Julia Shaw: belief

Transcript context

…On a small tangent, I get to interview a bunch of folks that a large number of people consider evil. So, how would you give advice about how to conduct such interviews when you’re sitting in front of a world leader that some millions of people consider evil? Or if you’re sitting in front of people that are actual, like convicted criminals, what’s the way to conduct that interview? Because to me, 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. And 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 who a lot of people, dehumanize, including myself. I mean, I also speak with people who I think are, or have, committed terrible crimes, and I’ve spoken to these people because, as a criminal psychologist, that’s often part of my job. So, what’s interesting, I think, when you’re speaking to people who have committed really terrible crimes, or certainly who’ve been convicted of terrible crimes, is that not only is it potentially insightful because they might give you a real answer and not just a controlled narrative about why they committed these crimes. If they are either maintaining their innocence or they’re more reluctant to do that, I think even the narrative that they are controlling, that they’re being very careful with, still tells us a lot about them. So, I think, certainly in my research on environmental crime as well, what we see is that people use a lot of rationalization, and they say things like, “Well, everybody’s doing it.” And, “If I hadn’t done this first, somebody else would have done this waste crime or this other kind of crime.” And so there’s this rationalization. There’s this normalization. There’s this diminishing of your own role and agency, and that still tells us a lot about the psychology of people who commit crimes, because most of us are very bad at saying sorry and saying, “I messed this up, and I shouldn’t have done that.” And instead, what our brains do is they try to make us feel better, and they go, “No, you’re still a good person despite this one thing.” And so we try to rationalize it and we try to excuse it. We try to explain it. And there is some truth to it as well, because we know the reasons why we engage in that behavior, and other people don’t have the whole context. So, we also do have more of the whole story. But on the other hand, we need to also face the fact that sometimes we do terrible things and we need to stop doing those terrible things and prevent other people from doing the same. I find these pictures of World War II leaders as children kind of fascinating, because it grounds you and makes you realize that there is a whole story there, of environment, of development through their childhood, through their teenage years… you just remember they’re all kids. Except Stalin. He was looking evil already when young.…

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