The Nature of Evil

Interview Transcripts

David Buss

Interview 8/10/05 by John Rieger

Part One

David Buss, in your book, The Murderer Next Door, you turn to the question of murder, why people commit murder, what makes people kill. With so much research over the years into murder and murderers, what was left to explain?

Quite a bit. Most prior theories of murder invoked pathology, suggesting that murderers were crazy or psychologically defective in some way, or they invoked theories like media violence. The problem is that these prior theories of murder all fail woefully to explain the very detailed circumstances in which people kill, and how ordinary people who have never killed before all of a sudden break loose and go out and kill someone. So, for example, theories that invoke media violence can’t explain why cultures that lack media violence, such as the Yanomamö or the Ache, both native Indian tribes in South America, or the Gabusi in Africa, why these people who lack media have higher murder rates than cultures such as ours with all the modern media and media violence that we are exposed to.

Furthermore, the theories can’t explain the detailed patterns under which people kill. The theories all lump murder into one category as though it were a unitary phenomenon. In fact, murder is a bunch of different phenomena. So an 18-year-old mother who kills her newborn child, that’s one form of murder, but that is very different from a male who kills another male in a dispute over a woman, or a man who kills his mate when he discovers that she’s sexually unfaithful or has dumped him, and those forms of murder are different still from a stepfather who beats his stepchild to death, and those are different still from people who kill in self-defense, and those are different still from males forming coalitions to go to war to kill members of another group. Furthermore, they can’t’ really explain obvious known facts about murder, such that in every culture far more men than women murder, and far more men than women are victims of being murdered. So roughly 85% of the murderers in all cultures are men, and only 15% women, and so theories that invoke media violence or pathology simply can’t explain that sex difference.

Of course, there is the very popular theory that men are just beastly.

Yes, well, and that very well may be true. It is true that men are responsible for committing the majority of violent and horrific acts, ranging from sexual harassment to rape to physical beatings to murder, but saying men are beastly doesn’t provide a theory of why men are beastly, and it doesn’t provide a theory for why women, under certain conditions, murder at higher rates than men. So, for example, if we go to, um, killing genetically related infants, women are actually higher than men in that category of homicide, so…

That’s infanticide—killing your own children is what you’re talking about?

Yes, infanticide. And so the point that I’m making is that, even to take child killing as a category, the conditions under which men and women kill children are very, very different.

You remark quite straightforwardly in your book that “the advent of sexual reproduction opened the door to murder.”

Yes. One of the strange and horrifying thinks about the logic of evolution by selection is that it turns out that in some circumstances, fortunately very delimited circumstances, it’s actual beneficial for individuals in the struggle for survival and reproductive success.

Basically, the evolutionary process is all about differential reproduction, which means that whatever leads an individual to out-reproduce his or her competitors, those traits that lead to successful differential reproduction will be passed, will increase in frequency in the population and come to characterize us as a species.

Now, we can see this ruthless competition in a very simple case that everybody can understand, which is self-defense. If someone’s trying to kill you, then killing them to prevent being killed allows you to survive, and allows you to survive so that you can subsequently reproduce.

But now we take it to different circumstances. What about if someone were trying to kill your children? Well, your children are the precious vehicles for your genetic material. They are the vehicles that carry your genes into the next generation, and so killing to prevent your children from being killed is also beneficial for your reproductive success.

Now we can extend the logic to other forms of reproductive competition. Let’s say that there’s a competition between two men for access to a particular woman. Well, in the currency of reproductive success, if you could kill that rival, and if there were no costs associated with killing that rival, and eliminating that rival gave you sexual access to this woman, then killing, again, would be beneficial, not in a moral sense, but in the sense of increasing the likelihood that you would reproduce. And so the same logic basically applies to all reproductively relevant resources, be they mates, food, access to critical territory, or whatever.

And so reproductive competition lies at the heart of why people kill, and there are a variety of circumstances in which it occurs. Some have to do with killing children who are genetically unrelated to you, so in the case of a stepfather who is investing resources in, in essence, a rival’s child, it can sometimes be beneficial for that stepfather to eliminate this genetically unrelated vehicle. Now, it sounds cold and it sounds harsh and it sounds cruel, and, of course, most stepfathers don’t kill their stepchildren, but the fact of being a stepchild in the preschool years increases your risk of being killed from 40- to 100-fold.

40- to 100-fold increase in risk… if you’re a stepchild?

Yes, being a stepchild in the early years—what that means is the preschool years—is the single largest risk factor for being killed. It far outweighs poverty or any of the other explanations that have been put forth for why children are killed.

What about cases where mothers kill their children—and there have been some fairly shocking ones in the last decade where mothers have killed three or more young children. How can that be adaptive when, as you say, children are the vessels of our genetic legacy?

Yes, I think that those cases are not adaptive. I thank that those cases are the result of true pathologies. So cases where a woman kills her, or in one case five of her children as in the Andrea Yates case, these I think are reflections of true pathology. We note them, and we are drawn to them and have tremendous media coverage of them precisely because they are so rare and so bizarre and so unusual and so difficult to explain. I mean if there’s one psychological circuit that evolution has implanted in women’s brains, it is a mothering circuit designed to protect her children at all possible costs, and mothers display this routinely on a daily basis for years and years and years, and that’s precisely why we find it so bizarre and shocking when a mother goes so far as to actually kill her children.

And yet one of the most striking points in your research is the discovery that the one kind of murder that women commit more frequently than men is killing their children?

Yes, and the circumstances under which they kill their children have to be understood in detail, and they have a very precise reproductive logic to them. Women who kill their children typically—and these are the strongest predictors—are when they’re young, unmarried, they lack an investing father who can provide resources and protection for the child, when they have many future years of reproduction ahead of them and so it’s not a propitious time for her to reproduce, and when they lack, the woman lacks close kin around who can support and protect that child. So as women get older, the probability that they will kill their child decreases dramatically; when there is an investing father, decreases dramatically; when there are close kin around , decreases dramatically. So what we have to understand is that in most cases these circumstances where women are killing their children is they’re in essence delaying reproduction to a more auspicious time when they have more resources that can aid in the survival and care of the child.

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Part Two

Men and women, you found, kill for very different reasons?

Yes. I can try to characterize the differences between men and women and their motivations, but they’re fairly complex, so maybe we’ll start with one set of motivations.

From a man’s point of view, women are valuable reproductive resources, they’re valuable reproductive commodities over which men compete intensely for access to. Now, from the standpoint of women, women are what we call the high-investing sex. That is, in order to produce a child, a woman has to invest nine months of her metabolic resources in a pregnancy, which is very costly, very time-consuming, in order to produce that single child. For a man to produce a single child, all he has to do is have one act of sex, and if it’s a successful conception, that one act of sex can lead to a successful reproduction.

So what this means is, women are the valuable reproductive resource over which men compete. So, now in every generation there are more men who are bachelors so to speak, who remain mateless, than there are women. And this is true across cultures. If you go to traditional cultures, all fertile women end up getting mated, and most of these cultures are polygynous, meaning men are legally permitted to take multiple wives. And so what that means is that for every man who has a couple of wives there are some men who remain bachelors. So what this means is that men are in competition with each other for access to women.

Now there are a variety of ways in which men can compete and succeed in competing for access to these women. One method, one very common approach is to provide resources to attract the woman. Another set of strategies is to inflict costs on one’s same-sex rivals. Now these costs might be things like threats or intimidation, but they might be simply killing the rival, and in fact killing the rival turns out to be a marvelously effective means of getting rid of a rival. Dead rivals can’t come back to haunt you. They can’t come back to take away your resources or inflict revenge. Now killing is not usually a first line strategy that men use, but in certain circumstances it proves to be a highly effective one. So, basically, reproductive competition is at the heart of male motivation for killing.

Now let’s extend this to a couple of different contexts in which men kill. Okay, one is men killing their intrasexual rivals, and this is the largest class of men killing other men. So that is they kill them under conditions under which other men are trying to take their mates, they kill them under conditions under which the men are threatening their status and social reputation. So the stereotypic image of the two men getting into a verbal disagreement in a bar, and the argument escalates, and one pulls out a knife or a gun, and someone ends up dead: from the perspective of an outsider we might look at these barroom fights that result in someone getting stabbed to death and say, boy, it’s pretty silly, you know, two men, it’s a verbal argument, “sticks and stones can break my bones, but words will never hurt me,” but in fact most often these men are competing in an arena where they’re surrounded by peers, and status and reputation are absolutely critical. A plummet in status and reputation can be absolutely devastating in terms of a man’s mating opportunities, and so even though we find this behavior somewhat bizarre, it in fact has a reproductive logic to it.

Context number two: why do men go to war? Now modern war is very different from traditional war. In traditional war, one of the primary motivations for men to go to war is to capture women. In the Yanomamo, for example, you ask, well, why do you go to war, why are you always engaged in raids with your neighboring tribes? They will tell you it is often to capture women and bring them back as mates—concubines or wives—or to recapture women who have been stolen from them by another tribe in a previous raid.

Good Grief!

And so mating motivations are also central to warfare. Now much less so in modern warfare, but even in modern warfare you have many instances of rape.

A third motive for men to murder has to do with murdering their stepchildren. If we can take a step back and look in the animal kingdom, we find a very common phenomenon in lions, and lions, the male lion will come in and usurp the resident male lion and drive him off, and then will kill the cubs that are not his own offspring. That is, he is in essence killing the rival male’s children. When animal biologists observe these phenomena, which are very regular in nature—in fact 25% of all lion cubs are killed in this manner—they have no problem invoking the notion that male lions have adaptations that are designed to kill. By killing the cubs of the rival males, that basically causes the female to come into estrous, and she becomes fertile, and the male lion who has just killed her cubs then has sex with the female lion, and in essence she mates with the killer of her cubs.

But when we see analogous phenomena in humans, people have been very squeamish, and perhaps justifiably, about invoking the possibility that human males might have adaptations designed to kill in analogous circumstances. Now they’re not strictly analogous, because human mating systems are quite different from lion mating systems, but they’re in some ways analogous. And they’re analogous in the sense that we see being a stepchild as being a tremendous risk factor for homicide in both lions and in humans, and we find females mating with the killers of their children.

So back to your original question… So these are some of the motivations for why men kill: it’s to gain access to females, and it’s to eliminate the offspring of rival males. Now when females kill, killing is a much riskier strategy for females. They basically weren’t designed with as many murderous motivations as men, and so when females kill, as I mentioned before, one of the contexts is if they’re not in a resource position to raise a child then they will commit infanticide. Second is women often kill in self-defense. Now why would they need to kill in self-defense? Well, the people women typically kill in self-defense are typically men, and they’re typically the husbands, boyfriends, or ex-husbands or ex-boyfriends of the woman, and they kill in self-defense to protect themselves against a man who is enraged that she has had sex with another man, or who is enraged that she has dumped him unceremoniously.

Let me ask a question about that. In the classic crime of passion a jealous husband will murder his mate, thus depriving himself of the very thing he desires to keep. This seems irrational, but in fact it is not, and in your book you use the Dorothy Stratton story as an illustration?

Yes, well the most dangerous… the two most dangerous circumstances in which men kill their mates are, first, if she has left him, okay, and it becomes clear when it sinks into his mind that she is not coming back. Okay, that is the single most dangerous time for a woman of getting killed, and in fact that is exactly what happened with Dorothy Stratton. She got killed when her boyfriend, Paul Snider, realized that she was not coming back. She had defected and was re-mated to Peter Bogdonovich. The second most dangerous circumstance for a woman is if she is sexually unfaithful, and the man catches her being sexually unfaithful.

That’s the second most dangerous?

Yes. So again, reproductive competition is at the heart of both of those circumstances and both of those male motivations. Now women also, like men, become enraged when they are dumped, or if their partner has sex with someone else, but these are far less likely to lead the woman to murder her mate or ex-mate. But women who are being attacked by males, by their boyfriends or husbands will often kill in self-defense. The other circumstances in which a woman will kill is if her children and her children’s safety and survival is in jeopardy. And so after prolonged history of physical abuse, where the woman is being abused, or her children are being abused, that is a circumstance in which women have an elevated probability of murdering her boyfriend or husband.

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Part Three

Now, in the case of abuse, and again in the case of the jealous husband who murders his former mate, or his mate whom he has caught in flagrante delicto it’s not clear how he gains anything by committing murder, or by battering?

Yeah, I think this one is probably the hypothesis… if you view my book, you know, within The Murderer Next Door, you can view it as a collection of hypotheses about homicidal circuits that humans have evolved, and among all the homicidal circuits that I propose, I think this one is probably the most tenuous. But the argument is as follows.

When a woman has sex with another man, it jeopardizes two things. One is it basically jeopardizes the man’s reproduction, because another man is fertilizing his wife, not him, and so in essence by killing her he is in essence killing the offspring of his rival, or a reproductive resource of a rival, okay, but second, is that men who are cuckolded sustain very large reputational damage, and reputation is critical for men in attracting future mates. And this reputational damage that cuckolds suffer is universal. I actually have data now from 17 different cultures that document this. And so men… and so that adds an extra incentive for men to kill under these circumstances. But of all the hypotheses I advance about homicidal circuits in humans, I would probably place the least confidence in this particular one. If you asked me to rank, to order my hypotheses in terms of likelihood to be absolutely correct, I would say men have evolved warfare adaptations, adaptations to declare war and to kill other males in group contexts, adaptations to kill male sexual rivals, adaptations to kill stepchildren, and adaptations to kill women who have permanently defected from the mating relationship so that they are in essence no longer reproductive resources for the killer but are now reproductive resources for the rival.

One of the critical things that you have to understand about the logic of the evolutionary process is that it’s differential reproductive success. And so what that means is that the rival’s gain is your loss. And so inflicting costs on rivals can be an extremely effective strategy of getting ahead in the game of reproduction, and one of the most effective means of inflicting costs on a rival is to kill that rival.

You use the example of Genghis Khan to great effect in making this point?

Yes, Genghis Khan, I mean this is a remarkable case, example, where Genghis Khan rose to power through killing, and was known as a feared conqueror, and he assembled armies to go kill groups of other males, and set women up in harems both for himself and his sons, and a recent study of DNA of 16,000 individuals around the area of the Mongolian Empire in China reveal that about half a percent have, in essence, Genghis Khan’s DNA. And so it looks like killing was an extraordinarily effective strategy for Genghis Khan, as it has been for kings, rulers, despots, and ruthless emperors throughout human history.

I must say that I find this book rather depressing. When I reflect on my own likely genetic legacy, it seems rather small. I’m just not as fearsome, murderous or high status as I would need to be to really change the tide of genetic history? Well, uh… I thought I could get somewhere just by being nice?

Well, that’s also a good strategy. Most of our ancestors have achieved reproductive success by acquiring resources, acquiring status, attracting women, and investing in children, although it’s very clear that males have evolved homicidal circuits, and, John, you have those homicidal circuits within you too. Fortunately in the modern environment, for most of us, those homicidal circuits are not activated or acted upon. I should say “acted upon.” They are activated in the majority of us at some point. So if you are in the majority of our sample, we found that 91% of all men have had at least one vivid thought about killing someone else, and that the corresponding percentage in women is 84%. Fortunately, most of us don’t act upon these homicidal impulses, but the fact that we have them, the fact that we devote cognitive effort to thinking about killing others, and even do scenario building, do cognitive simulations, and have rich fantasies about killing, and that we have these fantasies in precisely the circumstances in which people actually do kill, is very revealing that these homicidal circuits are part of our human nature.

Now your study of homicidal fantasies was actually very broad, was it not, very comprehensive?

Yes, we had more than 5000 participants in this study from six different cultures. So it’s the single largest study that’s ever been conducted on people’s fantasies of killing.

What were those cultures?

We had Singapore, Peru, Germany, Great Britain, and the United States.

And were the results fairly consistent across all those cultures?

Yes, they were. The circumstances that trigger homicidal fantasies were extremely consistent across cultures. The cultures did, I should say, vary in how frequently they had homicidal thoughts, and the percentage who admitted to having them. So Americans, for example, admitted to having more homicidal thoughts than people in Singapore. We don’t know whether this might be due to a social desirability issue, where people are reluctant to admit that they’ve had thoughts of this kind, but the circumstances that trigger thoughts of killing others in Singapore or Peru are exactly the same as the circumstances that trigger thoughts of killing among Americans. So people who are interfering with your ascension in the status hierarchy, people that are interfering with your mating opportunities, people who are inflicting costs on your children, people who are inflicting costs on your genetic relatives, these are all circumstances that trip the homicidal fantasies in all the cultures we studied.

Is murder still adaptive today, and if not, why does it persist?

Well, that’s an interesting question, and I think whether murder’s adaptive today has to be viewed on a case by case basis. I think that, by and large, it is far less adaptive today than it has been, and it is less adaptive because we have devised a professional police force, a legal system with written laws against killing, and jails to put killers, and all these modern methods of deterring killing have made killing a much more costly strategy to pursue, and in fact does deter killers. People like to think that we have a bizarrely high rate of homicide in America, for example, but in fact, cultures that lack professional police forces, written laws, juries and jails, have homicide rates that are far higher than ours. So even if you go to the so-called “peaceful tribes” like the !Kung San of Botswana, they have murder rates that are higher than those in modern America. So in the modern world, killing is a far more costly strategy to pursue, and so I would say as I general rule it is not adaptive in the modern environment.

However, I think we have to look at it on a case by case basis. There are some circumstances in which it might still be adaptive, and as I point out in my book, being a convicted murderer does not seem to deter women from being attracted to men. Men such as Ted Bundy, Scott Peterson who have been convicted of murder, these men get marriage proposals in prison, sometimes get married in prison, sometimes have conjugal visits, and sometimes end up reproducing, even though they have been convicted of murder. And so it would be comforting if we could say that, yes, it’s totally maladaptive in the modern world, but it’s just not clear that it’s always maladaptive.

If we have these adaptations for murder, does that imply that murder will remain an inevitability?

No, I don’t think murder will remain an inevitability, and I think the fact that we have been able to dramatically reduce murder rates by raising the costs of murder and devising more effective police forces with more effective forensic techniques, I think this has helped a lot and will continue to help a lot in reducing murder rates.

The other thing is, I would argue that understanding our evolved homicidal circuitry, our evolved psychology of killing, is absolutely vital to reducing murder rates. If we understand what motivates murder, and the circumstances under which people do murder, we’ll be in a better position to prevent murders from actually occurring. So just because we have evolved homicidal circuits or evolved adaptations to kill does not in any way mean that killing is inevitable. I believe that we can devise environments that prevent the activation of our homicidal circuits with enough knowledge. Of course saying we can do this in principle is one thing, actually doing it in practice is far more difficult.

The fact is that men and women continue to compete for access to mates. The fact that getting dumped and having your status and reputation severely interfered with, the fact that these are triggers of homicidal thoughts—it’s very difficult to eliminate these triggers. People get dumped all the time. The divorce rate in America is 50%. People have affairs; these trigger homicidal thoughts. So saying it’s in principle possible to devise environments that lower the frequency of activating these homicidal circuits is one thing, and actually doing it is another thing. So what I think our best bet will be to not devise environments that prevent the activation of the circuits themselves, but to devise increased costs so that we don’t act on those circuits once they’re activated.

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Part Four

In your discussion of status competition in the book you observed that doomed, utopian communities like the hippie communes were wrecked on the shoals of status competition. In that case, fighting human nature didn’t work. What makes you more sanguine about overcoming our propensity for murder?

Well, I think that it’s unlikely that we’ll ever be able to overcome status competition, but our evolved homicidal circuits are not of the sort where once the circuit is activated it becomes inevitable that you kill. In fact, I believe that our homicidal circuits are designed to cognitively evaluate whether it is advantageous to kill or not to kill. And in fact, one of the functions of our homicidal thoughts is actually to prevent carrying out the homicidal thought. In other words, what people do is, something happens to them, usually a grave cost is inflicted upon them, and then they think about what are the solutions to this problem. How can I eliminate the costs. One of the solutions is to kill. But most people work through the scenario-building, and they come to the conclusion that killing is too costly.

One of the things that I found in my study is that people say, well, we ask, what could have changed to enable you to actually carry out your homicidal fantasy, and they say, well, if I knew I could get away with it without being caught then I would have acted on it. And people cite that they don’t want to spend their life in a cage as a reason for why they didn’t carry out their homicidal thought, why they didn’t turn their thought into a deed. And so I think that, just because we have these homicidal circuits doesn’t mean that we are powerless to intervene in them, and what we can do, and we have done successfully to some degree, is we have made it far more costly to killers to act on their homicidal thoughts.

Now, of course, given the fact that there are somewhere between 16 and 20 thousand murderers in the United States every year suggests that we have not been entirely successful at it, and furthermore, even that is a gross underestimate of the actual attempts at killing. As I mention in the book, three times that number would be killed were it not for the fact that we have modern ambulances and modern medicine that save the lives of many people who would otherwise have ended up dead. And then of course there are many attempted murders that fail because the victim has successfully evaded the intended murder and avoided being killed, and that’s a very important part of the equation, is that we have very effective anti-homicidal defense mechanisms.

From an evolutionary perspective, it’s very bad to be dead, it’s very bad to be killed, and so as soon as killing entered the population as a strategy, it immediately selected for adaptations to prevent being killed, and that includes killing to prevent being killed, and so one of the things that we can do, I think, is both inform people about the circumstances in which their life is in danger, and secondly we can educate people about their anti-homicide defenses, and suggest that they are, in some sense should be listened to very carefully. One of the things that I found in our studies of anti-homicide defenses is that people will say, “Well, I felt very funny about this situation.” For example, a woman might feel, “Oh, I feel very uncomfortable walking into this dark place, because my life might be in danger,” and they think, “Oh, I’m just being silly, I’m just imagining things.” I think people need to listen to their evolved intuitions about when their lives are in danger and act on those intuitions.

Going back to the role of status competition in homicidal behavior among men. If this is a mental circuit, if this is an aspect of the adapted mind, then what happens to the Biblical injunction, for example, to turn the other cheek? Do we really respect a man who turns the other cheek to a public insult from another man?

Well, I think for men it’s very difficult. I mean, it depends somewhat on circumstances, but men who fail to rise to the challenge of public insults often do suffer in status and reputation. And this applies in even ivory tower academics. If someone has impugned your ideas and your theories, and you fail to respond to this public challenge to your theories, then you suffer in status and reputation, and so I think even in academia, where people are supposed to have a dispassionate pursuit of pure knowledge, status competition often gets in the way of that. People protect their theories and defend their theories, sometimes even to the death, though fortunately rarely in academia.

Although I must say the invective in academia can often be superb?

Yes, absolutely, and it’s interesting, you see even in comics, they have a phrase, you know, “Oh I killed last night.” That refers to you know they slayed the audience and produced an increase in their status as a result.

Tell me, evolutionary psychologists often speak of mental circuits or mental modules. Isn’t there perhaps a greater role for general intelligence, and isn’t there perhaps some other way in which this uniform behavior that is observable could be produced other than by these as-yet-to-be-observed, very rigid adaptations?

I wouldn’t characterize our evolved mental circuits as rigid. If I could use an example. There’s a lot of evidence for jealousy being an evolved adaptation. Okay, let’s say that you suspect that your partner might be unfaithful to you. Well, in my research I’ve documented that there are at least 19 different tactics that humans have at their disposal for dealing with this adaptive problem. These range from vigilance to violence. Which particular behavioral method an individual uses when they get jealous and suspect a partner of infidelity depends on many different factors within this informational problem. What is my physical formidability relative to my rival? Is my partner actually being unfaithful, or is there a justifiable reason for her unexplained absence?

So what I’m saying is that I don’t believe that the evolved mental circuits are rigid in the sense of single-input-producing-single-invariant-response. Rather, they’re tremendously flexible, and involve a lot of rich information processing. So, can just a simple general intelligence explain that pattern of findings that we find? I think that the answer is no to that, because there are certain statistical regularities that are not observable by an individual within their lifetime, but do occur over deep historical time, and so that evolution by selection can pick up on those historically recurrent statistical regularities in a way that a modern human, simply processing information cannot.

So, for example, on the jealousy case, there is a link between a woman having sex with another man, and from the husband’s perspective his paternity being jeopardized. But during a lifetime that information is not available. We can’t live and observe or experience enough events to establish that correlation between impaired reproductive success through cuckoldry and our partner sleeping with someone else, but that statistical regularity existed recurrently over evolutionary time, such that when these statistical regularities do recur, selection can pick up on them and fashion more specific mechanisms designed to respond to them—in this case responding to cues to sexual infidelity.

Now, do I think that humans might also possess more domain-general forms of intelligence, such as ability to reason about means and ends and so forth? Yes, I think that humans are likely to have more general psychological mechanisms in addition to the specific ones. But where there have been statistically recurring environmental structures operating over deep time, selection has fashioned more specific mechanisms, and we couldn’t really survive or reproduce without them. The general mechanisms can only get us so far.

David, I must say I find your research, both in this book and in your previous books, very disturbing, especially because it’s so convincing.

Thank you.

People don’t seem to be very nice. And I’m curious: what’s it like to spend seven years immersed in this kind of research?

Well, spending seven years immersed in the research was quite disturbing at me at some points. As I mentioned in the book at several points I almost gave up because it was so disturbing. It, you know, getting into this darker side of human nature is very troubling, and it changed me in a profound way. I think what it did is it made me more sensitive, rather than more calloused with respect to these issues, and it sensitized me in a couple of ways. One is to the simple brutality of murder, and how horrible it is, and how devastating it is not just to the victim, but also to the family and friends and so forth, but it also, and the most surprising thing is, it gave me a strange sympathy for people who have thoughts of killing, because the people in my sample, the 5000 participants in my studies, their thoughts of killing were triggered by tremendous costs that were inflicted on them typically. So they’d been humiliated profoundly in public, and had suffered tremendous damage to their reputation, or their mate had been sexually unfaithful, and had left them for a rival and plunged them into a deep depression.

When you read through the events that trip people’s homicidal thoughts, I found myself developing a deep empathy for why people would go to the disturbing end of actually contemplating murder, and so that was one of the very unexpected reactions that I had. But I guess the other effect it had on me is I started talking more to members of the legal community—law professors and police and forensic psychiatrists and psychologists—in order to use this information that I gained over the seven years in order to reduce the murder rates. And so I guess in answer to your question, it had a variety of reactions in me over the seven years, but I’m glad I did it, but I think I might focus on a sunnier side of human nature in our next project.

Professor Buss, thank you so much for talking to me today.

Well thank you. It’s been very interesting talking to you.

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