, too. When I find a meal I really like, I'll stick to it for a long time. I'm definitely a monogamy person, I think. But that also could be a component of where I grew up. There's a certain cultural upbringing, and maybe my brain is not allowing myself certain possibilities, you know?

I think it's more that I want people to feel like they have a choice, and that's the important thing. I think all we see is monogamy everywhere, all the time, and it's just 1 version of how we can live our lives. I don't think it's the only one.

Having conversations with your partner, especially early, is important. It's harder to bring this up later on, but to have it early and say, “How do you actually want to structure your life?” And I think, “How do you want to restructure your relationship?” is part of that.

Especially if you're going to commit yourself to 1 person, 1 primary person, or 1 exclusive person, that's part of it. Then you don't have to lie to each other if you do cheat, or you can talk about it in a different way if you feel like there's a certain capacity to be honest about whom you're attracted to and how that might impact your life more generally.

So, how difficult is polyamory? I think a lot of people would be curious about that kind of stuff. Does jealousy come up? Is it difficult to navigate?

It can be. All relationships can be difficult to navigate.

Sure.

I think it's the same. In the same respect, if you're going in because you're trying to fix something about yourself, you're going to have a hard time, much like if you're dating a single person. If you're trying to fix something and this is going to be the solution to the thing that you feel is broken about yourself, it's going to be hard.

But if you're coming from a good place and you're going, “I want to be open, and I want to connect with people, and I want to love people or a person,” then you're going to have a better time.

Hmm.

I think so. You can love people in different ways. Also, you can love lots of people deeply, I think.

Research on bisexuality has also found that people who are bi are more likely to be in nontraditional relationships. I'm bi, and one of the reasons for that is probably also because we constantly get asked to justify our sexuality.

If you're constantly being asked if 1 person is enough for you, or if 1 gender is enough for you when you're in a relationship with 1 person—for example, if I'm in a relationship with a man, do you miss women? It's like, I don't ask you that if you're in a relationship with a woman. Do you miss women? You probably do, but that's just other women than your partner. It has nothing to do with being bi.

I think there's this constant barrage of questions: What does it mean? Is it real? How do you choose? What does a relationship look like? Do you constantly want threesomes? There's also this constant hypersexualization, especially of women, that we find in the research. That can lead to really negative outcomes for mental health and things like the risk of sexual violence.

On the other hand, you've got bisexual people themselves saying, “Yeah, but I feel like I also have this superpower that I can love more widely, and gender doesn't really matter in terms of whom I'm capable of loving.” Relationship structures almost come with that conversation.

It's not that we need to be nonmonogamous or that we need to be in these kinds of relationships. It's more that if you've engaged so deeply with your sexuality, partly because society's forced you to, then you're also going to be thinking about relationship structures more generally and going, “Actually, I'm going to choose this one.”

Yeah, that's interesting. Your sexual preferences and relationship-structure preferences—some of the choice has to do with how society's going to respond to it. If you have to explain it every time you go to a party, you might not want to do that or talk about it, or at least be open about it. I'm sure there are a lot of annoying conversations you have to have if you're polyamorous, like some of which you've mentioned. And yes, there are effects of oversexualizing the people involved.

Or thinking they're lying. With men—

I wrote a book called Bi: The Hidden Culture, History, and Science of Bisexuality, and I did that after I created a bisexual research group. I wasn't a sexuality researcher, but as a bi person and a scientist, I was interested in the science of bisexuality, and I couldn't really find it. It was really hard to figure out what people were actually learning about bisexual people in comparison to other kinds of queer people.

One of the things I found is that the terms that are used are not necessarily bi.

And so it could be things like plurisexual. If you type the word bisexual into Google Scholar, you're going to get a lot of confusing things as well, because bisexual is used for, like, 2 sexes, where you have multiple sexes or you can change sex, and so they're bisexual.

Right.

Yeah, which is different entirely. And so I think partly out of that, researchers started using words like plurisexual, and omnisexual is another one. If you're looking for research on this, plurisexual is probably the word.

What does omnisexual mean?

It's just the same. It's just another word where it's all. Sometimes pansexual is also used. Again, the idea is that it's all genders.

So how should we think about bisexuality? Is it fluid—day to day, month to month, year to year—in terms of who you're attracted to? Or is it that, at the same time, you have the capacity to be attracted to anyone or attracted to everyone? What's the right way to think about it?

I think the right way to think about it is that I'm not attracted to most people, but I can be attracted to people regardless of gender, much like you're probably not attracted to most people, but you are attracted to people of a certain gender, maybe. That's the same as being heterosexual in terms of the pool of people whom I might potentially be interested in. It's just that gender is irrelevant.

What's the biggest thing that people misunderstand about bisexuality?

The biggest thing that researchers find people misunderstand about bisexuality is that it's a phase, and that it's transient, always changing, and a stepping stone. I think a lot of people still see bisexuality as being on the way to Gay Town, sort of like you're on your way, but you haven't quite committed and you're still stuck in the expectations of society. You haven't quite let go yet, but really you're gay. That's especially true for men.

When you look at research on bisexual men, that's actually how the research started. I think now, when we think of bisexuality, we think of women. It's true that today twice as many women identify as bisexual as men. But if you look at the history of this and the research on bisexuality over time, it was the other way around.

Someone called Alfred Kinsey was one of the first sexuality researchers in recent history, certainly. After World War II, he did this really big study called Sexual Behavior in the Human Male. He was a biologist himself, so he thought of taxonomies, and he was doing research on gall wasps, so insects. This idea of human sexuality was sort of thrown at him after the war because there was also this whole move to get people to reproduce and rebuild America.

So sexuality, and sex specifically, was becoming more of an area of interest, both in terms of research and in terms of policy and funding. Alfred Kinsey was asked, “Do you want to do a class on human sexual behavior?” And he was like, “I know nothing about this.”

He spent about a year just listening to students' questions about what they wanted to know about sex. He realized that he was looking for research to try to build up this course that he was probably going to teach, and he realized that he couldn't answer most of their questions because the research hadn't been done.

A lot of the questions were around, “What is normal? If I feel this during sex, is that normal? How often do people have sex? Should I want these fantasies? What about these fantasies? What does it mean? What if I have homosexual fantasies?” He was looking at all of these questions and collating them, and then he went out and did these huge studies.

He interviewed thousands of people himself, but also had all these research assistants who were out there interviewing people in America about their sexual behavior. Just picture the time. This was the 1940s. This was quite a conservative time, certainly more than we might expect now. Here's this researcher asking incredibly personal questions about thousands and thousands and thousands of people.

He ended up finding a huge interest in the topic. This was one of the big findings in the book he published, called Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, which was a best-seller for an entire year. He sold out auditoriums. They sometimes had to add the room next to the one he was in because there was so much demand to attend his lectures about sex that they had to connect radios to other halls to give people enough space to sit down.

He was basically a rock star. Again, I think this challenges the misconception we have about sexuality: that we think of it as this sort of woke thing now, and that the rainbow flag and all this stuff are almost modern inventions. But this was the ’40s. This was happening. People were going to these talks, and people were having these conversations.

He created something called the Kinsey Scale. The Kinsey Scale is from 0 to 6, and he found that it was not useful to apply a binary to people's sexual desires and sexual orientation. It was more useful to put them on a continuum because most people were not exclusively homosexual or exclusively heterosexual. Most people were somewhere in between.

So 0 was exclusively heterosexual tendencies, and 6 was exclusively homosexual. He would place people somewhere on the scale based on all of the things they told him. About half of men were somewhere in the middle, not exclusively either, and about a quarter of women were as well.

It was a very conservative time.

Well, it was post-war, though, so I think that mattered as well. There's something called a homosocial environment, which has nothing to do with being gay. That has to do with being in a situation where you are with people of the same gender as you.

A homosocial environment is something like a prison, where you only have men or only have women, or war, which, at that point, they had just experienced. You have a lot of men who are exclusively in the company of men, and maybe they're looking around going, “Well, now that my options are different, maybe I'm going to choose from this pool.”

Anyway, he found that it was that way around—that a lot of people had these fantasies or had engaged in these actions. Then there were other researchers, other male researchers, who found similar things. At some point in the ’70s, it swapped, and it felt like maybe more men were identifying as gay, and there were perhaps fewer people who would have called themselves bi. Suddenly, this became more of a thing for women.

I think there are some social things going on. There are some research things going on. Actually, bi men have been studied for a long time as well.

Okay, so you said a lot of interesting things. There is a difference between the truth and the socially acknowledged thing, so there are social elements. This might be anecdotal, but I know a few women, friends of mine, who identify as bisexual. I don't know a single guy friend who identifies as bisexual. They're either gay or straight. So there's still a social thing going on.

Definitely.

Right?

Definitely, and I think research consistently shows that bisexual men are more likely to identify as gay or straight. With gay, it depends. If they have what we might refer to as a homosexual lifestyle—if they engage in going to queer parties, maybe go on Grindr or other gay apps—that would be much more of a lifestyle thing, where you've embraced this and you see it as part of your identity, that you are part of this queer community.

It's much easier to say you're gay than bi, most often, also because there's biphobia within the queer community. You might get gay men saying to a bi man, “I was bi once.” That's a classic. Or, “Come on, you're actually gay.”

It's the same thing the other way around with bi women, because it's seen as performative. The idea is that bisexual women are doing it for attention—specifically, men's attention—and that they're all going to go back to men anyway and they're just doing it. It's a phase. It's something they're doing to be sexy to men, not because they're actually interested in women.

There's this lesbian-bi thing going on, which is often quite hostile. Not always, but often. And there's this gay male-bi thing going on, which is different in nature but is also potentially hostile. So in both cases, saying you're bi can be problematic, but for men more so.

Do you like the Kinsey Scale as a very simple reduction of the idea that there's a spectrum? I also saw the Klein Sexual Orientation Grid, which adds a few parameters, like who you're attracted to, how you're actually behaving, the fantasies you have, social preference, lifestyle preferences, all that kind of stuff. Self-identification—what you actually say publicly. All those different dimensions. Or is the Kinsey Scale a pretty damn good approximation?

The Kinsey Scale's a good start. And the Klein Grid, I think, is much more fun in some ways. The Klein Grid came out of research by Alfred Kinsey and others like Havelock Ellis, but we won't get into him. Fritz Klein was a male researcher doing research on sexuality as well. He was specifically a therapist, and he was looking at people who were struggling with their sexuality.

People would show up in the ’70s and ’80s in his practice, and they would say, “I'm struggling with my sexuality.” He would say, “How can I help you?” And they would say things like, “I wish I wasn't interested in men, and I'm a man.”

He would then work through what that meant. Does that mean you don't want to have these feelings? Does that mean you don't want to have these attractions? Does that mean the implications of how your friends and family will see you are the problem? And so he created this much more complex scale, which I think is really interesting for everybody to use, no matter what their sexuality is.

Because what it does is get you to think about things like your sexual identity—easy. Not just that, but in the past, present, and ideal. So if you say, “Well, I used to identify as straight. Now I identify as bisexual,” then I have in my head—this doesn’t mean that other people think this—in my head, I have an ideal, which could be straight, because that’s what maybe society’s told us we should be. But it could also be something else.

I’ve also had friends who’ve gone, “Past, present, straight, straight, but ideal bi.” So you get into these interesting dynamics where sometimes people just wish they were a different sexuality than they were for other reasons. Then there are other things in the scale that ask about your lifestyle. For example, if you are going to queer parties or if you have queer friends, then you might have a homosexual lifestyle even if you’re straight. But then again, it’s how much lifestyle would you like?

For me, that was a real moment where I was looking at that, going, “Wow, my lifestyle’s really straight. Maybe I need to change this.” He was using these attractions, fantasies, and identities—and the past, present, and ideal—to help people think through all these complicated feelings we have around our sexuality and identify sticking points.

Yeah, that’s fascinating. So maybe the presumption there is, if everything’s aligned—the fantasies, the ideal partner, all those things—that’s probably the healthiest place to be?

Right. He would look especially at the ideal and the present. If those were different, so if you said, “I wish I was bi, but I’m straight,” or “I’m bi, but I wish I was straight,” or “I’m homosexual, and I wish I was straight,” he would say, “Let’s talk about that,” and he’d try to work through it.

The term he used for bisexual people who were uncomfortable with their own sexuality was “being a troubled bisexual.” I think any sexuality can be troubled. You could be a troubled straight person, a troubled homosexual person, or a troubled asexual person. Just thinking about why, and which aspects are maybe missing, I think is really healthy for people to do.

Meaning there are some puzzles that you haven’t quite figured out. Maybe you haven’t been honest with yourself about your preferences, all that kind of stuff.

I don’t really like talking about honesty with yourself. I think that’s a high bar, and I think it’s also often weaponized against people, especially by men, where it’s this idea of, “You’re not really being honest. You’re actually gay.”

So I think this idea that we’re not being honest with our own sexuality is a big word. I think it’s more that maybe you haven’t had the right framework or the right words to think about aspects of your sexuality that are troubling to you.

How obvious is it, when a person is bisexual, to identify the sexual orientation grid? How big is the sign, whatever you are?

I think the sign is smaller than we think it is. There’s a tendency to assume that sexuality is something that we find, keep, and consolidate from our teenage years, maybe our early 20s. You might get university thrown in, if you get your experimental year as an undergrad. But you kind of have to choose.

That is a difficult requirement, I think, for a lot of people, because you can’t possibly know all of the things and all the people you might be interested in at that point. We change in every other way. Why wouldn’t we change in this way?

I think giving ourselves the ability to reappraise where we’re at with our own sexuality, our own desires, our own relationship status—all these things—is important to keep us happy and healthy and to not run into issues that we know are faced by a lot of homosexual but also bisexual people.

Research has found that bisexual people are more likely to self-harm. They’re more likely to be the victims of sexual violence, more likely to be isolated, and more likely to be stalked. There are lots of different aspects of being bi that are negative.

The reason for that is mostly that bi people are least likely to be plugged into the community. When you’re going through stuff like this and you feel different, and you’re constantly being asked about your sexuality—if you’re open about it, or you’re hiding it—that’s also troubling. You’re going to have these negative consequences, especially if you don’t feel like the queer community is really a place for you. That’s where finding your people really matters.

Since we’re on the topic of sexuality, one of the things you touched on in your book on evil was kinks and sexual fantasies. I think the point of describing that was that we often label that as evil or bad. What can you say about what you’ve learned from kinks and sexual fantasies from writing that book?

The reason I included kinks, evil, and sexual conversations in general is because they are so often thrown into the same conversation. If someone comes to me and says, “Julia, I want you to help me explain why this person killed this other person,” they’ll often say, “Did you know that he or she was also into”—insert kink here, insert a nontraditional relationship structure here, or insert whatever.

I respond to that by going, “Okay, so?” People use these words like, “Oh, he was really into BDSM,” and think that’s going to have this really important impact on me. Or, “Ooh, they were swingers.” Again, I go, “Yeah?” Almost like, “And in other news, they were swingers.” That is not related to this crime at all, unless one of the partners was killed.

People see this as a defect of character, and kink is very much seen as a defect of character in many circles, especially in broader society. That is wild to me, because if you look at research on sexual fantasies and kinks, a lot of people have at least one.

BDSM is the most common. A lot of people are engaging in or interested in BDSM—things like choking, restraints, being degraded, or degrading other people in bed, consensually, of course. That is something that a lot of people fantasize about and a lot of people engage in. These kinks and fetishes are much more commonplace than we sometimes think.

On the other hand, we obviously need to be careful not to assume that because BDSM is almost ubiquitous in pornography, that means everybody wants this. That is absolutely not the case. But we also don’t want to marginalize it and say it’s almost nobody. It’s somewhere in between, and the main thing is always just to ask and have open conversations about what people actually want in bed.

You want to make sure you have things like safe words, putting in the restraints to make sure that these interactions are safe and consensual, and then being able to explore. There’s everything from pup play, where you dress up as a puppy and engage in either general frolicking or sexual behavior, to other things like blood play, which is when you pierce the skin to release some sort of blood.

That can be scratching or cutting. It can be of yourself or your partner. It can be this idea of, “I don’t know, it’s this taboo thing you’re doing together, and it’s sexy in its own way.” Everybody has their own versions of what they find attractive—rubbing up against unsuspecting people, pretending that someone’s sleeping. There’s a wide range of things.

People often feel deeply ashamed about the things that they’re interested in. I think that’s really sad, because it makes it more likely that people won’t be able to live that part of themselves and that they’ll think there’s something wrong with them. That can spiral into things like, “Am I evil? Am I bad? Am I a bad person because I have these fantasies?”

That ties in, unfortunately, with homosexuality and bisexuality and the way that, certainly historically and in most parts of the world still today, these queer lives and queer identities are still villainized. They’re still seen as lesser, as bad, as a sign of a defect of character. If people see that within themselves, they’re going to think differently about themselves, and society is going to treat them differently. So it’s all about destigmatizing.

I really liked what you wrote about—I guess it was in the context of BDSM, or maybe sadomasochism, or maybe just the submissive-dominant dynamic—why that might be appealing: the disinhibition hypothesis. I guess this applies generally to sexual fantasies. If you live them out, you could just let go of all the bullshit that we put up in normal society. You could be all in, fully present to the pleasure of it.

Right. What research has found on fetishes, especially on BDSM, is that the reason people say they like it—I mean, it’s hard to explain why you have a fantasy—but if you go into the finer questions and really dig deep, you can find that people will explain a version of, “Well, I can really let go, and I don’t have to make any decisions. If someone is telling me what to do, then I don’t have to make any decisions, and I’ve spent all day making millions of decisions. I don’t have to in this context, and I really like that because it’s freeing.”

That’s the disinhibition hypothesis: The reason that we often go to things in the bedroom that, in other contexts, we don’t like or even find repulsive. In normal life, I potentially don’t want to be told what to do, but maybe when you move into the bedroom, you go, “Yeah, but this is a different context, and I kind of want the reverse of what I want in my day-to-day life.”

I can also understand furries and that sort of completely living as another species, even...

It's a really interesting psychological phenomenon of release and of letting go of social pressure.

Because you mentioned submissive, that's more straightforward to understand. I think that also applies to dominant, because you don't have to walk on eggshells. It's the clarity of it.

That was really interesting. Having read that from you, that really made me think that there is a deep truth to being true to whatever the sexual fantasy is. It's not just the fantasy itself that's appealing; it's the being free in some sense.

It's the being free, and the juxtaposition there is that you are free because of the fiction. You're playacting, but it's touching at something deep inside you psychologically. That's where it feels weird, but it also makes sense.

This is also why we like fiction, because it allows you to maybe be somebody else, have someone else's thoughts in your mind for a while, and you really get to live as that for a bit. So I think the truth-and-fiction circle is always an interesting one.

For researching the Bi book, the bisexuality book, what have you learned about sexuality in general, human nature, and how sexuality is practiced in terms of different communities? I'm sure there are subcultures and stuff. What have you learned?

The research on human sexuality is interesting because we keep finding that people have these desires that they feel weird about. Unless they have a community or an app that they can go to in order to live those fantasies, they can feel quite troubling to the individual and can make you unwell.

That's true whether it's about your sexuality—being gay and being unable to live as a gay person—or whether it's wanting to engage in BDSM and not having an outlet for that. That can just make you unhappy. I think the stigma there is that this unhappiness is going to lead to some sort of horrible manifestation of crime. I think that is mostly nonsense, but I'm more concerned about the mental-health consequences for the individual who's unable to explore those sides of themselves.

Research on kinks and sexuality is also about making sure that we have visible representation of certain kinds of communities. That's one of the reasons I ended up writing Bi. I came out in Evil. Making Evil is the UK title; Evil is the US title. I came out because I was writing about all the things we associate with the word evil, and homosexuality certainly is one of those things.

I came out as bisexual in the book, and I did it specifically—I wrote it this way as well—because I was talking about the importance of visibility, and how, through visibility, you realize that the people around you, people you already know and love, are part of this community that otherwise feels foreign, abstract, and maybe scary.

If you realize that you've got gay friends, friends who are into certain kinds of fetishes, or friends with whatever sexuality you're talking about, you suddenly go, “Oh, it's going to be much harder to dehumanize these people.”

This all comes for me from a really sad place. You could talk about Bi as this project of love and how I was finding the community. I was trying to write something that would bring us all together. But it's also because I'm constantly terrified that my rights are going to be stripped back.

We know that the laws around homosexual behavior and the rights around bisexual people are in flux. There's no straight line of acceptance. Just because right now I happen to live in a time and place where I'm allowed to be openly bisexual and I can engage in homosexual activity, that doesn't mean that that's going to stay—not even necessarily in my lifetime.

Much like writing Evil at a time when you're not at war and you're able to think deeply about these important issues, I think we also need to be thinking about things like sexuality and other issues that are important to us. If we want to preserve our rights, we need to normalize these issues and make sure that they're visible so that people find it harder to dehumanize those communities.

I'm always terrified that bisexual people are going to be hypersexualized, dehumanized again, and that there are going to be laws against basically just who I am.

Did you hear from a bunch of people after Making Evil—the book—and mentioning and coming out in that book, and then writing the Bi book, who are bisexual? What are some of their stories? I haven't seen much material on it, as you spoke to, so I'm sure they felt lonely without a community, right?

A lot of people felt seen by the book. The fan mail I got and the responses to the book were really beautiful. I got them from all over the world.

In the book, I also spoke with some researchers who were stationed or doing research in countries where bisexual behavior specifically is illegal, or where homosexual behavior was illegal. For a long time, homosexuality in women in general was seen as a blind spot, because what counted as sex was sex with a penis. Women can't have sex with one another.

A lot of laws around homosexuality were specifically applied to men. Certainly, historically, that's the case. We're talking about sodomy, and that involves men and not women. If you look at the evolution of laws, for a while, women weren't necessarily socially accepted, but they were getting away with it legally.

More recently, especially as bisexuality has become more visible, certain countries have started writing it specifically into their constitutions and laws—that bisexual identities and behaviors are also seen as problematic and illegal. These laws change all the time.

In terms of fan mail, especially from people in countries where homosexuality and bisexuality are illegal, seen as problematic, or socially condemned, that was particularly important. Some people wrote saying, “Can I translate this into another language, on the DL, on the down low, and distribute this to my friends?”

I had people sending me messages saying, “I'm at X airport,” or, “I'm in X country, where this would be considered contraband.” My book is a banned book, fun fact.

Nice.

It was banned. I sold the rights to a foreign publisher, and right after they were sold, the laws changed. They sent me this really sad email saying, “Unfortunately, we can't publish your book because it's now considered part of the gay agenda, promoting gay and homosexual lifestyles. We can't publish it anymore.”

I take a little bit of pride in the fact that it's a banned book, but obviously I find what it means really sad. It also makes me feel like it's more important. That's what people were writing to me about.

What advice would you give to young people, or just people in general, who are trying to figure out their sexuality or how to speak about their sexuality?

I'd say try and read widely on issues around sexuality. Books like mine, but also other books, might help you navigate what labels there are and whether or not those labels are good for you.

I think things like the Klein grid are really helpful, especially for people who are more analytically minded like you and I. It gives you a construct and numbers to work with, and that can be really helpful. If that's how you think, look at the Klein grid and see if that helps you navigate things.

I think it can be quite useful to see your sexuality almost as a mathematical equation. If that's how you think, then look at the Klein grid and see if that helps you navigate things.

A bit of a tricky question, but what are the pros and cons of coming out publicly as a nonstandard sexuality? From a recommendation perspective, what are some benefits and what are some challenges?

The benefits are that you can live authentically. You can just be yourself. I do feel more free in who I am and who I'm able to be online, for example, now that I'm out.

Because I came out in my 30s, I think it was almost a foot-in-the-door technique as well, which is a psychological technique of first coming in and then coming with your big ask. I'd already published 2 books. I was already an established scientist.

I think if I had tried Bi first, A, I wouldn't have been able to publish the book—it was the first mainstream book on bisexuality ever—and B, I don't think I would've been taken seriously as a scientist. Having the other stuff first and then Bi as a side project was acceptable. I think the other way around wouldn't have been.

I think it was still brave. I think you mentioned somewhere, maybe in an interview, that there was some concern about being sexualized when you covered the topic of sexuality.

There still is, but I actually find that it's done the opposite most of the time. As a woman, especially a young woman in the public eye, you're sexualized anyway, unfortunately. That is and was already a huge part of my online experience.

Actually, I think coming out as bi means, A, you get allies who suddenly are like, “We're on your side. We're going to help you fight the hypersexualization.” People get almost more weird about it in a good way. They get a bit quiet about it because they're like, “Oh, now it's an identity thing.

So maybe I shouldn't comment on what she's wearing. It almost disarmed some of the more sexualized comments. For me, I have to say, it was mostly a positive experience.

The incels didn't know what to do with it.

Exactly. Like, "Ugh."

Just to go back to the beginning, what got you interested in criminal psychology?

If you look at my trajectory into academia and then through it, basically what happened is I was ready to go study art.

Nice.

That's what happened. I had my portfolio ready to go. I was going to study art as an undergraduate, and then my grandfather intervened and was like, "Being an artist is a really hard life. Maybe you should reconsider."

What kind of art? Sorry to take that tangent.

Painting.

That is wild. I would not have expected that because you're so super analytical.

I am, but I also really like surrealism, and I really like messing with the sense of reality, which, again, is obviously something that then wove its way into my academic work.

That's cool.

But he was also right. I've always been very intellectual, let's just say. I skipped a couple of grades in school. I was part of the chess club. It was very much that I was the clever kid. But there's also a part of me that's just like, "Art is beautiful. I love making art, and it can speak to so many people."

Anyway, my grandfather convinced me not to do it, and then I applied instead for psychology. Although at that point, you just had to say social sciences. You didn't have to specify, but I knew it was probably going to be psychology.

The reason for that was because my dad has paranoid schizophrenia. I think one of the reasons I'm so obsessed with this idea of what is real—and I mean that in every way—is what is real in terms of perceptions of right and wrong, what is real in terms of our own memories of the world, what is real in terms of what happened in a crime, and what is real in terms of perceptual abilities and neuroscience.

I think that's because I grew up with someone who had a unique view of what is real in real time. Seeing that affected me profoundly, because not only was it very destabilizing in terms of my upbringing, but it's also just in your face that people quite literally are seeing and hearing different things than you. To not jump from that to "What else are people perceiving differently than me?" I think would be almost like a missed opportunity.

So I went to study psychology partly to understand that and what was going on there, and then that took me down the reality hole. Honestly, the reason I went into criminal psychology is because I could have gone into any other field, but the criminal psychologists were the most fun.

I feel like lots of psychologists take themselves so seriously, and I couldn't. I was like, "This isn't the vibe." The criminal psychologists had this gallows humor. They were doing arguably the most serious of the crimes and cases, and yet were somehow having fun and having nice lives. I saw myself, and I went, "I want to do this version." So I did.

Yeah, that's great to hear—that a criminal psychologist, because probably they have to, more than any other subfield, confront the reality of the mind.

It's often quite procedural. I'm also much more interested in applied sciences because I like the idea of, "What do we do with this information?"

The thing that interests me most from a research perspective—I did my PhD in false memories, so implanting false memories of committing crime—was the study that ended up going viral because I was the first to do it. I built on a history of people implanting false memories of various kinds of other emotional events, but it was the first time someone had combined false confessions research and false memory research.

The research on false confessions was by Saul Kassin, and the research on false memories was by Elizabeth Loftus. I was doing them both at the same time. The question was, could you get people to believe that they committed a crime that never happened and confess to it? Not just that, but could you get them to believe that it actually happened—to remember it?

The short answer is yes, you can, especially using specific leading and suggestive interview techniques. The procedural learning from that is what I'm most interested in. Being able to actually do it is sort of a party trick. It's only useful so that you can then take that and go, "Okay, how do we prevent this?"

I've since trained police and lawyers. I've trained people at the ICC, the International Criminal Court, who deal with collective memory, so they deal with hundreds of witnesses at a time in war crimes. The question is, how do we try to preserve memory as close to the original as possible without contaminating it? Or at least without contaminating it any more than it already is?

That's where social psychology, I think, excels. We've done a lot of research on how social settings change what people say and, to some extent, what people believe.

I think that's also where the leap to things like AI is not far, because ultimately, the way that we're engaging with large language models and generative AI in general is structured as a social interaction. It's structured as a conversation most of the time now, and that is what we do. That is literally what I train the police on doing: how to make sure that you don't distort people's memories in the process, and how to ask good questions.

So now you get confabulations from both sides. You get confabulations from AI and from people. The problem is that there's a third thing—the in-between—that I'm not sure is getting enough attention right now. I wish there were more integration of social scientists like me and people who do investigative interviewing and have done it for decades, so we could understand what is happening in the in-between. That way, we could teach both people and AI to respond better in that situation.

I mean, it's really interesting. Are you saying that there's a drift of some kind on both the AI and human sides when they're interacting together that we need to be very clear about?

Yes. What we've created with generative AI is basically the ultimate false-memory machine. We've created a tailored experience that is, most of the time, telling you what it thinks you want to hear and then uncritically giving that to you.

Sometimes, of course, there are other things where it's appraising whether or not this is truthful, but it is giving that to you. There's no safeguard from you just going, "This is truth, and this is my past," or, "This is how I remembered it."

The problem is that not only is AI potentially distorting people and their memories, never mind the factual basis on which they're relying, but it's also the other way around. By asking leading or problematic questions, people are changing how the AI is creating the content, which is, in turn, on some fundamental level, potentially having an impact on how it's discerning truth from fiction.

That's where false memories in human minds and confabulations in AI are much more similar than we think. When I first saw AI confabulate, or hallucinate, I was like, "This is what people do all the time." It's just that we can't fact-check them all the time. We're not constantly in a conversation being like, "Is that quite right? I'm going to use that for my homework," right? So it's both juicy and really troubling.

Well, right now the interactions are pretty ephemeral. They're short-lasting, and there's not really a deep memory to the interactions. But this could get a lot worse if the AI is personalized to a degree where it remembers things about you, so that you can then start to, over many interactions, feed the narrative about your past that you construct together with the AI over time.

But you don't even need that. This is what we find in investigative interviewing, which is police interviewing of witnesses and suspects. All you need is a leading question or a suggestive piece of information.

In a short interaction, most police officers don't spend a long time, and they have no memory of this person's past. They know basically nothing about them except for things related to the crime. Yet we know that within that very short, maybe half-hour or one-hour interaction, people's stories can change fundamentally.

The problem is that if you have a memory of something, when you pull it up in that social interaction, it's live. It's active. When you then finish that interaction, it settles back down. The thing is that if you put it back in a different way, the next time you're going to remember the latest version. You might not realize that it shifted.

Over time, it can shift and you don't realize it, and that's your truth. That's where even short interactions can have a profound impact on the human mind.

Wow, so you can modify memories that quickly?

Yeah. We do it all the time in experiments.

Okay, can you speak a little bit more to false memory? It's fascinating. Things happen to us. We humans do things in the world, and then we remember them. Most of our lives, I guess, are lived in memory—in remembering the things that happened to us.

You're saying that we can modify the story we tell about the things that happened to us? That's fascinating. What do we know about this ability to have false memories?

We know that false memories are common, that they're a feature of a normal, healthy brain. They're not a glitch; they are a feature.

And we know that false memories are incredibly common. If you think about basically any memory, I’m interested in autobiographical memories. This isn’t memories of facts; this is memories of experiences, things that you’ve lived in some way. Of those autobiographical memories, basically every single autobiographical memory you have is false. The question isn’t whether it’s false; the question is how false.

You’re despairing over there.

Well, yeah, it’s both beautiful and terrifying that nothing is real.

No, that’s not what I’m saying.

Okay.

I’m just saying that everything has a degree of falsehood to it. This is where sometimes I’ll get accused of being like, “Oh, but does that mean we can never use witness statements?” I’m not saying we can’t use any witness statements. I’m saying that we need to be careful because even if people say things with confidence, it doesn’t necessarily mean they’re true. If they have multisensory details and they’re describing in very specific detail what they smelled, what they heard, or whatever, it doesn’t mean it’s necessarily true.

Most of the time, our autobiographical memories are good enough. Memory scientists talk about this as gist memory. Our gist memory for events, much like for text, is that you get the gist of it, right? You’re good enough. You generally remember approximately what happened accurately.

But when you get to the so-called verbatim details—the specific details of memories—you find that people are often really bad. Most of the time, that doesn’t really matter because you remember you hung out with a friend, you remember you were at this university, you remember approximately what your favorite café was, and you remember this important negative or positive event. Fine. You don’t actually need to know exactly what you were wearing, drinking, and saying.

But in a criminal justice setting, you do need to remember exactly what you were drinking, saying, and doing, right? That’s where we have this need to break down this human capacity for memory to a level of detail that it’s just not made for.

That’s where the verbatim stuff can get you into trouble, because with criminal cases, I suppose the tiniest details really matter. The lawyers can really zoom in on that particular detail, and then you could just make that up. An interrogation with a leading question, as you were saying, can alter your memory of a particular detail, and then everything will hang on that detail.

Right, and if that particular detail is someone’s face, then that’s a really big problem.

You’re right.

It can also be an entire false memory. This is where, in my research and in research like mine, we’ve implanted what we call memories, or false memories, of experiences that never happened at all.

While most things are modifications of real memories, complete false memories are when you think you experienced something that you didn’t. We all have them. We all have some memories that can’t be true, and we usually realize this when we talk to our parents about our childhood or when we talk to friends and say, “Remember that time we did this?” Your friend will go, “That happened to me. That didn’t happen to you.”

You become what is known in research as a memory thief, where you’ve stolen somebody else’s memory and accepted it—or your brain has accepted it—as your own. That’s possibly because the other person told it in such vivid detail that you could imagine it, and basically your brain was like, “Well, this feels real now.” The next time you thought about it—maybe not the next time, but perhaps after a couple of times thinking about it—you started going, “This happened to me, right?” Then you integrate it into your autobiography.

How hard is it to insert false memories?

Not hard. It’s very easy to distort memories or insert small false memories. It’s harder to convince people of entire events, especially specific events. Exactly how easy it is to implant a specific false memory is widely debated. This is also one of the big debates around my own research.

When I was writing The Memory Illusion, which was my first book, and doing the research that went along with it, there was a huge debate between me and a couple of other academics about what it means for something to be a false memory and how we should talk about the ease with which they’re implanted. That is still one of the biggest scientific debates in our field.

To me, I think that’s where the core of the debate is about the difference between what some people call a false belief and a false memory. I think this thing happened, or I remember this thing happened, and that is often a really difficult differentiation because all we have as social psychologists is what you’re telling me.

I can ask you, “Do you think it really happened? Do you believe it really happened?” But it’s really hard to differentiate. I’ve always thought that you need to ask people about the specifics: “All right, how confident are you in this memory? Do you feel things in this memory? Does it feel like other kinds of memory?” Describe the nature of this experience rather than asking, “Do you think this is a real memory?” That’s a hard thing to ask people to do.

So you want to get as many signals as possible, indirectly, to show that they actually believe the thing happened.

Or that it approximates a memory in their minds. That’s right, rather than just being a thing they think kind of happened. Other people think it’s an easier line to differentiate. For me, it’s almost impossible to differentiate the two. Other people think it’s clearer.

In terms of the frequency, in my research, 70% of people became convinced that they committed a crime that never happened or experienced another important emotional event. That number is also challenged. People say, “Well, does that mean that 70% of people can have false memories like this?” The answer is no, obviously not. That’s just in my sample. It’s just these specific 6 false memories.

It could be that 100% of people are prone to some version of this, just maybe not in this specific study. If I had to come up with different false memories to implant, or if I were a different person and people trusted me differently, there would again be social factors that make it more or less likely that I’ll be able to convince you that something happened in your life that you can’t remember. In 1 study, obviously, I can’t capture that.

It also doesn’t mean that 70% of the time people have these complex false memories. It might be 1% of the time or 0.1% of the time that people have them.

I guess you’re speaking to the fact that you don’t know how representative the sample is. But even from 1 study, that’s crazy. That’s incredible.

It’s not just representativeness. We also shouldn’t take individual studies in that way.

Sure.

I’m not saying that 70% of people always have false memories either. It just means that in this 1 study, more people than not developed these complex memories.

What was the methodology for implanting the false memories? This is so cool, by the way. Human memory is so fascinating, and the fact that we can engineer memory is so interesting. It’s also really interesting that we live so much of our lives in memories, and that you can mess with that, you can shape it. It’s interesting.

It’s mostly, I think, a good thing that we can shape it.

I think so. Yeah.

I think the fact that memory can be false in the way that it is in my study is a result of the fact that our minds are made to creatively recombine information to solve problems in the world.

Even the fact that we have this gist memory is because we’re optimizing data processing. We’re basically saying, “These are the most important things from these events, and the other details are irrelevant. Don’t remember that. Gone. Now I’m going to work with that to try and solve what life comes up with.”

The ability to be creative and intelligent relies on our ability to take memories from the past and pieces of them and creatively recombine them. That’s what false memories are, except that it can look bad if you’re trying to remember something specific.

In my research, I used leading and suggestive questions like, “Close your eyes. Picture the event that I’m trying to implant.” I was implanting, for example, this event: “You’re 14 years old. You were in contact with the police. The police called your parents, and you assaulted someone with a weapon.”

Then the question is, “What do you remember?” You say to me as a participant, because you’ve been selected out specifically for never having had this experience—

And just to be clear, when I say a weapon, I don’t mean a semiautomatic weapon. I mean anything. Usually it was a rock. And so people would say, "I found..." 'Cause a weapon is just anything you use to hurt another person. And I did this study in Canada. We don't have guns in the same way as in some other parts of the world. And so it was unlikely that my participants would have been like, "Yeah, I totally have all these guns." And so they would take something, an object, and hurt somebody else, or they stole something, or they hit somebody. So those are three of the conditions.

I randomly assigned people to them, and they knew that I had contacted their loved ones ahead of time, so they were participating in a childhood memory study, an emotional childhood memory study, and they knew that. Then I contacted their parents ahead of time to get information about what they were like as teenagers, where they lived, who their friends were, basic things, and to make sure they hadn’t ever experienced any of the target events.

And then, with that information, I said to the participants, “Okay, so there are these 2 things your parents reported happening, and 1 of them is a true one.” I’d always include a true one to build rapport, which is, “I’m doing the what-not-to-do of interviewing, right?”

Right.

I’m laying it on thick.

To see what’s possible.

To see what’s possible. Because you have to push it to also show that it’s possible, that I can do this in this context, so that we can warn police not to do this.

So I said, “We have these 2 incidents that your parents reported, and 1 of them was that you had a skiing accident. The second one was an incident where you were in contact with the police, but we’ll get to that.”

We’d first spend 20 minutes talking about the true memory, which people are getting going. It feels good. I’ve got a structured interview as well, which I’ll then mirror in the false memory, so it all feels very legit.

And then we get to the second memory, and I say, “There’s this other important memory that your parents recalled.” They’d say, “I don’t remember that.” And I’d say, “Okay, but I have this really detailed account. All you have to do is remember it.”

Then I would do the illusion of transparency, which is a really powerful psychological tool: to make people feel like they know what’s going on when they don’t really. The thing I would do is just say, “Well, if you want to, we can do this memory-retrieval technique called an imagination exercise.”

I don’t like to call it repression, but sometimes we hide away memories that we don’t like about ourselves. I’m using words that people know and mechanisms that people have heard of that are frankly quite disputed in actual science. But people go, “Oh, well, maybe I did repress this.”

Then everybody says yes. Technically, they could say no. They can say, “No, I don’t want to do that.” But they go, “Yeah, of course I want to know.”

And so I do this imagination exercise where people close their eyes and just imagine what could have happened, basically. Every time they said a detail—I remember my very first detail ever because I was so excited; they had their eyes closed, right?—I’d always say, “Yeah, good job, good job.”

I’m right next to the head of the department because they were worried, since I was a PhD student, about the ethics and the consequences. It took years to get the protocol through ethics and to make sure it was safe. Anyway, I’m grinning as the person with their eyes closed says the most trivial detail: “I remember a blue sky.” And I remember thinking, “It’s working.”

Did you know it was going to happen at all?

Oh, no. I had no idea.

That’s so fascinating.

From the trivial details, I’d always say, “Yeah, good job, good job.” That’s social reinforcement, a little treat. They would remember more and more details, and then they’d get more specific, and then they’d tell me who it was they allegedly attacked or stole from, and where they were.

Those details had to come from them because I don’t know enough about their lives, right? This is the other thing with false memories: it’s basing them on lots of real pieces of memories—real places, real people, real feelings. They’re just woven together in a way that never happened.

After just 3 interviews, you’ve got 70% of people confessing to a crime that never happened.

First of all, great study. Great job all around. To what degree has this been elaborated on and proven further since? Because it’s a super-powerful idea, whether it’s 70% or any kind of percentage.

What I wanted with the study was just to show it’s possible.

That’s really the powerful thing: that it’s possible.

Right. And so it could have been 2 people, and I would have been happy. The fact that it was so possible was frankly quite surprising to everybody.

We did, in fact, cut the study short because we told ethics that we were only going to have about a 13% hit rate. We were like, “This is working really well. We’re going to stop.” That was just because of power calculations. Science. Because science.

Since then, there have been other studies on implanting false memories. There have also been studies using AI tools, looking at whether or not we remember, or think we remember, incidents differently or better if they were created with AI images or videos of ourselves.

There was a study that came out—I think it was this year—by a team including Elizabeth Loftus, which showed that if you turn photos of yourself into videos using AI, you are more likely to believe those things happened in the way that AI is telling you they did, even though AI has absolutely no idea.

Then you are more likely to remember it with high confidence, believing that it happened in the way that this AI created it. We can see that there are lots of versions of this, whether it’s in interpersonal social interactions or interactions with technology.

There’s a big replication of my study happening right now at University of Maastricht—or it’s about to happen, hopefully. That’s where we’re at.

There are a lot of questions I want to ask you. One of them is, doesn’t this mean that at scale, you could have something like a government use propaganda to mass-gaslight a population? Implant false memories using AI, using whatever tools they have?

Yes. That is definitely already happening.

That’s terrifying. Is there anything you’ve learned about defending against that? I guess knowing that the first step is just knowing that it’s possible. That’s already a very powerful piece of knowledge.

That’s right. The first thing that’s important is for people to understand that they are capable of creating these false memories, and that they’re not this really unusual, hard-to-generate thing. They’re actually a normal memory process.

That insight is why I wrote The Memory Illusion, because I think people need to just understand that their minds work like this, and that they’re really glitchy when it comes to the accuracy of their autobiographical memories. But again, that’s probably ultimately a good thing as well in terms of our overall human experience.

What happens if you do have an important piece of information that isn’t being distorted, right? You’re a witness to a crime, for example, and you now know that this is going to be important. What do you do?

The really simple answer is: don’t trust your brain. Just make sure you write it down. Assume you are going to forget everything. Assume you’re going to forget, no matter how important, how emotional, how intense it is, or how much you say to yourself, “I will remember.” You won’t.

This is a failure of prospective memory, it’s called. Just assume that you’re not going to remember. The closer you get to the time at which an event happened—we call this contemporaneous evidence—the closer you get in time, the higher quality that memory is going to be.

I think there’s this myth sometimes that if you’re drunk, or if you’re high, or if you’re really emotional, somehow you should wait. You should go home, sleep it off, and then recall your memory. That is not what the current advice in memory research actually says.

It’s in the moment, as soon as possible: write it down, record it outside your brain. You can do it again when you wake up, but then at least you have an original version.

Yeah. You used the analogy of a Wikipedia page for memory. I think that’s a pretty useful way to think about it. It’s kind of crowdsourced by all the different influences you have, all the different experiences, all the other people, and you telling other people about the memory. All of that edits the Wikipedia page of your memory.

It does. Collective and individual memory are really interesting. They interact in a really interesting way.

I would always say, when I train, for example, people in the German military who go to deal with warlords, that I was working with agents who were going abroad and who were in these really difficult situations where they had to remember a lot of information that was important for national security.

They couldn’t just sit there with a tape recorder being like, “Hey,” or with their phone being like, “Hey, Mister Warlord, can you just talk into this a bit closer?” You can’t do that. And so you have to remember it.

What they were doing was coming back from their deployments and meeting up immediately for a team meeting. It could be like, “What did you remember? What happened?” The problem is that they would do that before writing their notes, and that is the wrong way around.

They don’t do that anymore because I’ve told them not to do that anymore. But it feels good. It feels like collectively we are going to remember more details. Because you do, but it doesn’t mean that those details are right.

That’s where I’d always say: have your own version before you talk to anybody. Then—and my colleague, Dr. Annalise Fredevelt, is one of the experts on the effect of things like eye closure on memory and collective memory—she has found repeatedly that if you remember things together, especially if you’ve already got an original version of your own, you do usually remember more details.

Especially if you are helping each other to remember, like in a relationship, you’ll have someone who’s better at remembering certain kinds of details—maybe names, or what happened, or what you were doing—and the other person’s better at when it happened.

You can have these complementary memories that come in in social situations, and you can then have more details that are remembered afterward.

Right, but there are conflicting forces here. So that’s true, but also, as you said, it’s true that together, you can weave a narrative that never happened.

So together, you can solidify the thing that actually happened, maybe if you take notes beforehand. But at the same time, if you don't take notes, then you can just make things up very effectively together because you're yes-anding the whole time, building together a castle that's false.

Or distorted.

Distorted.

Yeah. But you can also sometimes go back to your original account and go, “Actually, no, that was a bit wrong.” As an analytical person and someone who works as an expert witness on memory cases, I just want to see all the versions. I want your version history—the complete version history of your memory—and then I can tell you whether I think things have gone wrong here and, if so, why.

Have you seen different versions of memory that are really conflicting? What have you learned about memory from that? Can they be very conflicting? Do people explain the same experience in very different ways?

Well, there are different people having very different memories of the same experience, and there's the same person having different memories of the same experience. So I work in both, in some ways, as an expert witness, but mostly on the individual changing their story in a dramatic way.

Ah, yeah.

A witness or an alleged victim might have one story the first time they go to the police and then, 3 years later, have a very different, sometimes categorically different, account. The question is: Were they just too shy initially to say what really happened? Were they under pressure from other people? Were they not really remembering? Why has it changed?

Or could it be that they have undergone some really problematic hypnotherapy, or just shady therapy in general, that has convinced them that things are maybe much worse than they initially remembered? Therapy can bring out more details, for sure, but the problem is that certain kinds of therapy mirror what we do in false memory research in terms of implanting false memories. It just makes it really messy, and it makes the quality of the evidence really low because we can no longer tell what is because of the therapy and what’s actually remembered.

This is so fascinating. What are the ways you can possibly figure out which is true: the thing you remembered initially or the thing you're now remembering 4 years later?

Receipts. That's all you've got. You have to look at your original versions. If you only have your version now, the only thing you can look for is evidence that confirms or shows that it didn't happen. If you can't access that, then it ultimately is a matter of—especially if you've got 2 people saying completely different things—it ends up being a battle of confidence, ultimately.

This is a tricky question, but you mentioned therapy. It does seem like what therapists do is they want to find a problem, and they can then just project the problem and convince you that the problem existed. So how do you know? Is therapy even effective? It takes a very special therapist not to implant a trauma that never happened, or details that never happened to a trauma that did.

It depends on the kind of therapy. There's a lot of therapy that is evidence-based and very much focused on tackling the feelings and reactions that you have right now. Then there is an area, or a bunch of areas, of therapy, including psychoanalysis, which are very focused on trying to find retroactive sources of mental illness in your personal past.

I am very critical of those kinds of therapy, both from an explanatory perspective and from a false memory perspective. I don't think that we are the way we are because of individual incidents that happened to us. I think that is a wild thing to think about the brain. To be like, “You are the way you are because of this one interaction you had that one time” is—I mean, maybe this explains a tiny bit of you, but what about all the other life experiences you have every single day?

I think that there's sometimes an oversimplified search for answers or sources of the problems that we have, and I don't like that. I don't think it's true. I think that there can be an uncautious approach to memory, as you were saying, where you have someone who is saying things, and your role as a therapist is to help them manage their emotions now and feel better.

The other thing is that they have a very different role from mine. A therapist is trying to manage the person's well-being now, whereas I am looking at the evidentiary quality. That is a completely different role. I'm almost—not quite—the other side, but I'm in a very different role.

Well, you just want the truth.

I'm criticizing and analyzing their memories, whereas therapists are more likely to be trying to help people manage the memories in their day-to-day life. So it doesn't matter to therapists if they're true or not. What matters is that they're troubling to the people themselves.

But once you get into a courtroom setting, as you say, the facts and what actually happened matter. It's not just what you remember; it's what actually happened.

Maybe you can speak to the other, the non-courtroom setting, because this is all fascinating. The positive side of it is that you can basically shape your memories to be happier. I find this in myself. Maybe you could speak to that.

If I look into past relationships, if I just think about, or maybe speak to others about, the positive things—really focus my mind on the memory, on the positive memories—then everything just becomes more positive. I think it makes me feel like I'm way happier about my past. So there must be something to that, because I almost start to forget that the negative stuff happened.

The same thing on the flip side is that if you focus on the negative, then the negative stuff just overpowers everything else, and you have a very heavy negative feeling about your past. So that seems like the way to live a healthy, happy life: just to focus on the positive. Not to sound cliché, but basically modifying your memories continuously so that everything was just great. Is there something to that?

The essence of that is right. There is something called state-dependent memory, which is that you're more likely to remember things that were consolidated or created as memories if they match the state that you're in now.

If you're sad now and your brain's just going, you're more likely to remember other sad times because your memory and the emotional state of your brain are basically already activating those networks of sadness. It's like, “Here are some other sad things and shitty things that happened to you.” It's the same if you are embarrassed. The classic example that we usually use as memory researchers is that moment where you do something embarrassing and, for the next 6 hours, all you're thinking of is all the other embarrassing things you've ever done.

It's like your brain is saying, “Would you like some other embarrassing stories?” Obviously, you're going, “No, thank you. Please stop,” but you have this spreading activation, as it's called, of these synapses just lighting up new networks, and you're going, “Ah!” There's this other memory that's attached to the same feeling.

It's the same with happiness: people who are happier tend to remember more happy memories. Most of the time, unless you're depressed, people look back at their lives with a rosy reminiscence bias. They're more likely to remember the positives than the negatives.

But it's not quite the way you were describing it. It's not quite that you only remember the good—the objectively good things that happened. It's more that your interpretation of the things that you've experienced is either neutral or positive.

For me, for example, growing up with my father, who had paranoid schizophrenia, is something that I see as a net positive. Obviously, at the time, it was experienced in a complicated way, but in hindsight, it defined my life and completely gave me a perspective of the human mind that I just wouldn't have had otherwise.

I see that as a positive part of my autobiography, and that is what good therapy should be doing. It should be taking negative experiences and not overwriting them or changing them. Our brains do that naturally anyway, but trying to work with what you've got—the experiences, the true experiences—and then just shifting the emotional content so that how you're dealing with them now is good.

How much of this Daniel Kahneman-type idea is that we live a lot of our life in memory? There's the direct, in-the-moment experience of a thing, and then there's remembering that thing over and over and over and over.

There's getting married, or whatever—a pleasant thing—and if you look over a lifetime, the pleasure you derive from that thing is disproportionately from remembering the thing rather than experiencing it. Is there something to that?

I think so. In his experiments, he asked participants if they were offered a holiday that they could go on, but they wouldn't remember it. They'd have the present-day experience of enjoyment on this holiday—I think it was a tropical vacation or something that he offered people—and he then said, “But you're not going to be able to remember this. Would you still go?”

A lot of people said, “No, I wouldn't go on that holiday if I can't remember it.” I think that's interesting, and I think that sort of “pics or it didn't happen” idea means that the social media generation is perhaps even more in line with that, also in terms of how you deal with that in a social context.

Sharing those memories with others and those experiences, and which experiences end up being the important ones in our lives.

Yeah, there's a real case to be made. There's this kind of ridiculous thing that happens now whenever something cool is happening: people take out their phones and film it. But the case for that is that this gives you something to look back at, so it's worthwhile to take a picture, actually.

Although it's even more worthwhile to pay attention.

Attention is the glue between reality and memory. If you're using your phone to not have to pay attention and not have to put any work into remembering it, then you're going to look at that picture later and go, "What was this?" You've tried to outsource it in a way that our brains don't work.

How hard is it to modify memories from a neuroscience perspective? If you look at brain-computer interfaces like Neuralink, for example, do you think there's a future where we're implanting or modifying memories directly?

That's basically what we do as human beings already, and I don't see why technology couldn't do exactly the same thing.

Just speed that up. So right now, we could do that with language, right? We just talk to each other and modify them, and we just speed that up.

Language, but also thinking about it yourself. It's called autosuggestion when you suggest things to yourself that didn't happen. That often comes from reading something, seeing something, thinking about something, or hearing somebody else's story and going, "Did something like that happen to me?"

Then you start picturing it and thinking about the context it could have happened in. Then you start to basically implant a false memory in yourself. That can happen as well.

I think with things like Neuralink, it would be the same: you'd have the ability to do that. Again, I still think that this interaction between humans and AI, or AI-like systems, is the same as a social interaction, which is why I was saying it's so important that we have social psychologists in the room.

Ultimately, whether it's an AI or another person, it's the same brain that you're modifying.

So what you're worried about there is that you become untethered from reality, like you fabricate too many details about the memory? If a human is interacting with AI, and the AI is telling the human what they want to hear, are you worried that, over time, you start to just have a very overly modified version of your past narrative?

I'm not necessarily worried about the fact that AI and generative AI can create false memories. That is, again, something we've also been doing for a long time. Modified photos are something we had before AI that was already messing with people's minds. Even just what you have in the frame of a shot matters.

If you take a holiday snap and you're omitting a really important part of what actually happened on that holiday because you're taking a picture of the nicest part and not the garbage behind you, that's going to have an impact on your memory as well. Versions of that have always existed.

Historically, if you go even further back, in some ways we've never been closer to facts than we are now. There's this whole idea of, "Oh, we're living in this post-truth," or blah, blah, blah. But that is not true.

We didn't even know how to write for a long time. We had no way of reliably cataloging information, never mind the scientific method, never mind reliably sharing it with one another or fact-checking quickly with things like Google. We're so close to facts, but that, in some ways, I think, is the worry: we've gotten comfortable feeling like we can just access things that aren't modified or that are less likely to be modified, and now they're more likely to be.

That can interface with our memories.

Just practically, is there a protocol for self-modifying memories so you can live a happier life?

There is. It's called cognitive restructuring: when you actively and deliberately change an aspect of a memory, usually for some therapeutic outcome—to be happier, to be better in some way.

That's really interesting, right? Not just if you have some kind of issue, but just how to have a life well lived. Does that work?

Yeah, it totally works. I do it all the time. Again, it's about thinking about experiences you've had, positive or negative. Usually, the negative ones are the ones we need to work on more.

Instead of thinking, "Wow, how terrible was that?" think, "What did I learn from that? What has this given me that other people haven't experienced? What is it that it taught me about who my friends are? What are these insights that I've won from this experience?"

I think that is an important part of resilience that we ideally need to celebrate and teach more than the opposite, which is hanging in the negatives.

That's probably really good for relationships too, right? Together, you form the collective memory, and you work on that. You can just fabricate or modify it toward the positive.

With relationships, one of my favorite pieces of research on memories is that if you ask people in relationships who does most of the housework or who does most of certain things, the numbers that they give you are revealing. Someone will say, "I do 60%." The other person will say, "I do 50%." You add them up, and that's more than 100%. That's basically always the case.

On lots of different fronts, people will claim that they do more, and if you ask them how much their partner does, they will diminish it. One of the tips I always give for relationships, in terms of memories, is actually just sharing what you're actually doing.

Initially, it feels a bit cumbersome because it's quite unnatural to be like, "I've just taken out the rubbish. I've just taken out the bins," or, "I've just booked us a hotel." But saying it out loud means the other person is able to perceive it and then can add it to their internal star chart of how much you've done in the relationship.

They're more likely to actually perceive what you're contributing. You might think, "Of course she remembers that I took out the bins," but not necessarily. She might not even have really perceived it. If you're reminding each other of all the things that you're doing, it can feel more balanced over time.

This memory is just so fascinating. Is it possible—this is a little bit outside of the topic of false memories—but is it possible to train memory? What have you understood about memory? Can it be improved?

Yep, it can be improved, and there are now some really good brain-training apps as well that can help people work better with attention and do N-back tests, where you remember information a couple of pieces back. What did I tell you three sentences ago?

There are all these kinds of games, effectively, that you can play that will in fact train how your brain is using its networks. There was one that was developed by researchers, including researchers at the University of Bonn in Germany, and it's called NeuroNation. That's one that I like because it's all these really short games.

The idea that doing one thing, like Sudoku or whatever—the sort of classics—to train your brain is only going to be useful up to a point, because it's then the same thing over and over again. What you want to be doing is lots of different kinds of tasks so that your brain has to remain flexible.

Short and many is the answer, rather than one thing hard. It's almost the opposite of expertise.

Yeah, so doing this regularly, like keeping your mind sharp—that's interesting. I'm terrible at remembering names.

Me too.

Is there a trick to doing that?

I don't know, because I'm also terrible at remembering names. Allegedly, there are tricks, and it's mostly to make the information more sticky by making it a bigger network in the brain.

Usually, when you hear a name—especially for you and me—it's gone immediately.

Yeah.

That's partly because—I like to think the positive of that is that we're focusing on other things about the person. What are they like? What's this next interaction going to be? Maybe you're a bit nervous about what they're going to say or what you're going to say.

You're already thinking a step ahead in terms of interpreting the situation. It's quite an overwhelming situation when you first meet somebody because there's a lot to take in. If, however, a name is important, then you need to focus when they actually say their name and tune out the other stuff, which can be really difficult.

Then give yourself a mnemonic: "How do I remember this name?" You could visualize something. You could have a weird word game or some sort of rhyme that you create for the person. You can say, "Julia with the big ears"—whatever works for you, as long as it sticks.

There's a caveat that I recently discovered about myself in terms of why I might have particularly bad memory for names. All of these mnemonic devices mostly rely on creating elaborate pictures in your mind. Memory champions—people who do competitive remembering—will tell you that they create these really elaborate images in their heads.

I recently discovered that I have aphantasia. Aphantasia is the inability to create mental imagery. When I was trying these techniques, I was going, "None of these are working for me." It turns out it's because I don't see anything, whereas other people actually see pictures in their minds. I think there's some individual-differences stuff going on there that we haven't quite understood.

Can you imagine a castle in your head and look at it?

No. So the memory palace idea is absurd to me.

Wow.

The test for aphantasia is really easy: close your eyes and picture a red apple.

You can't picture a red apple?

I just see black.

Wow.

Yeah. There's a scale. Some people are hyperphantasic, where they can have a really elaborate version of the apple. Other people have a gray sort of outline, and I have nothing.

Wait. How does your memory work? If you think about a past event, are you visualizing it, or are you just thinking about it?

Oh, that's the question. Or is it just a concept?

I think it might be—I might be operating in the space of concepts.

Hmm. Because I do, and I think that's why I'm so interested in concepts and ideas. We know that people with aphantasia are less likely to care about their childhood memories because they can't visualize them.

I'm trying to think if I can visualize people's faces from the past. I have a feeling like I can.

Ooh, but are you seeing anything?

Am I actually seeing it? I don't know. I think I'm—I actually reduced those people down to a few concepts about the characteristics of their face, and I might be visualizing the concepts. Boy.

Interesting, right? Most people with aphantasia don't realize they have it until they have this kind of conversation. I didn't know.

I don't know if I can visualize the red apple now. Oh, boy. Yeah, because the memory palace thing has never really worked for me either. I tried. Interesting. Okay.

I have a hypothesis that people who are analytical are more likely to—I think it intersects with other things. A lot of my friends, it turns out, have aphantasia, and I think there's a version of intelligence that it might be related to, or an interest in certain kinds of concepts that it's related to. But I don't know—

I'm going to—okay.

Because it's early days in the research on this.

All right. This conversation is totally leading me to do some soul-searching on many fronts. You have done incredible work across a number of disciplines, from sexuality to evil to memory, and now in your upcoming book, Green Crime: Inside the Minds of the People Destroying the Planet and How to Stop Them.

Can you speak to the psychology of the people and the organizations that are killing the Earth, as you describe, including illegal gold miners, animal traffickers, con men who falsify data and bribe regulators to keep polluting, and many other types of criminals? Is there a psychology similar to the psychology of some of the folks we've been talking about?

The book Green Crime is really an experiment for me in whether we can apply criminological and criminal psychology ideas to the area of environmental protection and environmental crimes. There are people who are convicted of crimes specifically in relation to destroying the Earth and our natural resources, our shared resources.

I sometimes think about the Earth as a house. If someone were coming into your house, setting things on fire, poisoning your water, or leaving a bunch of garbage all over it, and then walking out unpunished, you'd be really upset, and correctly so. That's what people are doing on a planetary scale.

The question is, are we responding effectively? If so, who is responding effectively? What is the adequate punishment? How should we deal with the people who we catch?

So in this book, the question was whether the people who are, for example, involved in the Dieselgate Volkswagen case are similar to other kinds of criminals. That case was all about lying about the emissions being produced by diesel cars, especially in the United States.

Volkswagen produced these cars for 10 years with what was called a defeat device, which is a specific device that makes it look like the cars don't emit very much nitrous oxides, but they were actually way over the legal limit for pollution. The reason we should care about nitrous oxides is because there is no bottom limit of nitrous oxides that is healthy for the human lung. Basically, any amount is bad for you.

It's related to things like asthma and premature death. It's related to all kinds of negative, immediate health effects. This was being pumped out of these cars at wildly high rates—40 times the legal limit in some cases—and they just lied about it. They covered it up.

There's a big debate within Volkswagen among the people who've been convicted. A lot of people say, "I didn't really know. I'm being scapegoated." Fine, people knew. The question of how much and who is up for debate, but certainly people knew because they had to create the thing. They had to literally create this piece of software to put into the cars.

When they got caught, they lied about it, and eventually the truth came out, but it was about 10 years later. The question is, what leads clever people—these aren't idiots; these are clever engineers who are literally working on emissions—to lie about it, to create these things, and to continue lying when they are caught?

They know exactly what these emissions do to people. They know exactly how harmful they are. So that is one of the cases I cover in the book, and I'm looking at it more as a case study for this kind of crime, which is corporate collective crime and lying. I'm looking at what leads people in these settings to lie, cover up each other's crimes, and conform to these new norms—these harmful environmental norms.

I look at it in that way. In other chapters, I look at people going undercover and uncovering poaching gangs. There, it's somewhat procedural. I didn't know that there were undercover agents infiltrating poaching gangs. I didn't know that INTERPOL was involved in all of these kinds of environmental crime operations, or how exciting some of these cases get when you really see the people who are trying to hold others accountable.

What are the different ways to fight environmental crime that you describe?

What I found most interesting in researching Green Crime was that I was speaking to people from the United Nations who were doing these huge research reports on things like the international trafficking in wildlife crime. I was talking to people who were infiltrating organized crime groups at the Environmental Investigation Agency. It's like the undercover police of the Earth, and they're infiltrating these gangs involved in poaching and other activities.

I was talking to an INTERPOL agent, and I think all of these people were talking about very different ways of measuring environmental crime and responding to it. Depending on who you talk to, the answer to "How do we fight crime?" will be very different. The answer is also potentially very different from how we deal with other kinds of crime that are more commonly discussed, like violent crime.

Initially, when I started trying to apply criminal psychology to these really big crimes, which are often multilevel, you've got bosses—whether it's a corporate boss or an illegal gang boss—you've got the middlemen, and you've got the people on the ground who actually have the guns and are killing people or animals, logging, or polluting.

You've got all these levels of people, and that makes it very different from the kinds of crimes that we often talk about in other kinds of true crime, for example, where it's one person, maybe a couple of people, against one other person or a couple of other people. The scale is normally so tiny, and it's mostly violent crime, which is mostly arguments and bad decisions.

It's people who are frankly often quite vulnerable themselves, like substance users, people with mental health problems, and people who are sleeping rough. These are not healthy, normal people most of the time who are perpetrating bad crimes.

Yet in this context, in environmental crime, this is where I couldn't apply the research directly. You've got some of the smartest people in the world who are still engaging in fraud, covering up financial information, and creating shell companies in order to hide certain things, like the proceeds of poaching.

You've got people who are out there illegally fishing, and someone's insuring the vessel that has literally been registered by INTERPOL as a criminal vessel for 10 years. Someone's going, "I'll insure that." You've got these really complicated other factors going on.

I thought what was so interesting was ultimately stripping back each layer of each of these crimes and asking, "Who is that person?" Who is the person who's insuring this? Who is the person who is out there engaging in illegal fishing on the boat? Who is the person who's financing the boat? Who is the person who's investigating them?

Looking at all the different levels, I think that's where you get some clarity. At the end of the book, I felt so optimistic.

I went into Green Crime because, like most people in the world, I think about the climate crisis on a regular basis. At least according to a recent UN climate survey, something like 85% to 90% of people in the world think about the climate crisis on a regular basis. Most people think about it every single day.

This idea that there's a minority of people who care about climate change is an illusion. That's not true. If you ask people what the emotional consequences of those feelings are, people say things like eco-anxiety, anger, sadness, and grief. We're worried about the future.

What you want is for people to feel motivated, energized, and purposeful about tackling one of the biggest issues of our time. Certainly, by meeting all of these UN researchers—but I went to so many conferences.

You have no idea how many conferences I went to. I went to anti-corruption conferences. I went to wildlife crime conferences. I went to the specific meeting of multilateral agreements to see how people were negotiating in the room and the tensions between them.

It was wild. It was so interesting. It's such a huge space, and it gave me so much hope for the future.

And actually, the way you frame it very clearly is a crime against Earth. Somehow, that's more actionable. It's less controversial and divisive because climate change, as a topic, has become a political issue. Is it really happening? What are the right policies? It's nice to look at actual, obvious criminals.

Yeah, where no one's debating, “Did someone just burn down this rainforest?” It's like, well, we can see it. I was at a European Space Agency conference recently, and they were telling us about the different satellites that are pointing at the Earth rather than out into space and imaging, through all these different wavelengths, exactly what's changing. They're basically just chronicling how the Earth has changed over time.

A lot of these environmental crimes can be seen from space and can be measured. As long as you trust that data, the question then is, okay, these crimes are happening. How do we stop them? As you say, I was very much trying—I mean, you can't write a book on environmental issues and be apolitical. I think that's impossible.

I was certainly trying to look at it quite logically and go, “Here's a crime. We all agree this is bad.” These are people who have been convicted. This isn't just someone who didn't do their recycling. I think that individual level is often detrimental.

These are huge crimes that cost us a huge amount of money to clean up, that cost a huge amount of human health, and that have these other knock-on effects. They're changing, certainly, the structure of our planet in a way that we can already feel. The purpose of the book is to try to show that we actually have lots of laws already. We've got lots of enforcers, and we've got lots of researchers, from space and not from space, looking at these issues, tracking them, and trying to hunt down the criminals.

So what can you say about how people end up doing bad stuff in a company when there's a lot of them? Are they bad people? How do you get to that place where, in a large collective, you're doing something really bad?

The psychology of environmental crime often boils down to the same kinds of things that we've already been talking about in the context of “evil,” where it's things like conformity—doing what you think everyone else is doing, or what you know everyone else is doing. There's an industry where you know that lots of people are cheating or fudging the facts in some way. Then you both feel the need and maybe rationalize the ability to deceive because it's market forces, right?

Ultimately, in a free market or even a controlled one, you've got these people who are just lying to everybody else. They're saying, “We're getting to these outcomes by following the rules that everyone else is.” And they're not. They're just lying to consumers. They're lying to the regulators. They're just lying.

Other people who are trying to be honest and play the game clean see the success of this other company and go, “Well, we want to have what they have.” Then they realize they can't, with the technology that exists, get there. So what do they realize? “Well, they must be cheating.” Then they start cheating, and it has this trickle effect of making everyone else fall in line with these unethical practices that are unethical on so many levels.

Later, you get these huge lawsuits because, if you get caught, everyone's upset. The investors are upset. The consumers are upset. The environmentalists, the lawyers—everybody's upset with you because you've committed this huge crime.

Yeah, you explain so many forces there, but even the simple force of social pressure—very slight social pressure. I was just watching this documentary based on a book, Ordinary Men, talking about the Germans in Nazi Germany who were taking part in the execution squads in Eastern Europe. They were given the option not to do it, and ultimately, most people decided to keep being part of the execution squad, even though they seemingly had no hatred in their hearts whatsoever.

It's just slight social pressure. You don't want to be the guy who chickens out. Just a little bit of social pressure, and you're able to very quickly dehumanize a large number of people and murder them without any hate in your heart, without anything that could be trivially and directly identified as “evil.” Just normal people doing very bad things.

You can be an emissions engineer with a kid with asthma and an old grandma who's struggling with her health and still feel like, “Yeah, I know that I'm creating these dirty cars, and yet I'm going to do it anyway.” As you say, there's conformity, social pressure, and rationalization, and those are all very human experiences.

That's why, in the book, I always focus on whistleblowers—a big word, but people who at some point actually helped to uncover what was going on. We're back to the topic of heroes, bystander effects, and all of the social psychology and criminal psychology that we've been talking about this whole time. That's why I thought it was so important to apply that research to this context and say, “Okay, so now we've got these people who are willing to engage in these crimes. They know it.”

But there's also this question of how you get out of it, and who is going to stop them. Going back to the idea of heroes, you usually do have a hero at some point in these cases, either an external one or an internal one, who goes, “This needs to stop.”

Do you have empathy for those criminals?

I have empathy for everybody.

Has that ever been challenged in your life—where you've had trouble empathizing?

Ooh. There is one context. I don't know if it's that I have trouble empathizing. I think it is that I have trouble empathizing, and I just think, “I don't want to.” I don't know why this is the one thing, but I remember writing Evil and getting to the section on sexual slavery.

There was something about that very specific issue of having women, in particular, in a confined area where you have often trafficked them and then forcing them to engage in repeated sexual acts.

It's tough for you.

I can't. That's the—I know that. I'm not saying that that's the worst kind of crime. I don't think it necessarily is. I just think, in my mind, there was just a, “You can't go there.” I don't know how to empathize with that person.

Yeah, I probably have a bunch of categories of people. Stuff with kids is just—it's tough. It's tough.

What gives you hope about this beautiful world of ours, about the future of human civilization, given all the darkness that you've studied?

I think the fact that there are people who study the darkness gives me hope, and that there are people who want to understand why we do bad things, myself included. I mostly get to benefit from other people's research that I summarize into my books.

I think the tech that we're now experiencing mostly gives me hope, in that there is this whole new frontier of capacity to implement scientific findings if we want to do so and choose to do so. Even in memory interviewing, we were talking about the potential role of AI in distorting our memories.

When I give talks, including corporate talks, I tell people the prompt that I use for the cognitive interview, which is the best practice in memory interviewing, because you can also tell AI tools to do the appropriate kind of interviewing if you're talking about memory.

I created a company called Spot in 2017, which uses—well, we're now building it out to be AI, but it's basically a tool to record important emotional memories and to share them as information with others. I've always been interested in how tech can help us record important emotional events, like with Spot, Talk to Spot, and how technology can actually make us feel more human.

There are these capacities, like memory, that we're bad at, and tech can help us overcome some of those shortcomings, as long as we use it in a science-backed way rather than just freestyling. I think the worry I have sometimes is that we're ignoring the social scientists entirely when building these systems. It ends up becoming an engineering math problem, when, in terms of the consequences for humanity, that's not actually what it's going to be.

I'm always keen on connecting social sciences and big issues.

Can you speak more about Spot? This sounds fascinating. So, what's entailed in recording important memories?

Spot came out of my going around the world and giving everyone an existential crisis. I'd go around and, with you, say, “Look, our memory is really faulty, and here are all the ways it can lie to us.” People would go, “Oh, no.” Then I'd go, “Bye.”

At some point, I thought, “Maybe I should do something about this.” So I did. I did a TED Talk, and I was invited to a tech conference called Founders Forum, which is a meeting of tech founders and others in London, but also in a couple of other places. While there, I met the founder of Evernote...

Phil Libin. I met Phil Libin at this event, and I was talking to him about my research on memory and how I've been wanting to implement, or translate, what I've been doing into something that could prevent false memories. Specifically, I was interested in creating an AI, or at least a machine-administered version, of the cognitive interview.

So that's the neutral approach. It's already a scripted approach, which was helpful. It's been scripted for decades as a cognitive interview. When we train police on how to do it in places like the UK, it's literally just asking people to basically read a script that we have fine-tuned over the years.

What can do that really well? Chatbots can do that really well. Together with Phil Libin and my 2 co-founders, Dillon and Daniel, I ended up co-founding Spot. It ended up pivoting into this general reporting tool for workplaces. This was before #MeToo, but the idea was that in lots of workplace environments, you have important emotional events that are really important to understand but are really hard to preserve.

Often, you have this really bad evidence that you're relying on. Someone at some point goes to HR and says something, and somebody else says something else, and you're unsure as a company whom to trust and what's real. We were trying to streamline that.

Now Spot is a reporting tool for any kind of compliance issues. You can talk to Spot, and it is this chatbot interface that administers the cognitive interview and then creates a report that, if you want, gets sent to your employer. We work with insurance companies and medical companies. We work with the Bar, so all the lawyers in the UK use it themselves, which I always think is a real stamp of approval when the Bar Council is using your tool.

Nice.

But again, not bars and drinks. Bars and lawyers.

Yes.

Just picturing all these people with flair throwing vodka bottles in the air. Not them.

They're great too, but yeah.

They could also use it, potentially. But we've got people reporting that someone left bleach in a machine. So it's a more small-memory kind of thing. It's streamlining reporting processes.

I mean, can you envision something like Spot being used for recording generally important emotional events, positive and negative, throughout your life? That seems like something the LLMs of today would really benefit from, not just strictly looking at compliance or in the context of companies.

Yeah. Again, that's why, in the context of Spot, it's just compliance. But I think in private life, and in terms of where I think this could go, I'm interested in all memories. I think that important life events can be recorded. I think the idea of having grief bots and having things that have a representation of you or your loved ones is something that I'd like to see in the future.

Have you gotten a chance to work with maybe the Gemini team, or OpenAI folks, or any of them? Anthropic? Because it seems like they don't have enough people who think about this.

Well, I'm just waiting for an email.

Okay. Wow.

Maybe I'll get one after this.

I'm hanging—

Hit me up, guys.

Yeah, I'm hanging out with DeepMind folks. That would be really fascinating to see. First of all, the proper cognitive interview is really interesting: how not to lead, how not to plant false memories. I don't think any of them are thinking about that.

I don't think so either. And then how to make sure that you're using that to help people store contemporaneous evidence outside of their brain. I just think there's so much potential that's being wasted right now.

So the hope is that technology, and that there are people willing to empathize with all different flavors of the human condition—that's your source of hope for the future?

And to celebrate all the people who are doing amazing research and really cracking down on things like environmental crime, and spending their lives to fight specific kinds of crime.

Yeah, I like this Earth. I hope we fight for it. It's the only one we got, and I'm pretty hesitant to say that maybe, in this galaxy, we might be the only ones. So let's protect it.

What's your name again? Just kidding. Julia, this is a huge honor. I've been a fan of yours for a long time. I'm really glad we got a chance to talk. This was really fascinating. Your work is fascinating, and you're just a fascinating human being, so thank you.

Thank you.