# Are psychopaths born evil? | Julia Shaw and Lex Fridman *Lex Clips* · https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0PIha7XI-Z4 ## Summary Criminal psychologist Julia Shaw discusses with Lex Fridman whether people are born evil, using the "baby Hitler" question as a starting point. She argues no one is born evil, that the label "evil" ends understanding and enables harm, and that war relies on dehumanization and de-individuation. She makes the case for "evil empathy" — understanding those who commit terrible acts as the only way to prevent such behavior. ## Key points - Julia Shaw would not kill baby Hitler because she does not believe people are born evil. - She argues the label 'evil' ends conversations and 'others' people, making horrendous acts against them feel justified. - Lex Fridman notes that war requires dehumanizing the other side as a fight of good versus evil. - Shaw adds de-individuation, where individuals are swallowed by the group and gain a cloak of morality. - She calls empathy for so-called evil people 'evil empathy' and says it is needed to understand and prevent harmful behavior. - As a criminal psychologist working on sexual abuse, rape, and murder cases, she says understanding psychological and social levers is the only way to make society safer. ## Notes ### Are people born evil? - Julia Shaw frames the "Would you kill baby Hitler?" question as a test of whether people think harmful traits are innate or socialized. - Psychologists who studied Hitler's life found traits like sadism and low empathy, but he did not show these strongly in early life. - Shaw's answer is no, she would not kill baby Hitler, because there is no straight line from baby to adult and people are not born evil. ### The problem with the word "evil" - Shaw avoids calling human beings evil because the label "others" people and can make us capable of perpetrating horrendous crimes against them. - Calling someone evil ends the conversation: it declares they are so different from us that we need not understand them. - She wants to dismantle the artificial good/evil divide and use continuums for negative traits instead. - We all have the capacity for terrible things; the real question is why we don't do them. ### War, dehumanization, and de-individuation - Lex Fridman observes that war requires dehumanizing the other side, framing conflict as good versus evil, and both sides usually see themselves as good. - Shaw adds de-individuation: seeing yourself as part of a group rather than an individual, creating an "us versus them" mentality. - Together, collapsed empathy and group identity provide a "cloak of justice" even when you may be on the wrong side. ### The case for "evil empathy" - Shaw promotes empathy even for people labeled evil, calling it "evil empathy." - Her book is titled Evil (Making Evil in the UK), referencing Nietzsche's idea that "thinking evil is making evil" — evil is a label we place on others. - As a criminal psychologist working on sexual abuse, rape, and murder cases, she says labeling people does not stop behavior. - Understanding the psychological and social levers behind harmful behavior is the only way to make society safer. ## Transcript [00:02] understand in the same context. - So, early in the book, you raised the question that I think you highlight is a very important question: if you could go back in time, would you kill baby Hitler? This is somehow a defining question. Can you explain? - Well, it's about whether you think that people are born evil. So the question of "Would you kill baby Hitler?" is meant to be something that gets people chatting about whether or not they think that people are born with the traits that make them capable of extreme harm towards others. Or whether they think it's socialized, whether it's something that, maybe in how people are raised, sort of manifests over time. With Hitler, we know from certainly psychologists who have pored [00:41] over his traits over time and looked at who he was over the course of his life, there's always this question of, "Was he mad or bad?" And the answer to "Was he mad?" Well, he certainly had some characteristics that people would associate with, for example, maybe sadism, with this idea that he was less high on 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. And actually, in his early life, he didn't showcase quite a lot of the traits that later defined the horrors that 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, [01:23] and I don't think people are born evil. - So you think a large part of it is nurture versus nature, the environment shaping the person to become, to manifest the evil that they bring out to the world? - Well, and 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. So for me, that word is the end of a conversation. It's when we call somebody evil, we say, "This person is so different from me that I don't even need to bother trying to understand why they are capable of doing terrible things because I would never do such things. I am good." And so that [02:07] artificial differentiation between good and evil is something that, certainly with the book, I'm trying to dismantle. And 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. So I think humanizing and understanding that we all have these traits is the most important thing in my book, certainly. - Yeah, I think a prerequisite of doing evil, I see this in war a lot, is to dehumanize [02:48] the other. In order to be able to murder them on scale, you have to reformulate the war as a fight between good and evil. And the interesting thing you see with war is both sides think that it's a battle of good versus evil. It almost always is like that, especially at large-scale wars. - That's right, and on top of dehumanization, there is also this other thing called de-individuation, which is where you see yourself as part of the group, and you no longer see yourself as an individual. And so, it's this fight of us versus them. And so you need both of those things. You need that sort of collapse of empathy for other people, the people who are on the other side. And you need this idea that you can be swallowed by the [03:30] group, and that gives you a sense of also the cloak of justice, the cloak of morality, even when, you know, maybe you're on the wrong side. And that's where, I mean, getting into sort of who's on the right side of each war is always a more complicated issue. But certainly calling other people evil and calling the other side evil and dehumanizing them is crucial to most of these kinds of fights. - Yeah, you promote empathy as an important thing to do when we're trying to understand each other, and then 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 by the evil. What's your case for empathy, even when we're talking [04:17] about some of the darker humans in human history? - My case for empathy, or evil empathy, as I sometimes call it, so empathy for people who we often call evil... Also, the title of my book is Evil, or in the UK market, it's Making Evil, which is a reference to a Nietzsche quote, which is, "Thinking evil is making evil." The idea being that evil is a label we place onto others. There's nothing inherent to anything that makes it evil. And so, 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 worst kind of manifestation of what somebody can be, so if someone can destroy others, torture others, hurt others... I work as a criminal psychologist, so I work a lot on [05:05] sexual abuse cases, on rape cases, on murder trials. And so, in those contexts, that word evil is used all the time. So, this person is evil. And if we're doing that, then we need to go, okay, but what we actually want is, we don't really just want to label people. We want to stop that behavior from happening, and the only way we're going to do that is if we understand what led that person to come to that situation and to engage in that behavior. And so, that's why evil empathy, I think, is crucial, because ultimately what we want is to make society safer. And the only way we can do that is to understand the psychological and social levers that led them to engage in this behavior in the first place.