What's the Fascination of Ceril Killers?

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There's a deep fascination also, wet thereo dark side of murder. The prevalence of this around us everses our perception of it. I think that thehre's been some c on why people murder other people. And when we when we look at bill's ristics, even a ai, they're not necessary. So again, like we have this weird connection,. i think, again, mostly through movies, that murderers are the statists who are sort of cackling away as they're killing someone. But quite often that's not at all the case and the've just made a bad decision at one time.

In this episode, we sit down with psychologist Julia Shaw, an expert in memory and criminal psychology, to discuss her new book - Evil. In the book, she makes a case for something she calls "evil empathy," seeing people who do heinous things as fellow human beings instead of as monsters. According to Shaw, othering criminals by categorizing them as a separate kind of human allows us to put them out of our minds and disappear them to institutions or prisons. The result is we become less-able to prevent the sort of behavior the harms others from happening again and again. In fact, she says "there's no such thing as evil," and sees the term as an antiquated, magical label that dehumanizes others, preventing us from accumulating the sort of scientific evidence that could lead to a better society.

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