Translator: Hiroko Kawano Reviewer: Peter van de Ven
What is the worst thing that you have ever done,
something that you're probably ashamed of?
Now imagine that everybody knew about it -
your friends, your parents, your colleagues.
We would hate for the world to judge us
based on the worst things that we've ever done,
yet we judge others in exactly this way every day.
For our own behaviors, we see the context, the complexity,
we see the difficulties.
But for other people,
we just see the outcomes of their behaviors.
And that leads us to label people, with all their complexity,
with one single, heinous term:
murderer, thief, liar, pedophile, monster, evil.
It's urgently time for empathy.
It's time for us to give humanity and understanding back
to a population that we too often deprive of both.
So first, do you think that you are evil?
Now, when I ask people this question,
of course, everybody says, "Well, no. I'm a good person."
Because guess what?
We all seem to think that evil is something that other people are.
People like Jeffrey Dahmer,
people who abduct rape, murder, dismember other individuals.
Jeffrey Dahmer was a notorious serial killer,
and it's easy to see someone like this
and say, "I would never be capable of those kinds of things" -
until we are.
Because some of us do.
Now, the question here is,
"Why do we forget the underlying humanity?"
When it's our turn to be the monsters, again, we see the nuance.
We have an explanation.
But for others,
we don't see the same things.
With Jeffrey Dahmer, for example, he kept pieces of his victims.
Now, this sounds like an atrocious thing to do,
and it's not an excuse.
But as a partial explanation,
when asked, "Why did you keep body parts from your victims?"
he said, "I was so lonely.
I didn't want them to leave."
Now, when we think of evil, we also think of torture,
and we think of situations like Abu Ghraib,
where human rights violations happened in a confined military space
and people were found taking pictures and posing gleefully
next to individuals who they were torturing,
who they were sodomizing, who they were murdering.
Now, when this came to light, the public said,
"No, it's not a systemic problem;
it's a few bad apples."
It's really easy to do this,
to say, "No, it's not a system of oppression.
It's not a system that dehumanizes the people we come in contact with.
It's not problems with levels and ranks.
No, it's that person; it's that sadist."
But when we look a bit deeper,
we find that there are structures and systems in place
that make it significantly more likely for us
to commit heinous acts in certain situations.
And then, of course, there are stereotypical versions of evil.
We think of evil scientists.
We think of a murderer who's laughing while he's killing his victim.
We think of evil clowns.
Now, these caricatures have to die
because what happens
when we oversimplify a complex issue like human atrocity in this particular way,
it makes it seem as though it's something that we can spot,
and it's something that is so different from us
that we shouldn't even try to understand it.
But evil and the things that we call evil
might actually be something that we're all capable of.
And the line between us and people like Jeffrey Dahmer
might not be as distinct as we'd like to think.
In fact, many of the things that we associate with evil
actually happen with surprising frequency.
Some of these things happen every day.
For example, in a study on murder fantasies,
it was found that most people have at some point wanted to kill somebody.
In one study, 73% of men admitted to having murder fantasies,
and 66% of women.
Now, that's most of the people in this room.
And the people you probably want to kill or have at some point wanted to kill
are your parents, are your lovers,
and are - a very popular target - potentially your boss.
Now, this in and of itself does not, of course, mean
that someone is going to actually go through with the fantasy.
It can remain a fantasy.
But given different circumstances,
given maybe enough push, enough adversity,
that fantasy might turn into reality quicker than we think.
What about the people who we love?
When we think of psychopaths or serial killers,
we say, "No, well, how could that person have possibly killed
or been aggressive to someone they love?
But in a study of long-term relationships,
it was found that 35% of people within these long-term couples
said that in the last month, they had acted aggressively
towards possibly the person they love most in the world.
Aggression isn't limited to serial killers,
aggression is something
that's actually quite a normal part of the human experience.
Another thing that we associate with serial killing,
that we associate with the word evil,
is a propensity for, well, sexual deviance.
Now, we might have the stereotypical picture
of someone sadistically tying someone up
and having gratification, sexually or otherwise, from the situations,
but once again, research shows us
that, actually, when we look at how many people enjoy bondage,
enjoy either dominating or being dominated in bed,
we get to about half of the population.
In one study, 46.8% of individuals
had not just said that they'd fantasized about BDSM activities,
they said that they'd engaged in them.
So if you look at your neighbor, Who knows what they're doing at home?
But it does lead us to rethink what it actually means
when we're trying to differentiate and find those particular factors
that identify someone who is a wrongdoer, who is an evil monster.
And maybe those fall apart when we start to look deeper.
Maybe even some of those things
that we label as characteristic of evil individuals
are actually quite mainstream
rather than being as deviant as we sometimes think they are.
Here's another example of everyday evil.
We - most of us - eat meat.
Now, if we were to walk by an animal on the street
that's being tortured and murdered by an individual,
we would be appalled.
Now, 70 billion animals are currently living in factory farms,
experiencing, as far as we know, essentially that:
being tortured and murdered and ending up on our plates.
Yet knowing that doesn't necessarily stop us
from contributing to that kind of gross violence.
Because guess what?
Not just are humans, well, pretty bad at having insight
into the harm that they themselves might be causing,
but we're also really good at hypocrisy.
Finally, if we talk about money,
money changes our relationship with morality.
When you look at research on even just introducing cash into a situation,
we see that people act differently.
But there's also some things that we consider taboos,
things that we would never trade for money.
For example, if I said, "How much would it cost to buy your kidney?"
You'd say, "My kidney's not for sale."
If I asked, "How much would it cost to sleep with you, to have sex with you?"
You'd say, "My body is not for sale."
But your body is for sale.
If you go to work,
if someone pays you for your time, for your health,
and potentially for your body,
that's exactly the exchange that's happening,
except we often don't see it as such.
So what I'm trying to say is that probably we're all heathens in some ways.
We just don't think about ourselves that way, conveniently.
And so the big question here as a criminal psychologist,
as someone who has studied
"why people do bad things, make bad decisions"
for more than a decade,
I have a few favorite theories as to why we act in these ways.
And one of the theories I don't like is the testosterone assumption.
If someone comes up and tells you,
"You know why this person committed this atrocity?
It's because of their high testosterone."
Please tell them to go away.
Because the link between testosterone and aggression
has long been overstated.
Last year, there was a review article
which showed that, actually, the correlation is quite weak
and we might even have it backwards.
Actually,
it might be that increased aggression leads to increased testosterone
rather than increased testosterone leading to increased aggression.
And on top of that, it stereotypes men as aggressors,
which I think is really a damaging thing to do.
So let's talk about the theories I actually like.
First:
I like the brain.
Bad brains can lead to bad decisions.
Now, one of these brains is the brain of a psychopath,
and the other brain is one of normal control.
Now, what we see is that the psychopath is missing activity
both in the part of the brain that is responsible for good decision-making
and in the part of the brain that's responsible for empathy.
Now, this means that it's much easier to hurt somebody and to make bad decisions
because if you don't feel the same things
that the person you're aggressing against feels,
it's easier to aggress.
But of course it's not a sufficient explanation.
It just makes it more likely, it makes it easier to do harm to others.
So a second theory, a second factor that we need to consider is personality.
Now, people like to talk about psychopaths,
but there are other types of personality characteristics
that we know are associated
with increased levels of behaviors we might label evil,
including narcissism, including sadism,
and including Machiavellianism.
And together, actually, these also exist on what's called a subclinical scale;
that means that you might not have a diagnosis
of a full-fledged, for example, psychopath,
but you might meet some of the criteria.
And if you meet some of the criteria for all four of these,
then you are significantly more likely to harm other individuals.
I mean, this is also where we can think of like corporate criminals,
people who might do OK in normal society
but who are really kind of assholes.
I call these the asshole chromosomes.
Anyways, the "Dark Tetrad," again, in and of itself
isn't sufficient to explain bad behavior,
because it also doesn't absolve people of basic responsibility,
and just because you're worse at making decisions
or you're more likely to make bad ones,
doesn't mean you have to do them necessarily.
So three,
another thing that strongly facilitates bad behavior.
Bad culture can also lay the groundwork for bad behavior.
Right now, there's a lot of talk about sexual harassment.
I don't think it's surprising
that in a society that treats women as inferior to men,
in a society that teaches boys that women are seductive temptresses,
that they're not particularly good at science,
that they're not particularly good at math,
that men, understandably perhaps, treat women differently.
We as a society have laid the groundwork for certain values and beliefs,
and when someone acts in ways
that are in line with the values that we've taught them,
we shouldn't be surprised.
Again, it doesn't justify, but it helps to explain.
And we see things like rape, intimate-partner violence,
we see sexual harassment
disproportionately perpetrated against women by men.
And this is a systemic problem.
Right now, there's a culture of pointing at the few bad apples,
saying, "That's the reason that there is sexual harassment in this industry."
But what that is doing is trying to externalize the problem.
It's trying to say, "It's not me, it's not us, it's that person."
But it is us.
And we're all part of the culture that facilitates bad behavior.
Four:
Bad supervision or a lack of rules and regulations
can also contribute to bad decision-making.
A theory called "routine activity theory,"
or "RAT,"
suggests that if you put suitable victims in a place with motivated offenders
without appropriate guardians, like regulators, like police,
they are significantly more likely to commit crime.
Now, one of the things that we're seeing right now
is that online rates of crime are astronomical.
And part of the rationale for that is that the cyber-RAT, that online,
when we have so many potential victims and so many potential perpetrators
in the same space without regulation,
we get into trouble.
So again there, we can take it upon ourselves
to help and regulate and bring in ethical frameworks
that can help structure our interactions online.
But my favorite theory, my favorite theory of all
that I think really helps explain the worst kinds of atrocities,
that helps explain the Jeffrey Dahmers of the world,
that helps explain why people in military situations can do awful things,
why humans are capable,
good, normal humans are capable of genocide
is dehumanizing people.
Because when we stop seeing people as human beings,
it makes us capable of the worst kinds of atrocity.
And one of the ways that we do that is by calling people evil.
When we call us someone evil,
we're trying to communicate to someone that,
"This person, I don't even want to try and understand.
This person is so different from me
that I'm not even going to consider them a human being;
I'm going to use words like 'monster' instead."
And the problem is -
as Nietzsche has said in his critique of the concept of evil,
especially of the dichotomous concept of good versus evil
rather than in more nuanced understanding,
suggesting that we're all a mix
of things that some people consider good and others consider evil -
is that when you start fighting with monsters,
you have to be careful that you don't become the monster.
And so what I need you to go out and do now is
next time somebody mentions the word "evil,"
ask them what they actually mean by that term.
Because using the word evil is lazy.
It's unnuanced and it's uninformed.
And you can speak up against this.
I would challenge you to think the unthinkable,
to speak about that which others deem unspeakable.
Bring up taboo topics at home.
Try to delve and start discourse about these incredibly important issues.
Because then we can start to explain that which some deem unexplainable,
and hopefully, we can begin to prevent
that which others have deemed unpreventable.
Because it's time for all of us to embrace our evil empathy.
It's time to rethink evil.
Thank you.
(Applause)