Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex | Lex Fridman Podcast #483
Summary
Shaw’s central claim is that “evil” is a continuum of ordinary human traits, not a separate category of monster. Psychopathy, sadism, narcissism, and Machiavellianism each run from low to subclinical or clinical levels, and social pressure can activate harmful behavior without hatred or pathology. For leaders and institutions, the risk model is therefore incentives plus conformity plus rationalization—not simply screening for “bad people.”
Generative AI is, in Shaw’s phrase, “the ultimate false memory machine,” because suggestive conversation can alter autobiographical memory within a single interaction. Her experiment produced confessions or apparent memories of invented crimes in 70% of one specific sample after three interviews, though she emphatically rejects treating that as a population rate. The product-safety implication is immediate: persistent personalization could magnify the risk, but even a 30-to-60-minute exchange can rewrite the version later recalled as truth.
The most reliable defense against memory contamination is contemporaneous evidence outside the brain. Shaw advises recording an important event immediately—even while drunk, high, or emotional—before discussing it with others, because “attention is the glue between reality and memory” and later recall retrieves the latest reconstructed version. AI systems could either contaminate that record or administer neutral cognitive interviews that preserve it.
Fraud scales by learning what a target wants to hear, making emotionally personalized AI a particularly potent attack surface. The Tinder Swindler combined love-bombing, luxury signals, an imagined shared future, and an urgent crisis until victims borrowed money; Shaw stresses that this works on ordinary people, not merely the gullible. “There’s a tailored version of fraud that could appeal to basically everybody if they have enough information about you.”
Criminal-justice spending is poorly aligned with repeat-risk if punishment is intended to make society safer. Homicide recidivism is only 1–3%, Shaw says, because most murders are unplanned fights over trivial triggers rather than serial predation; fraud, elder abuse, and sexual violence carry higher repeat risks. Long homicide sentences may satisfy retributive justice, but that is a different objective from prevention.
Corporate environmental crime emerges from normal organizational mechanics—benchmark pressure, collective deception, diffusion of responsibility, and fear of dissent. Volkswagen’s defeat-device scheme ran for 10 years and let some diesel cars emit nitrous oxides at up to 40 times the legal rate; clever engineers could know the health consequences and still conform. The investable risk is cultural and systemic: once one competitor appears to win by cheating, others infer that honest performance is impossible and misconduct cascades into litigation, consumer loss, and investor damage.
Shaw’s hopeful thesis is that the same technologies and institutions that distort reality can create auditable, science-backed accountability. Her company Spot, founded in 2017, applies a scripted cognitive interview to workplace reporting, while satellite monitoring, undercover investigators, Interpol, and existing environmental laws can make planetary crime measurable. The constraint is not a lack of tools but whether engineers include social-science knowledge and organizations protect the person willing to say, “This needs to stop.”
Deep dive
1. “Evil” hides a continuum of traits shared by everyone
Shaw defines the Dark Tetrad as four scaled traits: sadism is pleasure in hurting others; Machiavellianism is doing whatever advances you; narcissism is excessive self-regard and superiority; psychopathy commonly combines low empathy with deception, parasitic behavior, and comfort harming others.
Nobody simply has or lacks these traits. A person might score low on sadism but higher on narcissism, remain subclinical on both, and never meet a diagnostic threshold; scoring high across all four indicates the greatest likelihood of risky or harmful behavior.
Her answer to “Would you kill baby Hitler?” is no. The question tests whether people are born evil, but she sees no straight line from infant to adult and says Hitler’s early life did not display many traits that later defined his atrocities.
2. Calling someone evil ends the inquiry needed to prevent harm
Shaw treats “evil” as an othering label rather than an intrinsic property: “This person is so different from me that I don’t even need to bother trying to understand.” That artificial division licenses the comforting fiction, “I would never do such things. I am good.”
Her sharper reversal is that “we all have the capacity to kill people and murder people and do other terrible things.” The psychologically useful question is often why most people refrain, not why an alien class of monsters acts.
Lex connects that framing to war, where both sides commonly narrate mass killing as good against evil. Shaw adds de-individuation: empathy for the enemy collapses while the individual is “swallowed by the group,” acquiring a “cloak of justice” and morality from the collective.
3. Empathy for perpetrators is a prevention tool, not absolution
Shaw calls her approach “evil empathy”: understand people who destroy, torture, rape, or kill because stopping the behavior requires identifying the psychological and social levers that produced it. A label may condemn an act, but it supplies no intervention.
Asked how to interview leaders or convicted criminals who control their narrative, she says even the managed account is evidence. “Everybody’s doing it,” “someone else would have done it,” and diminished agency reveal normalization and rationalization, whether or not the speaker offers a candid confession.
Her broader point is uncomfortable but ordinary: brains preserve a morally acceptable self-story after wrongdoing. People explain, excuse, and contextualize because admitting “I messed this up, and I shouldn’t have done that” is difficult—even when part of their context is genuinely relevant.
4. Creepiness and confidence are unreliable detectors of danger
Historical photographs tempt viewers to read adult atrocities backward into a child’s face, but Shaw says “our creepiness radars are also way off.” Creepiness largely tracks deviation from expected social behavior, not a validated ability to identify harmful character.
People physically distance themselves from someone known to have severe mental illness, as a waiting-room study illustrated, yet severe mental illness is not inherently associated with greater violence. Erratic behavior feels threatening because it violates norms and becomes misread as danger.
Attractiveness does not rescue the heuristic cleanly: being unusually attractive can itself deviate from the norm and reduce trust. Shaw’s concern is the adjacent belief that a face or manner reveals deceit.
Deception researcher Aldert Vrij’s experimental work, as Shaw summarizes it, finds police and investigative interviewers no better than chance at detecting lies despite high occupational confidence. That gap can overlook actual liars while directing aggressive questioning toward innocent people and potentially contributing to wrongful convictions.
5. Psychopathy may require treatment built around incentives, not empathy
Some research supports better lying among people high in psychopathy, including “faking good” before parole bodies by mimicking the behavior of a safe, rehabilitated prisoner. The committee may reward performance while misjudging actual risk.
Shaw preserves a live treatment concern: empathy-focused programs might teach psychopathic participants to imitate and weaponize empathy. That does not mean treatment is futile; it means interventions must match the personality structure.
She points to Jennifer Skeem’s work with people convicted of severe crimes: teach society’s rules and persuade participants that prosocial conduct is a better route to what they want. For someone who does not experience low empathy as a defect, enlightened self-interest may outperform moral exhortation.
6. Criminal psychologists survive by treating horror as a puzzle
Shaw does not think studying “monsters” makes a person evil. Her professional boundary is to treat visceral accounts as pieces of information and pattern recognition: therapists support victims emotionally; her role with police and lawyers is to determine how the evidence fits.
Lex worries that seeing “the beauty in the puzzle” can loosen one’s footing on the moral landscape. Shaw recognizes the estrangement: where society responds “This is horrible,” a scientist may react “Oh, wow!” because a new pattern illuminates part of human experience.
Nuance can look like trivialization, though Shaw distinguishes understanding from minimizing. The same tension governs true-crime production: some killers may commit murder to become famous, so creators must consider how cases are covered rather than assuming every case should be treated identically.
7. Loneliness can remove the social tether that constrains violent fantasy
Shaw identifies Robert Pickton’s case—covered by her podcast under “Piggy’s Palace”—as especially formative. Pickton kidnapped and murdered victims at his farm, did terrible things to their bodies, and rumors held that he fed some victims to pigs.
Simon Fraser University professor Stephen Hart served as an expert witness in the case. His combination of kindness, seriousness, and gallows humor showed Shaw that someone could confront one of Canada’s darkest cases without surrendering a good life, helping draw her into criminal psychology.
Her reading of Pickton emphasizes profound loneliness. A social network performs “reality monitoring,” challenging beliefs and asking how someone knows a disturbing thought is real; without that tether, a person can drift deeper into an internally coherent but evidence-free universe.
Shaw carefully distinguishes severe mental illness from inherent violence, while noting that distressing command hallucinations are one schizophrenia symptom associated with greater risk. More broadly, isolation can combine with psychopathy, sadism, and entitlement—as in her interpretation of Jeffrey Dahmer’s attempt to manufacture a “perfect partner”—and turn a recognizable longing into an atrocious extreme.
8. Rehearsing murder can help people rehearse refusal
Historical neighbors becoming enemies persuade Shaw that almost anyone might commit “the worst things we can imagine” once convinced former friends are threats. Peace is therefore the time to study pathways involving loneliness, jealousy, aggression, and group pressure before judgment becomes constrained.
Two studies she cites found that about 70% of men had fantasized about killing someone; more than 50% of women had too. Fleeting murder fantasies are “incredibly common” and may be adaptive dress rehearsals for confronting consequences and deciding, “The better thing to do is not to murder this person.”
Her hedge matters: persistent rumination about harming a specific person is different from a passing thought and becomes a risk factor worth taking to a psychologist. Normalization should remove shame without erasing escalation signals.
Lex extends rehearsal from wrongdoing to resistance: imagining oneself in Nazi Germany is incomplete unless one also simulates the difficult act of saying no. The useful exercise is not confidence that one would be heroic, but practice stepping forward while everyone else remains still.
9. Heroism is trainable, and the bystander story is less bleak than remembered
Philip Zimbardo called this rehearsal the “heroic imagination.” Shaw acknowledges that the Stanford Prison Experiment has since been “torn apart in various ways,” while retaining its historical influence as an illustration of how assigned roles can rapidly reshape relations between guards and prisoners.
The goal of studying evil is not merely “Ooh, this is curious”; it is recognizing, “Wait, I’m off track,” and finding a route back. Shaw rejects the fantasy that top-down toughness can eliminate crime and puts prevention partly in practiced individual judgment.
The Kitty Genovese murder became a cultural proof that witnesses never intervene, but later bystander experiments did not substantiate that generalization. Shaw says most bystanders do help; inhibition rises after a crowd forms because each person reads everyone else’s inaction as evidence that no real emergency exists.
Heroism is difficult precisely because it violates that social reading. Shaw favors celebrating people who jump into a river for a stranger and “normalizing intervening,” thereby changing what future crowds interpret as expected behavior.
10. Most homicide is an impulsive disaster, not a serial-killer plot
Shaw rejects the television-friendly assumption that a murderer must have endured a singular childhood trauma or spent months sharpening knives. Most killings are fights that escape control—over “$4,” a stolen bicycle, or another trivial grievance—and were neither planned nor desired in advance.
Intimate-partner homicide is also among the leading contexts, but ordinary escalation lacks the spectacle of a calculating serial killer. Audiences prefer extreme causes for extreme outcomes because the victimization gap is so large: the victim loses a life while the perpetrator’s originating reason may appear absurdly small.
Homicide recidivism is only 1–3%, Shaw says, because few perpetrators wanted that killing and fewer want another. Fraud, elder abuse, and sexual violence present higher repeat risks, creating a mismatch between preventive danger and the sentences society considers morally proportionate.
Lex asks what reform follows. Shaw separates objectives: long imprisonment can represent “life for life,” and the death penalty extends that logic, though she opposes it; if the sole purpose is safety, sanctions should instead track deterrence and likelihood of repetition.
11. Restorative justice leaves forgiveness with victims’ families
Shaw refuses to prescribe forgiveness: it belongs to families, whose responses legitimately range from demanding maximum punishment to seeking restorative justice, explanation, apology, and acknowledgment from the perpetrator.
Gang killings between teenage boys complicate the punitive picture. Bereaved parents may still see the perpetrator as another child and decide that destroying his entire future would take a second life without restoring the first.
Restorative justice does not deny the killing or its consequences. It asks what surviving families need to understand and whether accountability can coexist with allowing the offender a future—an aim distinct from either vengeance or incapacitation.
12. Incels become dangerous where entitlement meets group reinforcement
Shaw’s “Black Pill” episode examined environments that intensify hatred of women and a belief that men deserve a predetermined life: partner, children, home, and white picket fence. Society sells the aspiration, but “nobody’s entitled to a good life.”
Her distinction is between rights that let people pursue a chosen life and a guarantee that another person must supply it. When frustrated expectations become entitlement, anger can justify taking what one believes is owed or publicly retaliating for its absence.
Online groups supply normalization and practical reinforcement: “Yeah, I feel the same way. Do you want me to help you?” The internet does not create every grievance, but it can validate the worst interpretation and reinforce a person’s worst self.
13. Romance fraud weaponizes hope before it asks for money
The Tinder Swindler presented lavish wealth, private-jet access, expensive dates, and intense emotion almost immediately. Love-bombing was paired with future construction—children in the garden, marriage, “you’re the only one for me”—so the target could already see the promised life.
Once Cecilia was invested, an urgent story appeared: he was being followed or attacked and needed flights and other costs covered. She borrowed money and received family help until the resources ran out and she realized it was a classic love scam.
Shaw’s anti-shame argument is central: fraud succeeds because perpetrators learn what ordinary people want and tell them exactly that. Cecilia was not necessarily gullible; she was “a nice person who wanted to believe that this person was capable of loving her.”
Lex flags AI’s ability to generate a more precisely tailored story. Shaw agrees love is an unusually effective entry point because most people want both to love and be loved, while victims’ belief that they would easily detect a scam often converts injury into silence and embarrassment.
14. Jealousy is a faulty lie detector that can become coercive control
Coercive control can begin with an apparently practical arrangement, such as one partner managing finances, then mutate into possession: “I’m going to give you your allowance” replaces recognition that both partners own the shared money.
Shaw calls persistent jealousy “basically always a red flag.” She distinguishes that from a transient feeling of being left out; she means a persistent identity as “a jealous person,” signaling personal insecurity, relational incompatibility, or failed communication.
She rejects jealousy as proof of love or mate protection and sees it primarily as control and possession. Her stated asymmetry is that not all jealousy becomes violence, but jealousy is almost always a precursor in intimate-partner violence, often triggered by imagined conduct rather than evidence.
Lex asks whether widespread cheating makes jealousy reasonable. Shaw answers that building decisions on suspicion still relies on an inaccurate human lie detector; the broader solution is to examine the relationship structure and communication, not elevate insecurity into reliable evidence.
15. Monogamy is one relationship design, not a universal default
Shaw says research consistently finds that most people have cheated on a significant other at least once or have cheated repeatedly. Her conclusion is not that deception is polyamory, but that nominal monogamy often conceals non-monogamous behavior plus lying.
As a polyamorous person, she argues that people can love multiple partners and that open structures should be available without becoming mandatory. “One size fits all” relationship culture sets some people up to fail and makes honest discussion harder once commitments have solidified.
Lex’s disagreement is worth preserving: choosing not to cheat and dedicating oneself to one person is romantic, while lifelong focus reveals an infinitely deep human puzzle. Like repeatedly choosing a favorite meal, concentration can uncover nuance rather than merely deny variety.
Shaw answers with choice, not conversion. Couples should ask early, “How do you actually want to structure your life?” Polyamory is no easier if used to fix insecurity; like monogamy, it works better when participants begin from openness, connection, respect, and a capacity to communicate.
16. Bisexuality expands the possible pool, not attraction to everyone
Shaw’s clean definition is that she is not attracted to most people but can be attracted regardless of gender. The structure resembles heterosexual attraction—selective interest within a possible pool—except gender is not the limiting variable.
Research can be difficult to find because scholars also use “plurisexual,” “omnisexual,” and sometimes “pansexual.” Searching only “bisexual” introduces unrelated biological uses involving two sexes, which partly encouraged alternative terminology.
The recurring misconception is that bisexuality is transient: a phase, indecision, or a stop “on the way to Gay Town.” This suspicion is especially strong toward men, who may be told that bisexuality is merely an incomplete admission of being gay.
Today, Shaw says, twice as many women as men identify as bisexual. Yet the history of sexuality research complicates any claim that the underlying capacity belongs chiefly to women.
17. Kinsey found a continuum long before sexuality became a modern culture war
In the 1940s, Alfred Kinsey began by gathering students’ unanswered questions—what is normal, how often people have sex, and what fantasies mean—then interviewed thousands for Sexual Behavior in the Human Male.
The book was a bestseller for a year, while demand for Kinsey’s lectures overflowed auditoriums into radio-linked rooms. Shaw uses his “rock star” reception to challenge the idea that public curiosity about sexual diversity is a recent “woke” invention.
Kinsey’s scale ran from zero, exclusively heterosexual tendencies, to six, exclusively homosexual tendencies. He placed roughly half of men and a quarter of women somewhere between the endpoints, arguing that binary classification discarded too much observed behavior and desire.
Shaw preserves contextual uncertainty: the findings followed World War II, when many men had lived in homosocial environments such as the military. Prisons and wartime units change the available pool, so behavior, identity, opportunity, and enduring attraction should not be collapsed into one measure.
18. Identity labels reflect community pressure as well as desire
Bisexual men may identify as gay or straight because both mainstream and queer communities challenge the middle category. A gay partner may say, “I was bi once” or “you’re actually gay,” making a settled gay identity socially simpler.
Bisexual women face a different dismissal: attraction to women is treated as a performance for male attention, a sexy phase before an inevitable return to men. The shared mechanism is disbelief, though its gendered expression differs.
The Klein Sexual Orientation Grid improves on one continuum by separating attraction, behavior, fantasies, lifestyle, social preference, and self-identification across past, present, and ideal. A straight person might have a queer social life; another might identify as straight now but ideally wish to be bi.
Therapist Fritz Klein used discrepancies—especially between present and ideal—as discussion points, calling an uncomfortable client a “troubled bisexual.” Shaw broadens the category: any sexuality can be troubled when a person lacks a framework for understanding what feels misaligned.
19. Sexuality can be reappraised, but “honesty” can become an accusation
Shaw resists Lex’s wording that someone may not be honest with themselves. “Honesty” is often weaponized to insist that a bisexual person is secretly gay; a kinder and more precise interpretation is that the person lacks useful language or a framework for troubling feelings.
She rejects the expectation that sexuality must be discovered in adolescence, consolidated by the early twenties, and permanently kept. People change in every other respect, so periodic reappraisal of desire, identity, and relationship structure should remain possible.
Shaw says bisexual people show higher rates of self-harm, sexual victimization, isolation, and stalking. Her main explanation is weak community connection: bi people may face interrogation when open, strain when hiding, and exclusion from the queer community that might otherwise provide support.
“Finding your people” therefore has a health function beyond identity symbolism. A label is useful when it creates language, choice, and social connection—not when it becomes another compulsory box.
20. Kink is not evidence of criminal character
Producers asking Shaw to explain a murder often introduce BDSM, swinging, or another nontraditional practice as if it completes the psychological profile. Her response is “Okay, so?” Unless the practice is connected to the offense, it is biographical color, not causation.
BDSM is the most common kink or fantasy she discusses, including consensual restraint, degradation, and choking. Its visibility in pornography does not mean everyone wants it; its stigma does not mean almost nobody does. Asking, consent, safeguards, and safe words are the governing requirements.
The disinhibition hypothesis explains why submission may appeal to someone who spends all day making decisions: being told what to do becomes freeing. Lex adds that domination can create the same clarity by removing the need to “walk on eggshells.”
Shaw’s memorable synthesis is that “you are free because of the fiction.” Role-play reverses daily demands and touches something psychologically real, much as fiction temporarily gives readers another person’s thoughts without confusing the imagined world with ordinary conduct.
21. Visibility makes dehumanization harder but carries real career risk
Shaw came out as bisexual in Evil because homosexuality and bisexuality are routinely placed beside things labeled bad or defective. Visibility reveals that an abstract, feared group already includes people one knows and loves, making othering harder.
The project is motivated partly by fear: “There’s no straight line of acceptance.” Rights governing homosexual and bisexual behavior can reverse within a lifetime, so normalization is not merely self-expression but an attempt to make future repression socially harder.
Readers in countries where such behavior is illegal asked to translate and distribute Bi quietly or described carrying it as contraband. One foreign edition was canceled after a legal change classified it as promotion of a gay agenda; Shaw takes some pride in having written a banned book while grieving what the ban means.
Coming out in her thirties, after two established books, functioned as a “foot-in-the-door technique.” She doubts a sexuality-first career would have secured the same publishing access or scientific credibility; unexpectedly, being explicit also brought allies and disarmed some routine sexualization of a young woman in public.
22. Shaw’s career began with a lifelong question: what is real?
Shaw nearly studied painting and still loves surrealism’s manipulation of reality. Her grandfather warned that an artist’s life would be difficult, steering the academically gifted chess-club student toward social sciences and eventually psychology.
The deeper origin was her father’s paranoid schizophrenia. Growing up beside someone who quite literally saw and heard a different reality made perception unstable but intellectually irresistible: what is real in memory, crime, morality, neuroscience, and another person’s experience?
Criminal psychologists won her over through applied work and gallows humor. They confronted the most serious cases without the solemn self-presentation she found elsewhere, modeling a way to pursue truth, usefulness, and a livable personal temperament together.
23. False-memory research shows that confession and recollection can be engineered
Shaw’s PhD combined Elizabeth Loftus’s false-memory tradition with Saul Kassin’s false-confession research. Her question was whether someone could confess to a crime that never occurred and also come to experience it as an autobiographical memory; under leading conditions, the short answer was yes.
The practical outcome mattered more than the “party trick.” Shaw has trained police, lawyers, and International Criminal Court personnel handling hundreds of war-crime witnesses to preserve accounts with as little additional contamination as possible.
Generative AI recreates the same social problem: humans confabulate, models hallucinate, and conversation links the two. Shaw thinks insufficient attention goes to “the in-between”—how leading questions alter model output, which then feeds back into a person’s belief and memory.
Her blunt formulation is that generative AI is “basically the ultimate false memory machine”: a tailored interlocutor often produces what it estimates the user wants, with no inherent safeguard preventing that output from becoming “This is truth, and this is my past.”
24. Memory is accurate in gist and fragile in the details courts demand
Shaw says false memory is “a feature of a normal, healthy brain,” not a rare glitch. Basically every autobiographical memory contains some degree of falsehood; the question is how much, not whether the underlying event necessarily occurred.
Lex hears “nothing is real,” and Shaw pushes back. Most memory is good enough at the gist—who was present, the broad event, the place—but weak at verbatim details such as exact clothing, wording, sequence, or sensory specifics.
Daily life rarely requires those details; a courtroom does. Confidence and multisensory richness do not guarantee accuracy, while a distorted face memory or a single invented detail can become a major problem in identification and legal proceedings.
Entirely false events also occur. A “memory thief” may absorb a friend’s vividly told experience, imagine it repeatedly, lose track of its source, and integrate it into a personal autobiography.
25. Three suggestive interviews produced invented crimes in 70% of one sample
Shaw recruited participants whose parents confirmed they had not experienced target events, then presented one genuine childhood memory and one invented event: at 14, police contacted their parents after they assaulted someone with a weapon, stole something, or hit somebody.
Twenty minutes recalling the true event established rapport and an interview structure that she later mirrored. When participants denied the false event, Shaw invoked a detailed parental account, disputed ideas about hidden memories, and an imagination exercise: close your eyes and picture what might have happened.
The first participant supplied only “a blue sky,” but Shaw reinforced each detail—“Yeah, good job”—until people generated locations, victims, objects, and actions. The construction worked by weaving real people, places, and feelings into a combination that never occurred.
After three interviews, 70% of that sample confessed to a crime or accepted another significant emotional event. Shaw stresses that this is not a population rate or a claim that such memories arise 70% of the time; it shows possibility under six particular scenarios, with a particular interviewer and sample.
26. AI-generated evidence can harden an invented past
The original study worked so well that researchers stopped early after telling ethics reviewers they expected roughly a 13% hit rate. Shaw says even two successes would have established the result she sought; the observed ease surprised the team.
Subsequent work has tested AI-generated imagery. Shaw cites a study involving Elizabeth Loftus in which converting personal photos into AI videos increased belief and high-confidence recollection that events unfolded as depicted, although the AI had no knowledge of what happened.
A large replication of Shaw’s paradigm was being prepared at Maastricht when the episode was recorded. She presents the field honestly as contested: researchers still dispute how to code a false belief versus a false memory and how often complex implantation occurs.
Her preference is dimensional evidence—confidence, sensory experience, resemblance to other memories—because social psychologists ultimately observe reports, not the memory directly. A binary question, “Is this a real memory?” asks participants to draw a line the science itself struggles to locate.
27. The defense is to record first and reconstruct together second
Asked whether governments could mass-gaslight populations with propaganda and AI, Shaw answers, “Yes. That is definitely already happening.” The first defense is accepting personal susceptibility rather than assuming false memory is something that happens to other minds.
For any important event, “don’t trust your brain”: write or record it as soon as possible. Contemporaneous evidence is generally higher quality, and the promise “I will remember” is a prospective-memory failure waiting to happen.
Shaw rejects the intuitive advice to sleep before recording an account if drunk, high, or emotional. Capture the immediate version, then record another when you wake up; retaining both is safer than replacing the earliest trace with a cleaner-feeling reconstruction.
Memory resembles a Wikipedia page edited by later thought, conversations, and outside information. A recalled memory becomes active, changes during the social interaction, and is stored again; next time, the brain may retrieve the newest version without noticing the edit.
28. Groups remember more only after individuals preserve their own version
Shaw trained German military personnel who met warlords and could not openly record national-security conversations. Teams had been debriefing collectively before writing notes, which felt comprehensive but allowed members to contaminate one another’s accounts.
Her corrected sequence is individual notes first, group discussion second. Research on collective recall and eye closure suggests people can then contribute complementary details—one partner remembers names, another timing—while retaining a baseline against which additions can be evaluated.
Lex captures the dual force: a group can strengthen a true account or “build together a castle that’s false.” Shaw wants the complete “version history” so an expert can locate when a material change appeared and evaluate the likely source.
When versions diverge three years apart, possibilities include initial shame, external pressure, genuine later access to detail, suggestive therapy, or fabrication. Without earlier records and independent confirmation, confidence may become the deciding factor rather than truth.
29. Therapy and evidence serve different purposes
Shaw is most critical of therapies, including psychoanalysis, that search backward for a singular event explaining present distress. “You are the way you are because of this one interaction you had that one time” radically oversimplifies a brain shaped by continuous experience.
Some therapeutic techniques mirror false-memory procedures through imagination, suggestion, and reinforcement. They may surface genuine detail, but they can also lower evidentiary quality until nobody can distinguish what was recalled from what the intervention created.
Lex presses that Shaw “just want[s] the truth.” She qualifies the division: an expert witness analyzes accuracy and change, whereas a therapist is responsible for current well-being and may appropriately focus on managing a troubling memory whether or not it can be externally verified.
In court, however, emotional reality is insufficient because “what actually happened” determines responsibility. When present recollection is all that survives, Shaw’s practical answer is blunt: “Receipts. That’s all you got.”
30. Memory’s flexibility can support resilience instead of deception
State-dependent memory makes sadness retrieve other sad events and embarrassment trigger a cascade of old humiliations: “Would you like some other embarrassing stories?” Spreading activation links experiences through their emotional state.
Most non-depressed people show rosy reminiscence, but this is not necessarily deletion of the bad. It is reinterpretation: Shaw now treats growing up with her father’s schizophrenia as a net-positive source of perspective while acknowledging that the experience itself was complicated.
Cognitive restructuring deliberately asks what a painful event taught, which relationships it clarified, and what capabilities it produced. Good therapy can shift present emotional content without pretending the underlying event never happened.
Kahneman’s proposed vacation-with-no-memory thought experiment supports the value people place on later recollection: many decline the enjoyable trip if it will be erased. Yet outsourcing experience to a phone also fails when attention disappears—“attention is the glue between reality and memory.”
31. Better memory depends on visibility, variety, and individual cognition
Couples systematically overcount their own contribution: one reports doing 60% of the housework, the other 50%, producing totals above 100%. Shaw recommends narrating otherwise invisible work—taking out bins, booking a hotel—so a partner can encode the contribution rather than being expected to infer it.
Memory can be trained with varied, short tasks, including N-back exercises. Shaw favors NeuroNation’s changing games over repeating one puzzle such as Sudoku: “short and many” keeps networks flexible, whereas mastery of one task produces narrower expertise.
Name mnemonics usually enlarge the neural network through rhymes, associations, or imagery, but Shaw discovered she has aphantasia. Asked to picture a red apple, she sees black; elaborate memory palaces therefore fail because there is no internal picture to populate.
She suspects some analytical people may operate more in concepts and may be disproportionately aphantasic, but labels that an early hypothesis rather than a finding. The exchange leaves Lex unsure whether he visualizes faces or merely reconstructs conceptual features.
32. Green crime turns planetary damage into prosecutable conduct
Green Crime applies criminology to people already convicted of destroying shared natural resources. Shaw’s analogy is a house: if someone poisoned its water, scattered garbage, or set rooms on fire and walked away unpunished, the violation would be obvious.
Volkswagen’s Dieselgate provides the corporate case study. For roughly 10 years, cars used defeat-device software to appear compliant during emissions testing while some emitted nitrous oxides at up to 40 times the legal limit.
Shaw says there is no healthy lower threshold of nitrous oxides, linking them to asthma, premature death, and immediate health damage. Debate remains over precisely who knew what, but someone knowingly had to design the software, and the company continued misleading investigators before the truth emerged.
The psychological question is why intelligent emissions engineers, fully capable of understanding the harm, collectively build and defend the deception. Shaw’s answer returns to conformity, normalized lying, career pressure, divided responsibility, and rationalization—not ignorance or cartoon villainy.
33. Environmental crime is a supply chain with culpability at every layer
Shaw interviewed UN researchers measuring wildlife trafficking, Environmental Investigation Agency operatives infiltrating poaching networks, and an INTERPOL agent. Each sees different data and intervention points, so “How do we fight crime?” has no single institutional answer.
Unlike an interpersonal assault, environmental crime can involve gang or corporate bosses, middlemen, armed poachers, loggers, polluters, financiers, shell companies, vessel owners, and insurers. A boat can remain registered by INTERPOL as criminal for 10 years while someone still agrees to insure it.
Her method is to strip back each layer and ask, “Who is that person?” Responsibility becomes more actionable once the abstract system is resolved into the individual who finances, insures, falsifies, transports, investigates, or physically destroys.
A recent UN climate survey she cites found roughly 85–90% of people think about the climate crisis regularly, with many doing so every day. The obstacle is not a tiny concerned minority but converting anxiety, anger, grief, and sadness into motivation, energy, and purpose.
34. Measurable crime offers a less divisive route into environmental action
Lex likes the criminal frame because nobody needs to debate whether a rainforest was burned when satellites can show it. Shaw describes European Space Agency systems observing Earth across wavelengths and chronicling physical changes, including environmental crimes visible from space.
The book is not apolitical, but it begins with conduct already prohibited and perpetrators already convicted—not failure to recycle. Shaw considers excessive emphasis on individual habits potentially detrimental when the largest offenses impose vast cleanup, health, and planetary costs.
Her research left her unexpectedly optimistic: laws, enforcers, undercover teams, scientists, satellites, and multilateral forums already exist. Attending anti-corruption, wildlife-crime, and treaty conferences exposed a large operational field rather than an empty policy slogan.
The central question becomes enforcement and proportionate accountability: which methods work, who coordinates them, and what punishment changes behavior across complex organizations?
35. Competitive cheating spreads until a whistleblower breaks conformity
When one firm lies about reaching a target, honest competitors see its success but cannot reproduce it with available technology. They infer “they must be cheating,” then cheat too, turning individual misconduct into an industry norm rationalized as market necessity.
Discovery reverses the benefits: consumers, regulators, environmentalists, lawyers, and investors all become claimants against the company. The concealed shortcut accumulates legal and reputational exposure while appearing to generate superior performance.
Lex compares this pressure with Ordinary Men: German execution-squad members were reportedly allowed to withdraw, yet most stayed, partly because nobody wanted to appear cowardly. Slight social pressure enabled ordinary people without explicit hatred to participate in mass killing.
Shaw’s corporate equivalent is an emissions engineer with a child who has asthma and a sick grandmother, still building dirty cars. The route out usually requires an internal or external “hero” willing to reject the norm and say, “This needs to stop.”
36. Science-backed technology can preserve evidence and strengthen accountability
Shaw founded Spot in 2017 after repeatedly explaining memory’s fallibility and leaving audiences with an existential crisis. With Evernote founder Phil Libin and co-founders Dillon and Daniel, she turned the police cognitive interview—a neutral, decades-refined script—into a machine-administered reporting process.
Spot became a workplace compliance tool for recording emotionally important events and optionally sending structured reports to employers. Its users include insurance and medical organizations and the Bar in the UK; reports can range from serious misconduct to a practical safety event such as bleach left in a machine.
She sees room beyond compliance for preserving personal milestones and eventually creating representations or “grief bots” for loved ones. The promise is not perfect memory but an external account that can be distinguished from later reconstruction.
Shaw’s closing hope is conditional: technology can implement good interviewing, compensate for human memory, and help investigators fight environmental and interpersonal crime, but only “as long as we use it in a science-backed way rather than just sort of freestyling.” Engineering systems that alter human narratives without social psychologists in the room wastes both safety knowledge and opportunity.