Speaker

Julia Shaw

Julia Shaw

Criminal psychologist and Senior Lecturer in Criminology and Psychology at University College London, best known for research showing that detailed false memories of committing a crime can be deliberately implanted through suggestive interviewing.

Background

Shaw earned her PhD at the University of British Columbia with a doctoral thesis, ‘Constructing Rich False Memories of Committing Crime’, that combined Elizabeth Loftus‘s work on false memory with Saul Kassin’s work on false confessions. The resulting study — showing that a structured, three-session interview protocol could lead roughly 70% of one sample to report vivid, confident false memories of assaulting or stealing from someone — is among the most cited studies in forensic psychology. She has since trained police forces, military and intelligence personnel, and investigators at the International Criminal Court on interview protocols that avoid contaminating witness testimony.

She writes for a general audience across several books: The Memory Illusion (on false memory), Evil: The Science Behind Humanity’s Dark Side (published in the UK as Making Evil, on the psychology of psychopathy, sadism, and violent crime), Bi: The Hidden Culture, History, and Science of Bisexuality (in which she came out publicly as bisexual), and the forthcoming Green Crime (on the criminology of environmental offending — poaching, illegal mining, and corporate emissions fraud). She co-hosts the true-crime podcast Bad People and co-founded Spot, a company that built a chatbot-administered version of the police ‘cognitive interview’ for workplace incident reporting.

Core positions

  • Autobiographical memory is reconstructive rather than recorded: every memory carries some degree of falsehood, and the operative scientific question is how much, not whether.
  • Complete false memories of specific, consequential events — including committing a crime — can be implanted through suggestive, leading interview techniques; this is a normal feature of a healthy memory system, not a rare pathology.
  • Generative AI recreates, at scale, the same socially validating conversational structure that makes memory implantation possible, and should be a subject for social scientists, not only engineers, to shape.
  • ‘Evil’ functions as a label that ends inquiry rather than starts it; the traits associated with the word (the dark tetrad — psychopathy, sadism, narcissism, Machiavellianism) are continuous and universal in degree, not markers of a separate category of person.
  • Most real murders are unplanned escalations of ordinary disputes, not the premeditated work of masterminds; criminal-justice sentencing is often calibrated to a folk sense of just deserts rather than to what would actually reduce future harm.

In the wiki