Criminal psychologist explains whether people are 'born evil' and if anyone could become a killer

A criminal psychologist has given her view on whether a person is 'born evil' and whether or not everybody has the capacity to kill someone else.

Think about what people have done over the years and you can probably pluck out a few less-than-stellar examples of humanity who it would not be difficult at all to describe as 'evil'.

Of course, the conundrum here is whether or not they were simply born that way or whether they did terrible things due to other factors, the classic argument of nature versus nurture.

It might be more comforting to think someone is born evil and that makes them separate from the rest of us, but criminal psychologist Dr Julia Shaw spoke to LADbible about her views on what makes the minds of criminals.

Among the topics she discussed was the idea of being born evil, and whether anyone and everyone had it in them to be a killer.

Criminal psychologist Dr Julia Shaw had a lot to say on whether people were born evil or not (LADbible)

Is anybody 'born evil'?

This is one of the big questions she was asked and Dr Shaw answered it with a resounding 'no', but there's more to it from her point of view.

She said: "I say no because, there are two reasons.

"One is that I don't like the word evil for human beings. I think that that is a terrible and dehumanising word that almost always is the end of a conversation rather than the beginning of a really important conversation we need to be having.

"The other thing is that the idea that you could somehow be born with almost, like, the sin, this, it's almost a religious idea that you are, you are brought into this world and you are already carry this evil within you.

"And so ultimately it's just about trying to stop people from revealing their inner evil or I don't know, it just really underestimates the role of environment and society and values and what else is going on in the world at that point."

Dr Shaw said she thought 'people are capable of terrible things' and there were people whose minds were 'lower on empathy' or 'higher on sadism' which made them more likely to hurt others and not feel remorseful about it.

However, she said that 'what they do with that is entirely dependent on everything else' so in her view 'people are not born evil' and she thought human beings should stop using the term 'evil' to describe each other.

Does everyone have the capacity to kill?

This is one of the questions she gets asked 'all the time', and the criminal psychologist explained that people wanted to know why others killed and whether that capacity lay within them as well.

In short, her answer is that 'everybody does have the capacity, but not everyone has the capacity right now'.

"So I don't think, for me today, I think it's unlikely that I will be capable of killing somebody, certainly of murdering someone who isn't attacking me," the expert explained.

"But if I add a couple of risk factors in, things like suddenly maybe I've lost my job, maybe I'm suffering with poverty, maybe I get into drugs, maybe I meet some new friends who are making bad choices.

"Maybe I get really bad at anger management because my life is starting to feel more complicated and I'm making more rash and more angry decisions."

Dr Shaw explained that when it comes to murder, it was 'almost always because of a fight that gets out of control', and that the idea you see on TV of someone planning it out or waiting to kill someone was not generally accurate.

As such, if those struggles which pushed people got into someone's life then she thought they would have the capacity to kill.