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)
