Julia Shaw: belief

Transcript context

…So what kind of person feeds their victims to pigs? What’s interesting about that psychology? The psychology about Robert Pickton? I mean, he was a tricky person because I think he was profoundly lonely, and this is something we see with a lot of serial killers is that 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 to do what’s called reality monitoring, to understand what’s true and what’s not. And so 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, you’ve got delusions, 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. And if you don’t follow those, you will hear those voices forever. They’re profoundly distressing, and they are one of the aspects of schizophrenia that if you have, it does make you more prone to violence. And so 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 that thought. 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 that you might live in in your head, and it’s the same with radicalization in other contexts is that 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. You can see that people will get more extreme over time, and 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. So with serial killers, we find this reality monitoring problem, and I think part of that’s related to the lack of social networks that people have. That’s fascinating. So that’s one important component of serial killers. What else can we say about the psychology? What motivates them? So if you look at some of the famous serial killers, Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, Jeffrey Dahmer, are there other things we could say about their psychology that motivates them? So interesting, the tether to reality. Loneliness is a part of the human condition. It is, in fact, one of its side effects is you can get untethered. And then with some of these brains, I guess the untethered goes to some dark place.…

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