[RADIOLAB INTRO]

JAD ABUMRAD: Okay, here we go. Ready, Robert?

ROBERT KRULWICH: Yes.

JAD: I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: Robert Krulwich.

JAD: God, I feel like we haven't you and I sat together and said our names in quite some time.

ROBERT: That's because Molly's been in the chair.

JAD: Molly's been killing it with the Gonad series.

ROBERT: That was just, for those of you who haven't heard it yet, this is kind of a rush through sex reproduction.

JAD: What makes boys boys and girls girls, and the infinity of gray spaces in between.

ROBERT: Yeah.

JAD: And now that we're sort of just on the other side of that ...

ROBERT: We thought that maybe as we turn a corner ourselves, we should refresh. But in an odd sort of way.

JAD: [laughs] I mean, you know, it's just one of those things we've been bringing back shows that we think are just vibrating still in the world.

ROBERT: So at a time when there are people all over our country eyeing other people all over our country and thinking, "She's bad, he's bad, you're bad. I'm good, you're bad." There's a lot of ...

JAD: A lot of black and white thinking happening right now.

ROBERT: Yeah. And so we've decided that it's time to go back to something we did once upon a time when we were wondering about good and bad. We did a show called "The Bad Show."

JAD: We were sort of asking these questions, like, what makes a person inherently good or bad? Is there a way to explain why some people act the way they do and others don't?

ROBERT: Because we really know that no one has a monopoly on bad, although there's some people are trying. [laughs] But we thought we would play this show about the little bit of bad that is in all of us.

JAD: And the really, really bad that is in some of us.

ROBERT: Yeah.

PAT WALTERS: Hello, David.

DAVID BUSS: Yes, hello.

PAT: This is Pat.

DAVID BUSS: Oh, hi Pat.

ROBERT KRULWICH: Let's begin with this story from our producer Pat Walters.

JAD ABUMRAD: Pat, go ahead.

PAT: Okay. So I heard this one from this guy named David.

DAVID BUSS: My name is David Buss.

PAT: Two Ss. He's a psychology professor.

DAVID BUSS: At the University of Texas at Austin.

PAT: And this particular story, it comes from a book that David wrote.

PAT: Could you just—just tell me the little story that you begin your book with?

DAVID BUSS: Okay. Yes. This is one of the things that's—this was one of the things that sparked my interest in the topic of murder.

PAT: The whole thing happened several years ago.

DAVID BUSS: I had a very good friend.

PAT: Another professor at the university.

DAVID BUSS: And I used to socialize with him and—and his wife. And one evening, they were throwing a party and invited me over. And so when I went to the party, the party was already in full swing when I got there. Walked in and asked his wife where this friend of mine was. And she got a disgusted look on her face and said that he was up in the bedroom. And so I went up to the bedroom to find him and he was, you know, in a rage.

PAT: In a rage how? Like, you walked into the room, what do you find?

DAVID BUSS: Well, he started—he started fuming that his wife had dissed him. And ...

PAT: What did she do?

DAVID BUSS: She expressed disapproval about his clothing choices.

PAT: She made fun of his shirt or something.

DAVID BUSS: But did it publicly in front of her friends, so it was kind of a—he felt publicly humiliated.

PAT: And while David's sitting in the bedroom with this friend, the guy looks up at him and he says ...

DAVID BUSS: "I'm gonna kill her."

PAT: How—how did he say it? Like quietly, or ...?

DAVID BUSS: Like, through his teeth. You know, "I'm gonna kill her."

PAT: David had always known this guy to be pretty mild mannered.

DAVID BUSS: But he is a large, very strong man, with a black belt in karate. I knew what he was capable of, so I suggested that we go out for a walk. And I basically spent the next half hour walking around with him trying to cool him off.

PAT: And eventually he did.

DAVID BUSS: He just calmed down.

PAT: Hmm. And did you go back to the party then and, like, continue dinner partying for a while?

DAVID BUSS: Yeah, I did.

PAT: And he did too?

DAVID BUSS: Yes. And he did too. And then he seemed fine when I said goodbye to him. He seemed calm. And I left and went home. And then it was several hours later in the middle of the night that I got the call.

PAT: And it was his friend.

DAVID BUSS: And he says, "Can I come over and sleep on your couch? If I don't leave my house right now, I'm gonna kill her." He was in this state of fury, he said, and instead of hitting his wife, he smashed his fist into the bathroom mirror. And then realized that he had to leave the house or he was gonna do damage to her.

PAT: And then—and so he says that and you're like, "Okay. Yes. Come over now."

DAVID BUSS: Yeah. Exactly.

PAT: Meanwhile later that night, the other side of town ...

DAVID BUSS: His wife went into hiding. Literally disappeared for six months and didn't tell anyone where she was because she was terrified that he was gonna kill her.

ROBERT: This story made us wonder: is David's friend ...

JAD: Is he unusual?

ROBERT: Or does everybody at some point have something dark in them that just tiptoes out, just from time to time?

JAD: Yeah. This is Radiolab, and today we're gonna get bad. So to speak.

ROBERT: We've done a good show.

JAD: And this is "The Bad Show."

ROBERT: So you ask, like, why do people do bad things?

JAD: What does it actually mean to be bad, anyways? Like, how do you tell the real baddies from the rest of us?

ROBERT: That's our hour.

JAD: I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: This is Radiolab.

ROBERT: "The Bad Show."

JAD: Back to Pat.

PAT: Okay. So what happened to David that night with his friend got him really curious about murder and badness and all these things we're thinking about, but it wasn't until a few years later that he learned something that really put what happened that night into context. By this point, David's moved onto a new university and he's teaching an introductory psychology class.

DAVID BUSS: And I devoted one class session to the topic of homicide and why people kill. And I designed a little questionnaire where I simply ask the students, you know, "Have you ever thought about killing someone?" And they would circle yes or no.

PAT: Then he left some space at the bottom for them to elaborate if they said yes.

DAVID BUSS: And, you know, the class ended and I went back to my office. And I just sat at my desk and started reading these. And I was just astonished.

PAT: To find page after page of yesses. And not just yesses ...

DAVID BUSS: But these very vivid descriptions about ...

PAT: Who they would kill, where they'd do it, when.

DAVID BUSS: The precise method.

PAT: How many of them went into that kind of detail?

DAVID BUSS: I would say 75 or 80 percent.

PAT: Wow! Were you a little bit, like, horrified? Like, "Oh my God. My students are murderers!"

DAVID BUSS: Well, horrified is—I was pretty stunned. And so I expanded the sample where we asked about 5,000 people.

PAT: All over the world.

DAVID BUSS: Singapore, Peru, the UK.

PAT: That same question.

DAVID BUSS: Have you ever thought about killing someone? And 91 percent of the men said yes. And 84 percent of the women.

PAT: Said "Yes, I've thought about killing someone."

DAVID BUSS: Yes. If any sizable fraction actually acted on their homicidal fantasies, the streets would be running—running red.

ROBERT: Yeah. But that's just a—those are fantasies.

PAT: Some of them actually seem like ...

DAVID BUSS: Well, here's one.

PAT: ... something more than just fantasies.

DAVID BUSS: From a woman.

PAT: Sure.

DAVID BUSS: Okay. This is a 20-year-old female. We ask "Who do you think about killing?" And she said, "My ex-boyfriend. We lived together for a couple months. He was very aggressive. He started calling me a whore and told me he didn't love me anymore, so I broke up with him. Then a few months later, he started calling me, trying to get back together, but I didn't want to. He said that if I ever had a relationship with another man, he was going to send videos of us having sex to all the people in my university. The thing is that I do have a new boyfriend, but my ex-boyfriend doesn't know that yet, and I'm terrified that he'll do what he says. Then suddenly, the thought occurred to me that my life would be much happier without him in existence."

DAVID BUSS: And then she said, "I actually did this. I invited him for dinner. And as he was in the kitchen looking stupid, peeling the carrots to make salad, I came up to him laughingly, gently, so that he wouldn't suspect anything. I thought about grabbing a knife quickly and stabbing him in the chest repeatedly until he was dead. I actually did the first thing, but he saw my intentions and ran away." When asked how close she came to killing him, she estimated 60 percent.

ROBERT: Sixty. I don't think I've ever had a fantasy that—that anatomically specific where I would see the part of the other person that I was gonna stab or plan it like that.

JAD: Well, have you ever been blackmailed the way this woman was being blackmailed?

ROBERT: No. No one has ever said about a sex tape that I've ever—you know?

JAD: So you don't know. It is a fair question to ask what are the conditions under which you or me or any of us could do awful things?

ROBERT: I think they have to be extreme in the extreme.

JAD: Well ...

ROBERT: You know how mild-mannered I am.

JAD: No. No. And you know what? This actually brings us to the first topic of the hour, so let me—just to set it up, Robert, I'm gonna give you this piece of paper here.

ROBERT: What is this?

JAD: So these are some word pairs. So read these words that you see.

ROBERT: These words here?

JAD: Yep.

ROBERT: "Nice day."

JAD: Uh-huh.

ROBERT: "Fat neck."

JAD: Yes.

ROBERT: "Sad face." What is this? "Soft hair."

JAD: Yeah.

ROBERT: I don't know what this is.

JAD: They're just word pairs.

ROBERT: "Hard ..."

JAD: I want you to commit them to memory.

ROBERT: Commit them to memory? You know ...

JAD: And while you're doing that, just give me your finger. I'm gonna ...

ROBERT: "Fast bird."

JAD: ... connect it to this little electrode to your finger.

ROBERT: "Hard."

JAD: There you go. There.

ROBERT: Wait a second. "Clear air."

JAD: Okay. So give me the paper back.

ROBERT: Already?

JAD: Time's up. So I'm just gonna go into this other room over here. Can you hear me?

ROBERT: What? What?

JAD: Right. So I'm gonna talk to you over this intercom, okay?

ROBERT: Okay.

JAD: I'm gonna give you a test.

ROBERT: I'm not ready for this!

JAD: Pay attention.

ROBERT: All right.

JAD: To the best of your memory, which word was matched with "nice?" Was it "nice day?" "Nice sky?" "Nice job?" Or "nice chair?"

ROBERT: "Nice ..."

JAD: Answer please.

ROBERT: I don't know. Wait a second.

JAD: Just push the button that corresponds to the right word. Go.

ROBERT: Okay. I'm choosing "job."

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Stanley Milgram: Wrong. Answer is "day."]

JAD: Sorry, man.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Stanley Milgram: 285 volts.]

JAD: I'm gonna give you a little ...

ROBERT: [laughs] What did you just do?

JAD: She just burst my eardrums. [laughs] God! Obviously no need to be alarmed. That was not a real shock. We were just enacting an old very famous experiment you may have heard about.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Stanley Milgram: It is May, 1962.]

JAD: Done by this guy.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Stanley Milgram: An experiment is being conducted in the Elegant Interaction Laboratory at Yale University.]

JAD: That's Stanley Milgram, talking about the experiment in a film. In case you've never heard of this—probably have, but in case you haven't, here's what he did. He recruited a bunch of subjects.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Stanley Milgram: The subjects are 40 males between the ages of 20 and 50.]

JAD: Just normal everyday dudes.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Stanley Milgram: The subjects range in occupation from corporation presidents to good humor men and plumbers.]

JAD: And he ran them through something like what you and I just did. He would have each subject sit down at a table.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Stanley Milgram: Have a seat right here.]

JAD: In front of this really impressive-looking machine.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Stanley Milgram: This machine ...]

JAD: It had lots of switches on it.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Stanley Milgram: ... generates electric shocks. When you press one of the switches all the way down, the learner gets a shock.]

JAD: And in the other room, there was a guy who he called the learner who was supposed to have memorized some words. And every time that guy got the word wrong ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Stanley Milgram: Wrong!]

JAD: ... like you just did.

ROBERT: Yep.

JAD: Which happened constantly.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Stanley Milgram: The answer is neck.]

JAD: The volunteer ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Stanley Milgram: 300 volts.]

JAD: ... was instructed to shock that guy.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: [screams]]

JAD: With higher and higher voltage. Now the volunteer couldn't see the guy he was shocking, but he could definitely hear him.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: [screams]]

JAD: Milgram staged the whole thing like it was some experiment about memory and punishment, but of course it wasn't about that.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Oh, man.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Stanley Milgram: Continue please.]

JAD: It was about how far would these people go. How many times would they shock that sad ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP: [screams]]

JAD: ... sap in the next room just because they were being told to?

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Let me out of here! Let me out of here!]

JAD: That guy yelling of course was an actor and the shocks weren't real, but the questions in the air at the time were very real.

[NEWS CLIP: Prosecution ...]

[NEWS CLIP: The Attorney General.]

JAD: This was a moment when human cruelty was on trial—quite literally.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: When I stand before you, judges of Israel, in this court to accuse Adolf Eichmann, I do not stand alone.]

BEN WALKER: So Stanley Milgram actually begins these experiments the same year that Adolf Eichmann goes on trial for Nazi war crimes.

JAD: That's radio producer Ben Walker. He'll be our guide for this segment.

BEN WALKER: And in the trial, when the prosecutors essentially ask him, "How you came to commit genocide?" He would say over and over again ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Adolf Eichmann: It was not my personal affair.]

BEN WALKER: I was just following orders.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Adolf Eichmann: I had to do what I was ordered.]

BEN WALKER: And it's this defense. This is basically what Stanley Milgram set out to test.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Stanley Milgram: 285 volts.]

BEN WALKER: In a lab at Yale University with a bunch of regular Americans.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: [screams]]

JAD: Like, is that something that's universal?

BEN WALKER: Yeah.

JAD: Or just an Eichmann thing?

BEN WALKER: Yeah. He figured maybe one percent of these men would keep flicking the switches up to the highest voltage, but that's not what he found. 65 percent ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Stanley Milgram: Continue please.]

BEN WALKER: ... were willing ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP: [screams]]

BEN WALKER: ... to shock their fellow citizens over and over again.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: [screams]]

BEN WALKER: ... even past when they were screaming in pain.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, volunteer: Something's happened to that man there.]

JAD: Even when they stopped screaming?

BEN WALKER: Yeah. When they were maybe dead.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, volunteer: You better check in on him, sir. He won't answer. We have nothing.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Stanley Milgram: Please continue. Go on please.]

BEN WALKER: They continued shocking their corpses. His experiment remains one of the most famous experiments of the 20th century.

[NEWS CLIP: In 1962 Stanley Milgram shocked the world with his study on obedience.]

BEN WALKER: It is still trotted out to explain everything from hazing to war crimes.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Stanley Milgram: What is there in human nature ...]

BEN WALKER: To gang behavior.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Stanley Milgram: That allows an individual to act inhumanely?]

BEN WALKER: Genocide.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Stanley Milgram: Harshly.]

BEN WALKER: It's like a downloadable-from-the-internet instant defense for doing wrong. But if you look at Milgram's work closely ...

ALEX HASLAM: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

BEN WALKER: ... like this guy did ...

ALEX HASLAM: Alex Haslam, professor of psychology at the University of Exeter.

BEN WALKER: ... then a different picture will emerge.

ALEX HASLAM: Really, that story has been told a million and one times for the last 50 years. We just got to get—get out of it where ...

BEN WALKER: Now what you need to understand about Alex Haslam is that he hates it when interviewers only want to talk about the baseline study.

ALEX HASLAM: The one that everybody knows, the so-called baseline.

BEN WALKER: The 65 percent one.

JAD: The one we just talked about.

BEN WALKER: Yeah.

JAD: So there's more? There's more to it?

ALEX HASLAM: Yeah, because actually, he studied between 20 and 40 different variants of this same paradigm.

BEN WALKER: Stanley Milgram took electric shock very seriously. He did this experiment a bunch of times in a bunch of different ways.

ALEX HASLAM: Had all sorts of different things.

BEN WALKER: He would change where the shocker and the shockee sat.

ALEX HASLAM: He had women participants. He had an experimenter who wasn't a scientist, but was a member of the general public.

BEN WALKER: And every scenario produced a different result.

JAD: Really?

BEN WALKER: Yup.

ALEX HASLAM: Let me—I mean, just—I've got in front of me, I've just got the data from the Milgram. So let me just get that out.

BEN WALKER: So again, the baseline study is the one where 65 percent of the volunteers ...

ALEX HASLAM: Go all the way.

BEN WALKER: Highest dose of electricity.

ALEX HASLAM: XXX.

BEN WALKER: But in experiment number three, if they put the shockee in the same room with the shocker so the shocker could actually see the person as a shockee ...

ALEX HASLAM: Obedience drops to about 40 percent.

BEN WALKER: And then in experiment number four, when the teacher has to hold the learner's hand down.

ALEX HASLAM: On a plate.

BEN WALKER: ... and order him to feel the shocks.

ALEX HASLAM: It drops to about 30 percent.

JAD: Wow!

BEN WALKER: Experiment 14.

ALEX HASLAM: If the experimenter is not a scientist, but is an ordinary man ...

BEN WALKER: Not wearing a white coat.

ALEX HASLAM: Obedience drops to 20 percent.

JAD: Oh!

ROBERT: Really?

JAD: Well, how low could we go?

ALEX HASLAM: Okay.

BEN WALKER: Here's another one.

ALEX HASLAM: This variant ...

BEN WALKER: Experiment 17.

ALEX HASLAM: There's you and there's two other participants.

BEN WALKER: Both actors.

ALEX HASLAM: If those two participants refuse to go on ...

BEN WALKER: Like, saying like, "I don't want to kill a guy."

ALEX HASLAM: Only 10 percent under those circumstances go on. And then, the final one ...

BEN WALKER: Experiment 15.

ALEX HASLAM: Of course normally, you just have one experimenter who's giving you these instructions.

BEN WALKER: But if you put two experimenters in the room, and ...

ALEX HASLAM: They start disagreeing with each other. And in this one you get zero percent going all the way.

BEN WALKER: Zero?

ALEX HASLAM: Zero in that condition.

BEN WALKER: You said zero.

ALEX HASLAM: None ...

BEN WALKER: That's absolute zero.

ALEX HASLAM: Not one person.

BEN WALKER: No one?

ALEX HASLAM: No.

BEN WALKER: Not a soul.

ALEX HASLAM: Exactly zero percent.

JAD: Well, all right. I'm starting to feel a little bit better about my fellow man.

BEN WALKER: One second. Hey, hey, hey, hey! Shhh. Okay.

ROBERT: Where is he?

BEN WALKER: I'm in a closet.

JAD: In a closet?

BEN WALKER: Because this room is echo-y and, you know, there's nothing like a closet full of clothes to, like, help balance that out.

ROBERT: [laughs]

JAD: That's true. All right. So keep going.

BEN WALKER: So you see, it's just in that one experiment that 65 percent of people are willing to go all the way.

JAD: Yeah.

BEN WALKER: But in all of these other scenarios, they don't. And even when they do say yes, even when they go along with the experiment, as you can see in the film ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, volunteer: Woman.]

BEN WALKER: ... they struggle.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Stanley Milgram: Continue using the last switch on the board, please.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, volunteer: I'm not getting no answer.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Stanley Milgram: Please continue. The next word is white.]

ALEX HASLAM: They have debates with themselves.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, volunteer: Don't you think you should look in on him, please?]

ALEX HASLAM: Debates with the experimenter.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Stanley Milgram: Not once we've started the experiment.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, volunteer: But what if something's happened to the man? He had an attack or something there?

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Stanley Milgram: The experiment requires that we continue. Go on please.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, volunteer: Don't the man's health mean anything?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Stanley Milgram: Whether the learner likes it or not.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, volunteer: But he might be dead in there!]

BEN WALKER: What's interesting is that how all of these struggles, all of them, play out the same way. It's the experimenter ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Stanley Milgram: Go on, please.]

BEN WALKER: ... prodding the shockers along.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, volunteer: You're gonna keep giving what, 450 volts every shock now?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Stanley Milgram: That's correct.]

BEN WALKER: For me, it's all about the prods.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Stanley Milgram: The next word's 'white.']

BEN WALKER: This is what totally pulled me into this story.

JAD: The prods.

BEN WALKER: Stanley Milgram had four scripted prods that he wrote out for his experimenters.

JAD: For when the subjects didn't want to continue?

BEN WALKER: Yup. The first one was "Please go on."

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Stanley Milgram: Continue please.]

BEN WALKER: And if they didn't go on, if they resisted, the experimenter would break out prod number two. "The experiment requires that you continue."

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Stanley Milgram: Well, the experiment requires that you continue.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, volunteer: Well, I mean, I know it does, sir, but I mean, he's up to 195 volts!]

BEN WALKER: And if they still were resisting or struggling, they'd get prod number three.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Stanley Milgram: It's absolutely essential that you continue.]

JAD: It's absolutely essential.

BEN WALKER: It's a little bit more direct.

ALEX HASLAM: It's a bit stronger. It's not an order.

JAD: Not quite.

BEN WALKER: But the fourth prod ...

ALEX HASLAM: Really, the critical—the critical force prod.

BEN WALKER: Is an absolute order. The fourth prod is ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Stanley Milgram: You have no other choice, teacher.]

BEN WALKER: "You have no other choice, teacher."

ALEX HASLAM: You must continue.

BEN WALKER: That is definitely an order.

ALEX HASLAM: Exactly.

BEN WALKER: But every time the experimenter pulled out the fourth prod, and this was confirmed when the experiment was redone in 2006, total disobedience.

ROBERT: Total disobedience?

BEN WALKER: Any time the experimenter said, "You must continue," the shocker would say, "Hell no, I don't."

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Stanley Milgram: You have no other choice, teacher.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, volunteer: I do have a choice. I'm not gonna go ahead with it.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Stanley Milgram: Well, we'll have to discontinue the experiment then.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, volunteer: I'm sorry.]

BEN WALKER: Here's another one.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Stanley Milgram: You have no other choice. You must ...]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, volunteer: Yes, I have a choice.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Stanley Milgram: Fact is if you don't continue, we're going to have to discontinue the experiment.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, volunteer: We have to. He says cut it out. After all, he knows what he can stand. That's my thing and that's where I'm gonna stand on it.]

JAD: Wow! So the subject seemed willing to shock another human being, but as soon as you say it's an order ...

ALEX HASLAM: They don't do it.

JAD: Huh!

ALEX HASLAM: Now that's important. It's very important because if you ask university undergraduates what does the Milgram study show, they will invariably say something like "They show that people obey orders," okay? Well, actually the one thing that the study really doesn't show is that people obey orders. And it's a pretty big thing to miss. It's a pretty [bleep] big thing to miss. [laughs] Isn't it? Really?

JAD: So wait, if it doesn't show that people are just obeying orders ...

ALEX HASLAM: Yeah.

JAD: ... then what does it show?

ALEX HASLAM: Okay. I think it looks—it's like this.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Stanley Milgram: All right. Let's go on to our instructions. We will begin with this test ...]

ALEX HASLAM: The participants are there in the study ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Stanley Milgram: Each pair of words ...]

ALEX HASLAM: They've got a very plausible, very credible high-status scientist at a high-status scientific institution.

JAD: Yale.

ALEX HASLAM: Who is going to do this powerful piece of science.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Stanley Milgram: Direct your voice to the microphone in the room.]

BEN WALKER: So they sit down in the chair thinking, "Wow. This is really important. I'm about to help this quest for knowledge. I really want to do a good job."

ALEX HASLAM: Now as we sort of know in life, lots of things that we do if they're worthwhile doing, are not always easy. And you find yourself in a situation where you've got to do something that's hard.

BEN WALKER: Like shocking an innocent stranger over and over.

ALEX HASLAM: But if you think that's the right thing, if you think that science is worth pursuing, you say, "Okay. I'll go along with this."

[ARCHIVE CLIP: [screaming]]

JAD: So you're saying they were shocking these people because they thought it was worthwhile?

ALEX HASLAM: Look, the participants, you know, they're not—it's not just blind obedience. "Oh, you tell me, sir. Yes sir, no sir, three bags full, sir."

[ARCHIVE CLIP, volunteer: Answer, please!]

ALEX HASLAM: They're engaged with the task. They're trying to be good participants.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, volunteer: Are you all right?]

ALEX HASLAM: They're trying to do the right thing. They're not doing something because they have to. They're doing it because they think they ought to. And that's all the difference in the world.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Stanley Milgram: 220 volts.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: [screams]

JAD: Suddenly I'm thinking this is actually a darker interpretation than the original.

BEN WALKER: It's absolutely darker.

JAD: Because they are doing it.

BEN WALKER: No question about it.

JAD: They have the agency.

BEN WALKER: Yup.

JAD: And they think it's right. Although clearly on some level they know it isn't.

ALEX HASLAM: This is a sort of chilling comparison, which is a speech that Himmler gave to the SS, some SS leaders, when they were about to commit a range of atrocities. He said, "Look, this is what you're gonna do is—of course you don't want to do this. Of course, nobody wants to be killing other people. We realize this is hard work, but what you are doing is for the good of Germany. And this is necessary in order to advance our noble cause."

JAD: Wow. So then ...

BEN WALKER: Hey, wait! I'm almost done, guys. Give me two more minutes. Two more minutes.

JAD: [laughs] So in the Milgram case ...

BEN WALKER: Uh-huh?

JAD: ... well, if the idea is that people would do bad if they think it's good, like if it's a good noble cause. Well, what's the noble cause in this case?

BEN WALKER: Science.

JAD: Science.

BEN WALKER: You can see this in the surveys that the men filled out after the experiments were over. "This was exactly what was on my mind. If the experiment—if the experiment had to be successful, it had to be carried on."

BEN WALKER: The questionnaires they filled out are part of the Milgram archive at Yale.

BEN WALKER: "I'm willing to help in a worthwhile experiment."

BEN WALKER: And it's kind of surprising. A lot of them are really positive, even though they've just been told that they were duped.

BEN WALKER: "Research in any field is a must, particularly in this day and age." "Do you think that more studies of this sort should be carried out?" "Definitely yes."

ALEX HASLAM: We—as onlookers to this study, we have this kind of god-like sort of vision of, like, "Well, of course what they're doing is wrong." But if looked at from another perspective, there is a sense in which you could celebrate what they're doing. You—I mean, I'm not suggesting one should, but I'm just saying there is a sense in which these people are prepared to do something that's very painful to them and to someone else because they want to promote science. Well, you know, you can see that's a good thing. You know ...

JAD: Oh my [bleep] God! Because it's like we started with this experiment that we all see as evidence of humans' latent capacity of evil.

ALEX HASLAM: Yeah.

JAD: And you tell us, "Actually, no. Under some circumstances we don't do the bad thing we're told to do because"—here's another flip—"we don't have to be told. In fact, we hate being told. But we will do it on our own if we think it's good."

ALEX HASLAM: Yeah.

JAD: Now you're saying actually that you could read that, that very dark fact, as being actually evidence of something quite—quite noble.

ALEX HASLAM: Well, if you dressed it up, and if you just had some minor variance in the paradigm, you could presumably, you know, make it sound like these are people who are incredibly noble. They are. I mean, it's a fact, of course, that they're administering pain to a stranger. That's what's horrifying about it, but imagine they were administering pain to themselves. Imagine they really were—had to administer shocks to themselves or something. But if they were prepared to do that, and I suspect a lot of them would, then we'd say these are people who really believe in science. And isn't this a good thing that we have people in our society who are willing to make sacrifices for the greater good?

JAD: Hmm. So in the end, where do you come down? Do you leave this experiment in a light mood or in a dark mood?

ALEX HASLAM: Uh, I ...

JAD: Overall.

ALEX HASLAM: I would say in a powerful mood. We're close to some really fundamental truths about human nature. And, you know, my views about human nature are that it affords infinite potential for lightness and dark. There's lots and lots of lessons here, but one is I think, you know, when you are enjoined to do something for the greater good, maybe ask yourself the question: what is greater and what is good?

JAD: Now that right there. Slap some quotations around that.

ALEX HASLAM: [laughs] Yeah.

ROBERT: Our thanks to Ben Walker whose podcast—he has a podcast, and it's a good one. It's called Too Much Information.

JAD: Yes, it's awesome. Thank you, Ben. And also, thank you to Alex Haslam, professor of psychology at the University of Exeter. We'll be right back.

[ANSWERING MACHINE: Start of message.]

[BEN WALKER: Okay, here goes. Take one. My name's Benjamin Walker and here are some Radiolab credits.]

[ALEX HASLAM: Radiolab is supported in part by the National Science Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.]

[BEN WALKER: Enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world.]

[ALEX HASLAM: More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org.]

JAD: Oh, okay.

PRODUCER: They're gonna record it over there. I mean, I'm gonna record it here, too.

JAD: All right. Three, two, one. Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: This is Radiolab. And today?

ROBERT: Evil?

JAD: Although I don't know if that's the right word for this next thing.

ROBERT: Yeah, because it's sort of ...

JAD: More complicated.

ROBERT: When you call someone evil then you're kind of done with them.

JAD: Yeah.

ROBERT: But there's a fellow, I've been thinking about him for the better part of a year, as you know.

JAD: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

ROBERT: He's such a puzzle to me. I can't quite place him.

JAD: Though it's very fun to try.

ROBERT: And I heard about him from science writer Sam Kean.

ROBERT: Well, let's talk about Fritz Haber. So first of all, could you just like—when did he live and what did he look like, and that kind of stuff?

SAM KEAN: He was doing his great science work right around the turn of the 20th century, so right around 1900. Very distinctive-looking man. Bald on top. Trim, nice mustache. Wore a little pince-nez? Is that how you say that?

ROBERT: I think I call it pince-nez, so I'm not sure.

SAM KEAN: Pince-nez? Okay. One of those very tiny, old fashioned pair of glasses that would pinch on your nose. And he was someone who had very big ambitions.

JAD: Just to put that into context, and to bring a few other of our storytellers in.

FRED KAUFMAN: He comes from Breslau, Germany.

JAD: That's Fred Kaufman, reporter.

FRED KAUFMAN: Which is a fairly small—you know, a small sort of town. And so does Clara.

JAD: That's Fritz Haber's wife.

ROBERT: We're gonna meet her later.

FRED KAUFMAN: Right? Clara comes from the same town. And they're both secularized Jews.

JAD: But this was a moment in German history, he says, when Jews had a decent amount of freedom.

FRED KAUFMAN: And this was the difference between Kaiser Wilhelm and, of course, Hitler's Germany.

DAN CHARLES: Yeah. Put it in context ...

JAD: Dan Charles, he's a historian.

DAN CHARLES: ... his was the first generation when a young Jewish boy could truly imagine that he could just be a regular part of that society. He could do anything.

JAD: And he believed it. Fast forward 10 years, Fritz Haber's a professor.

ROBERT: Small university.

JAD: He's working with chemicals. It's about 1880.

ROBERT: And he throws himself at one of the central issues facing Germany at that time.

FRED KAUFMAN: Germany has a problem.

ROBERT: A big problem.

FRED KAUFMAN: It has enough what they used to call then solar energy.

ROBERT: You know, solar energy from the sun to grow crops.

FRED KAUFMAN: To feed about 30 million people. However, that leaves behind 20 million Germans.

JAD: You mean they're looking at 20 million people going hungry?

FRED KAUFMAN: That's what we're heading towards. I mean, you have to remember, during the—during the Crimean War in the 1850s, Europe starves.

ROBERT: So around the turn of the century, for German scientists like Haber, this was the challenge.

FRED KAUFMAN: He is—he wants to feed—he wants to feed Germany.

JAD: And actually, this wasn't just the German thing. A lot of people were beginning to worry that with about a billion and a half people on the planet at that point, that maybe we were maxing out, that the Earth couldn't support this many people.

ROBERT: And everyone thought, "Well, we know the solution."

JAD: Yeah. We just need a whole lot more of one simple element.

ROBERT: Nitrogen.

FRED KAUFMAN: Nitrogen.

SAM KEAN: Nitrogen.

DAN CHARLES: Nitrogen.

ROBERT: They needed more ...

JAD: Nitrogen.

SAM KEAN: Nitrogen is an essential part of amino acids and proteins.

JAD: And when you stick a seed, like a wheat seed in the ground ...

ROBERT: One of the reasons it grows is because it's sucking up all the nitrogen in the soil.

JAD: To make its cell walls.

SAM KEAN: Without nitrogen you don't have life.

JAD: Now of course, you could find some nitrogen out in the world.

ROBERT: Natural deposits would be like seaweed or ...

SAM KEAN: Manure was one.

JAD: You know, you could find it in cow manure or ...

SAM KEAN: Guano.

ROBERT: Which was basically ...

SAM KEAN: Bat poop and seagull poop.

JAD: Which made that poop valuable.

SAM KEAN: And actually, two nations in South America went to war.

JAD: Literally over bat[bleep].

LATIF NASSER: You could say people were bat [bleep] crazy.

JAD: By the way, that's reporter Latif Nasser.

LATIF: You know, this was like oil is today. This is ...

ROBERT: Everybody was desperate for sources, new sources of nitrogen. And to make the problem even more annoying ...

SAM KEAN: The most common source of nitrogen is in the air around us. It makes up four out of every five or so molecules that we breathe. So, it's very ...

ROBERT: That's a lot!

SAM KEAN: Yes. Eighty percent of the air is nitrogen atoms.

ROBERT: So all the nitrogen you'd ever need ...

JAD: Was right there!

SAM KEAN: But you can't, like, throw that air onto a plant.

ROBERT: [laughs]

SAM KEAN: They couldn't deploy it. They couldn't deploy it.

JAD: Meaning they couldn't capture it?

SAM KEAN: That's right. And part of the problem here, and although once again, we're getting a little ahead of ourselves ...

ROBERT: We'll be right back to Haber, but let's just finish this.

SAM KEAN: ... is that nitrogen is trivalent.

JAD: Trivalent.

SAM KEAN: Trivalent. In other words, nitrogen has really strong attachments to itself.

JAD: And what he means is that when nitrogen atoms are just free floating in the air, they will cling to each other. These little nitrogen atoms will fiercely hold together, and it's almost impossible to pry them apart.

SAM KEAN: His calculations showed that it couldn't be done. At least not without a tremendous amount of energy.

JAD: More energy than seemed, like ...

ROBERT: Possible to make.

SAM KEAN: Yeah. Yeah, yes. But, you know ...

JAD: Being ambitious ...

SAM KEAN: Haber starts thinking, "In order to do this we need to pressure this. We need to put it under a lot of pressure."

JAD: So he starts experimenting. He figures out a way to take a lot of air that's filled with these little nitrogen bonds clinging to each other, and pump it ...

SAM KEAN: Into a big iron tank

ROBERT: Under extreme, extreme pressure.

SAM KEAN: At high temperature.

ROBERT: And then he forces hydrogen into the tank.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Get in there!]

SAM KEAN: And you have a number of chemical reactions. And what happens is that you're—you're elbowing the nitrogen apart from itself, and then forcing it to bond with the hydrogen in a new way.

JAD: And when nitrogen and hydrogen bond together, the thing you get ...

SAM KEAN: Is ammonia.

JAD: A liquid that has captured the nitrogen right out of the air.

SAM KEAN: You literally get a drip, drip, drip of ammonia. It is—it is arguably the most significant scientific breakthrough of them all. 'Bread from the air' was the phrase.

ROBERT: Wow!

ROBERT: Because Haber had figured out a way to take nitrogen from the air, put it into the barren ground and grow wheat.

SAM KEAN: This has allowed the world to have seven billion people. This is what's driving the world towards 10, 12 by 2050. Now we're seeing about 100 million tons of synthetic fertilizer produced industrially each year, and that tonnages then moves into our food source. Our food source then moves into our bodies. And the rough statistics are that half of each of our bodies contains nitrogen from the Haber process.

JAD: No [bleep]! Really?

ROBERT: And so in 1918, Fritz Haber gets a Nobel Prize. But this is why he's such an interesting guy. Around the same time, officials in the US government are calling him a war criminal.

JAD: All right. Just to back up for one second.

ROBERT: After Haber's nitrogen discovery ...

JAD: He was promoted.

DAN CHARLES: You know, he takes over leadership of this institute in Berlin and he starts hobnobbing with a whole different level of society.

ROBERT: That's Dan Charles again.

DAN CHARLES: I mean, it's a pretty heady thing for, you know, a Jewish kid from Breslau to be hobnobbing with the Emperor and cabinet ministers. He's part of the club, and he really, really relished it.

JAD: And not just because he was vain—which everyone agrees he was—but because he loves his country.

DAN CHARLES: He loves the fatherland and he loves Germany. So ...

JAD: When World War I begins ...

DAN CHARLES: He signs up immediately, sends a letter volunteering for duty.

ROBERT: Saying, "You know the process that I used to make food? Well, I can use that same process ..."

DAN CHARLES: To make explosives.

ROBERT: Because the thing that you put into the ground to grow more food is also the thing you can explode to make a bomb?

DAN CHARLES: That's correct. Because it takes such energy and pressure to separate it, this trivalent bond is so strong that when it comes back together, that energy that's released, it could be used for life or death. In any case ...

JAD: Back to World War I.

DAN CHARLES: There's trench warfare. It gets bogged down. And Haber has an idea.

LATIF: He goes straight to the German high command and he pitches this idea.

DAN CHARLES: He says, "Well, we can drive those enemy soldiers out of trenches with gas."

JAD: Chlorine gas.

LATIF: "We'll basically bring it to the front, and when the wind is right, we'll just spray it."

DAN CHARLES: But the generals were not all that convinced.

LATIF: No.

DAN CHARLES: They just didn't like it.

JAD: A lot of them were like, "This is not how you fight a war."

LATIF: It's like playing dirty.

DAN CHARLES: Yeah.

LATIF: Sort of unsportsmanlike.

DAN CHARLES: But he organizes soldiers, he organizes whole gas units.

LATIF: And nobody even had to ask.

DAN CHARLES: Takes command of them, partially. He travels to the front.

ROBERT: And on April 22 ...

JAD: 1915?

LATIF: 1915.

ROBERT: Haber finds himself in a little town in Belgium called Ypres.

LATIF: Y-P-R-E-S. Actually, the Americans called it Yeeps.

ROBERT: Whatever you call it ...

LATIF: This was one of the bloodiest arenas on the Western front.

ROBERT: The Germans were on one side, the French, the Canadians and the British on the other. And there behind the German lines is ...

LATIF: Our friend. Our frenemy, Fritz Haber.

JAD: [laughs] Our frenemy.

LATIF: He's bald. He has a pot belly. He has these pince-nez spectacles. He's chomping on a Virginian cigar. He was always smoking his Virginian cigars. And he was wearing a fur coat.

JAD: Really?

LATIF: In what is basically like the Baghdad of his time.

JAD: But ...

LATIF: Nobody had done what he was about to do on the scale that he was about to do it. So basically at 6:00 pm on April 22 ...

JAD: When the wind was just right, he says.

LATIF: Haber's gas troops unscrew, they open the valves on almost 6,000 tanks containing 150 tons of chlorine. That's like an adult blue whale of chlorine.

JAD: I'm just trying to imagine that. Is that like a—like a green cloud?

LATIF: Some people described it as a cloud, and then others describe it as this kind of 15-foot wall kind of hugging the land. And it's just sort of approaching. And it's moving at about one meter per second.

JAD: And according to some accounts, as they crept across no man's land ...

LATIF: The leaves would just sort of shrivel, and the grass was turning to the color of metal. Birds would just fall from the air.

JAD: Within minutes, the gas reached the Allied side. And as soon as it did, soldiers began to convulse.

LATIF: They were gagging, they were choking. Hundreds of them were falling to the ground.

JAD: What is the gas doing to them exactly?

LATIF: I think what it's doing is if you breathe it in, it sort of irritates your lungs to the extent that they sort of fill up with fluid so quickly that you sort of drown in your own phlegm.

JAD: So they are actually drowning?

LATIF: Literally drowning on land.

JAD: Wow!

LATIF: Yellow mucus was frothing out of their mouths. Those who could still breathe would turn blue.

JAD: This is a description of hell!

LATIF: Yeah.

DAN CHARLES: But Haber saw it as a wonderful success, and wished—wished that the Germans had been better prepared to exploit it because he felt like they really could have made a terrific advance if they had had more confidence.

LATIF: And he is celebrated for it. He gets promoted to the rank of Captain.

ROBERT: And he goes home for a few days a hero. But when he gets there, he has to contend with his wife.

DAN CHARLES: Clara Immerwahr.

ROBERT: Clara.

DAN CHARLES: Also from Breslau. Also from a Jewish family. And also a scientist.

ROBERT: Huh!

DAN CHARLES: Unusually so in those times.

SAM KEAN: She was actually sort of a genius herself. She was one of the first women to earn a PhD in her country.

ROBERT: And shortly after his return, Clara allegedly confronts him and says, "Look, you are morally bankrupt. How could you?"

SAM KEAN: But Haber just kind of ignored her and ...

JAD: According to legend ...

SAM KEAN: ... he actually threw a dinner party in celebration ...

JAD: Of the big victory.

SAM KEAN: Invited his friends over.

JAD: Now we don't actually know if he threw a party.

DAN CHARLES: Like, I consider that apocryphal.

JAD: Dan doesn't think so. But what's clear is that he saw no reason to question what he had done. And that infuriated Clara.

SAM KEAN: Especially because she found out he was leaving the next day to direct more gas attacks.

FRITZ STERN: And they probably had an argument.

LATIF: Yeah.

FRITZ STERN: Undoubtedly they had an argument.

ROBERT: That's historian Fritz Stern, who also happens to be Fritz Haber's godson.

LATIF: They had a quarrel?

FRITZ STERN: More than that.

ROBERT: Let's call it a fight.

SAM KEAN: And later that night ...

LATIF: After the party, Haber takes a bunch of sleeping pills, goes to sleep. And she takes his service revolver ...

FRITZ STERN: Fritz Haber's pistol.

ROBERT: Walks outside to the garden.

LATIF: And pulls the trigger.

ROBERT: Shoots herself in the chest.

DAN CHARLES: And is found by her son.

ROBERT: By her son?

DAN CHARLES: Yes.

SAM KEAN: Aged ...

FRITZ STERN: Thirteen, I think.

LATIF: And he finds her actually still alive with the life about to run out of her.

DAN CHARLES: Haber, it's unknown what happened for the rest of that evening, but it is a well-documented fact that the very next morning ...

SAM KEAN: On schedule.

LATIF: He goes back to the—to the front.

DAN CHARLES: To the eastern front.

FRITZ STERN: Leaving a son alone with his dead mother.

ROBERT: That's ...

DAN CHARLES: Cold, huh?

ROBERT: Yeah.

DAN CHARLES: Heartless.

FRITZ STERN: It was a terrible moment.

DAN CHARLES: Did he run away? Was it duty? The son eventually, after he immigrates to America, kills himself.

ROBERT: So, you know, around this point, I just don't want to have anything to do with this guy. This is—I just want to take a shower. Walk—walk away.

JAD: Yeah. Yeah, me too. You know, on the other hand, I mean, if you look at the grand calculus, people he's helped or fed versus people he's killed, I mean, he's fed billions of people. I don't know that you could entirely call him bad. I might even tilt towards saying he's a little good, to be honest.

ROBERT: You wouldn't though. Would you really? Would you really think that this guy's a good guy?

JAD: Honestly, yeah.

ROBERT: You know, just because of a mathematical summing up?

JAD: We're talking billions of people.

ROBERT: He's standing there on the front pushing the gas into the lungs of other human beings. Now admittedly it's a war, but still. Then he goes and—you know, and celebrates that. And then walks away from his child and his wife dead in the garden and says ...

JAD: I think ...

ROBERT: ... "More of that please."

JAD: Well, there's something distasteful about the fact that he was too into it, but I do think on some level you have to divorce the man from his deeds, and you got to ask is the world better with him or without him? I think you got to answer it with him, right?

ROBERT: Huh. Well ...

JAD: Should we keep going with the story?

ROBERT: Yeah.

JAD: All right.

ROBERT: So Sam, what happened to this guy after World War I?

SAM KEAN: He actually was very humiliated that Germany had lost, and especially humiliated over the fact that they had to pay enormous war reparations to other countries. So he decided he was going to invent a process to pay for these reparations by himself, and what he decided to do is go into the ocean, into seawater, which contains very small levels of gold. But, you know, over the entire ocean, there's a lot of gold dissolved into the sea.

DAN CHARLES: And he spent five years in a futile effort to distill gold from the ocean's waters.

JAD: Sounds insane. On the other hand, if anyone could do it ...

DAN CHARLES: He was trying to repeat this masterstroke.

ROBERT: Needless to say ...

JAD: He fails!

DAN CHARLES: It was actually a crushing blow for him.

JAD: And then things really take a turn.

DAN CHARLES: 1933 comes, and Hitler takes over. And one of the first acts that the Nazis do is to ...

ROBERT: Basically issue an order ...

DAN CHARLES: That says there shall be no Jews in the civil service.

JAD: Now Haber was Jewish, but because he'd served in World War I ...

DAN CHARLES: He technically would be exempt.

JAD: But 75 percent of the people who worked for him at the institute, they were Jewish.

DAN CHARLES: And they would have to be dismissed.

JAD: So he decides to take a stand.

DAN CHARLES: And says, "This is intolerable. I'm gonna resign." He says that he's always been hiring people based on how smart they are and not who their grandparents were.

JAD: So he sends a letter to the Ministry of Education resigning, and he leaves Germany, telling a friend he felt like he'd lost his homeland.

SAM KEAN: And then he starts this period of roaming. He eventually goes to England.

JAD: But in a famous incident, one of England's leading scientists refuses to shake his hand.

SAM KEAN: And he is basically homeless at this point. You know, he's a man adrift.

JAD: Meanwhile ...

SAM KEAN: His health is failing. In 1934, he takes a trip to Switzerland to a sanatorium.

JAD: But before he can get there ...

SAM KEAN: His heart fails and he dies.

ROBERT: Now there's a footnote to this that is very strange. I got a little—my—this is my dorsal hairs stood up when I read the end of this.

SAM KEAN: Right. So during World War I Haber's institute had developed a formulation of an insect-killing gas called Zyklon.

ROBERT: Zyklon A.

JAD: Which was originally just a pesticide.

DAN CHARLES: And once again, another nitrogen compound. It was developed in his institute. He knew about it.

ROBERT: In fact, his chemist had given this particular pesticide a smell. It was a warning smell so that people didn't inadvertently breathe it in and get sick.

SAM KEAN: But after the Nazis take over ...

JAD: This is after he died.

SAM KEAN: They reach back to the shelf and they find this Zyklon stuff, and they ask for it to be reformulated to take out the warning smell. And it becomes Zyklon B, the killing gas of the concentration camps.

ROBERT: Did members of Haber's family die in the concentration camps?

SAM KEAN: Yeah. Members of his extended family did. Certainly friends of his did.

FRITZ STERN: There's something deeply, deeply wounding, stressing, upsetting at the thought that he had anything to do with Zyklon B. But he did. The use of it, he couldn't have imagined.

JAD: So how do you feel about him now? Because I don't know, I can't help but feel bad for the guy, Despite the chlorine gas. Like, he didn't intend for that to happen. He could have never imagined that.

ROBERT: No. But—but there's part of me that says, you know, here's a guy who just wanted to do everything better than it had ever been done before. Whether it was feeding or killing or ...

JAD: And he does.

ROBERT: And he does. But he does it with a kind of amoral athleticism. You know, he does it without humility, without—without a lot of doubt. And, you know, it's a craft, but it's a craft with consequences. And to approach it with kind of crazy joy, I don't know. I would rather have scientists who carry doubt with them as they proceed. I ...

JAD: Yeah, I agree with that. Maybe it's all about doubt in the end. Thanks to all our great storytellers: Dan Charles, Sam Kean, Latif Nasser, Fred Kaufman and Fritz Stern. You can find out more information about all those guys on our website, Radiolab.org.

[LISTENER: Hi, my name's Josh and I'm calling from Harlem, New York. Radiolab is supported in part by the National Science Foundation and by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org. Thanks.]

JAD: Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: This is Radiolab. And today we're talking about ...

ROBERT: Well, we're trying to think about what goes on in the mind of a bad person.

JAD: Yeah.

ROBERT: What makes a bad person so bad that he's different from the rest of us?

JAD: And we didn't really come into any kind of agreement with the Haber thing.

ROBERT: Yeah, I don't think we quite ...

JAD: But, you know, we ended up walking this question around to different people.

JAMES SHAPIRO: You want to talk about bad people in Shakespeare.

JAD: And oddly enough, we came—got a really interesting take on the true nature of badness from this guy.

JAMES SHAPIRO: James Shapiro, professor of English at Columbia University.

JAD: And he said, "To start, you want to know about bad? I'll give you bad."

ROBERT: In Titus Andronicus, there's a character by the name of ...

JAMES SHAPIRO: Aaron the Moor.

JAD: There's a moment in the play when Aaron gets up on stage, looks at the audience and says, "Let me just tell you the kinds of things I've been up to recently."

JAMES SHAPIRO: "Set deadly enmity between two friends, made poor men's cattle break their necks, set fire on barns and haystacks in the night, and bid the owners quench—quench them with their tears. Oft have I digged up dead men from their graves and set them upright at their dear friend's door."

ROBERT: Oh! [laughs]

JAMES SHAPIRO: "Even—even when their sorrows almost were forgot. And on their skins, as on the bark of trees, have with my knife carved in Roman letters, 'Let not your sorrows die, though I am dead.'"

ROBERT: Whoa!

ROBERT: So he's bad.

JAD: Yeah, but see, here's the interesting thing. According to James, he's not the baddest in Shakespeare or in life, because ultimately the play offers up a reason for his nastiness.

JAMES SHAPIRO: The reason why he's telling all this stuff is because he has cut a deal. They will spare his son if he fesses up and tells them what they need to know. So there's a way in which there's a touch, a spark of humanity.

JAD: Just a little glimmer. And he says that's what people wanted. They wanted someone who was really thrillingly bad, but in the end, was redeemed a bit.

ROBERT: Yeah.

JAD: This wasn't just a theater thing.

ROBERT: No, because if you couldn't afford a ticket for a play, you'd seen all the plays, in the 1500s you could always go to a public hanging.

JAD: And you'd go ...

ROBERT: For much the same reasons.

JAMES SHAPIRO: In those days, if you're a convicted male felon, you are, you know, strung up but you're not allowed to hang until you die. You're cut down before then.

JAD: Warning. This next part's a little graphic.

JAMES SHAPIRO: Then the executioner castrates you, cuts you open and takes out your internal organs, and then separates your head, which is put on a post.

ROBERT: But even with all that gore and horribleness, there was often a moment that people waited for. And in a way we wait for it still, even now.

JAMES SHAPIRO: We want what Elizabethans got at the scaffold, which was a confession. Before the guy is cut to shreds, he's allowed to confess. You know, "I heartily, you know, regret the fact that I killed a young maiden or defamed the king." Whatever it is. The expectation is somebody is made to make his peace with his maker before he dies. That's what you do.

JAD: And that's what Shakespeare did in all his plays. He would give all his baddies at least one moment where they could be understood.

ROBERT: Except this one time.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Othello: So will I turn her virtue into pitch.]

ROBERT: Iago. He is a soldier. He works for a general. The general's name is Othello. They're supposedly chums, but General Othello has no idea that Iago ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Othello: I hate ...]

ROBERT: ... hates him.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Othello: ... the Moor!]

JAD: So he plans to destroy Othello. Now we don't exactly know why. There are hints at reasons. Like, maybe he thinks Othello is sleeping with his wife. We're not sure. But the weird thing is that he decides not just to take down Othello, but everybody.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Othello: I know what he did.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Othello: What? What?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Othello: Lie.]

ROBERT: He stirs up hatred between friends, between lovers. He even schemes against his own wife.

JAMES SHAPIRO: This is just somebody who's performing brain surgery without anesthesia on other people. He's a master plotter.

ROBERT: And as for why?

JAMES SHAPIRO: Maybe Othello was sleeping with Amelia.

JAD: But as the play goes on, you begin to think that maybe that's just another lie.

ROBERT: Eventually, Iago convinces Othello that his wife has been disloyal—which she hasn't. And then Othello goes and kills his own wife, smothering her with a pillow.

JAMES SHAPIRO: This is just a tsunami of evil that passes through the play.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Othello: Desdemona's dead! Desdemona's dead!]

JAD: And at the very end of the play when everyone finds out what Iago's done, Othello asks him, "Why? Why did you do this?" And Iago?

JAMES SHAPIRO: He refuses what we fully expect and what everybody on stage at that moment fully expects from him. You know, what does he say? "Demand me nothing. What you know ..."

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Othello: You know.]

JAMES SHAPIRO: "From this time forth, I never will speak word." I'm not saying a word. I'm not gonna give you what you want. I'm not gonna give you—I'm not gonna help restore the sense that there is a moral order to the world and a moral norm. What you know you know.

JAD: If this is the singular moment in Shakespeare where he gives you an un-understandably evil man. No motives. No reason. Any idea what the hell he was intending?

JAMES SHAPIRO: What you know you know.

ROBERT: Meaning?

JAD: Any idea what was in his mind? Was he trying to make a commentary or something? Was he grappling with something? Do we know?

JAMES SHAPIRO: What you know you know.

JAD: Damn it!

ROBERT: [laughs]

JAMES SHAPIRO: The good Iagos make you want to shower the minute you leave the theater because you are sullied by them.

ROBERT: Thank you to James Shapiro, whose most recent book is called Contested Will.

JAD: You know what? You know, unless ...

ROBERT: He had you there.

JAD: Yeah, well. You know what I'm left thinking though, is if you could somehow—I mean, that was make believe, but if you could somehow get a real Iago in the room and subject that person to questioning, and really get him to sort of fess up as to why they did it, would that make a difference?

ROBERT: We should say that this next section of the program has some references which are extremely graphic and not to everybody's tastes. So if you have kids in the—in the room, maybe this is a time they tell them to go brush their teeth or something.

AARON SCOTT: Yeah. Yeah.

ROBERT: It comes to us from our reporter, Aaron Scott.

JEFF JENSEN: Aaron?

AARON: Yeah?

JEFF JENSEN: Jeff Jensen

AARON: Nice to meet you.

JEFF JENSEN: Nice to meet you.

JAD: All right. So who is this guy we're hearing?

AARON: This is Jeff Jensen, and he's a reporter in LA. And he wrote this graphic novel that I read about one of the most prolific serial killers in US history.

JEFF JENSEN: Gary Leon Ridgway.

AARON: The Green River killer.

JEFF JENSEN: The first victims of the Green River killer were found in the summer of 1982.

[NEWS CLIP: The Green River murders terrorized Seattle in the 1980s.]

[NEWS CLIP: In Seattle today, a man called the Green River killer ...]

AARON: Ridgway murdered at least 49 women.

[NEWS CLIP: The so-called Green River Killer.]

AARON: But it's suspected that it could be upwards of 75.

JAD: Wow!

[NEWS CLIP: Making him the most prolific serial killer in American history.]

JEFF JENSEN: All the victims were prostitutes.

AARON: He buried them, or left their bodies in these little clumps in the woods.

[NEWS CLIP: The killer seems to have placed their bodies as if they were mannequins.]

JEFF JENSEN: And in January of 1984, the Green River Task Force was formed. And my father was recruited to the task force.

AARON: So Jeff wrote this book because his father, Tom Jensen, was one of the lead detectives tracking Gary Ridgway. He ultimately spent 17 years searching for this man.

JEFF JENSEN: In December of 2001, my father and his colleagues make the arrest.

[NEWS CLIP: DNA testing matched him to the crime.]

JEFF JENSEN: They arrest Gary Leon Ridgway. And on June 13, 2003, Gary was secretly taken out of his jail cell and brought to a sort of very nondescript, concrete, ugly office building. And ...

AARON: Over the next six months ...

JEFF JENSEN: From June to early December ...

AARON: ... it was Tom's job to get Gary to open up.

JEFF JENSEN: And give up the few details that they really needed to link him certifiably to all these crimes.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, John Natson: Today's date is June 17. Year 2003. The time now is 08:36 hours.]

AARON: So every day they would bring him into this conference room.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, John Natson: This is a continuation of an interview with Gary Leon Ridgway.]

AARON: And interrogate him.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Tom Jensen: Yeah, why don't you just—what do you remember since we last talked in this interview?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Gary Leon Ridgway: I got those—I mostly—I remember picking her up at, um ...]

AARON: It immediately became apparent that there was gonna be difficulties.

ARCHIVE CLIP, Gary Leon Ridgway: No, I don't know.]

AARON: He would deny things. He would obscure. He would dance around things.

JEFF JENSEN: He didn't really want to cop to everything that he did.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, John Natson: I gotta tell you, I'm not totally comfortable that you are providing all the information about ...]

AARON: Especially when it came to one particular fact.

JEFF JENSEN: What my father and his colleagues know is that something was done to these bodies, many of them after they were murdered.

JAD: Does he—is he saying what I think he's saying?

AARON: Yeah.

JEFF JENSEN: Necrophilia.

AARON: Gary is dancing around this topic.

JEFF JENSEN: Gary had denied this to his own lawyers. So my father and the other interviewer in that room that morning, Detective John Natson, they start using a line of—a tact of interviewing that was very ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Tom Jensen: It's okay. It's okay if you did it.]

JEFF JENSEN: ... stunningly shockingly empathetic.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Tom Jensen: Nothing to be ashamed of. Thousands of people have done it before you. You're not the first one.]

JEFF JENSEN: You know, you're not the first person that's ever done this.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Tom Jensen: You're not gonna be the last one.]

JEFF JENSEN: You won't be the last.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Tom Jensen: That's one of the things that we—that we need to know.]

JEFF JENSEN: My father's trying to, like, reach out to him.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Tom Jensen: Okay? I know it was more than 42].

JEFF JENSEN: "It's okay to admit this. You need to admit this."

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Tom Jensen: Okay? It's all right, but we've gotta know that. That's one of the things we have to know, and that's why it's okay to let out.]

JEFF JENSEN: And he does.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Gary Leon Ridgway: I mean, yes, I did lie about that. I went back one time before. Like I said, I got to get it out. Can't keep holding it all in.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Tom Jensen: No. It's building up inside.]

JEFF JENSEN: This was a major breakthrough.

JAD: So he ends up admitting it.

AARON: In graphic detail.

JEFF JENSEN: And it gets even more disturbing for my father as the conversation suddenly pivots to another victim.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Gary Leon Ridgway: The one that was real close to me.]

JEFF JENSEN: By the name of Carol Christensen.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Gary Leon Ridgway: And Christensen, I dated her several times—three times—two times before.]

JEFF JENSEN: He brings her up as an example of a—of a woman that he actually had strong feelings for.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Tom Jensen: You liked this—you liked this girl?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Gary Leon Ridgway: I liked her.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, John Natson: She was good to you?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Gary Leon Ridgway: She was good to me.]

JEFF JENSEN: And as it happens, my father has very vivid memories of investigating the Carol Christensen murder. Speaking with Carol's mom, Carol's little daughter.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Gary Leon Ridgway: I killed her. She was a—I knew she had a daughter.]

JEFF JENSEN: And so Gary starts going through this narrative of what he did to Carol.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Gary Leon Ridgway: The last time was—she was in a hurry.]

JEFF JENSEN: She, like, was allegedly in a rush.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Gary Leon Ridgway: And she didn't ...]

JEFF JENSEN: And it kind of like, hurt his feelings.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Gary Leon Ridgway: Wasn't satisfied. Made me mad because she was very much in a hurry. She had something else on her mind. And I—I killed her.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Tom Jensen: How'd you kill her?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Gary Leon Ridgway: I choked her.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Tom Jensen: With?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Gary Leon Ridgway: With my arm. And the way I killed her, I cared for her because I dated her before. But it didn't turn out right.]

JEFF JENSEN: Up until that point, Gary refused to say that "From the minute I picked these women up I wanted to kill them." He claimed they were in the middle of a sex act, he would get distracted, something would happen. He just kind of went crazy. He had snapped. And almost like blaming the victims. And my father wasn't buying it.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Tom Jensen: Let's back up. Let's just back up.]

JEFF JENSEN: The fact that he kept on doing it over and over and over again was like, "Come on."

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Tom Jensen: You've been through this a lot of times before, and she's already told you she's in a hurry.]

JEFF JENSEN: "You knew what was gonna happen."

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Tom Jensen: And you've done this how many times before? Ten, fifteen, twenty times? You know what's gonna happen if she pissed you off. And you like her. You're telling us all this.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Gary Leon Ridgway: Yes.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Tom Jensen: Yet you go into this anyway, knowing full well that it could end up in her death.]

JEFF JENSEN: And Gary just says ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Gary Leon Ridgway: Yes.]

JEFF JENSEN: "That is true. When I picked them up I was gonna kill them." Finally, acknowledging yeah, that's true. There's a pause, and my father just says ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Tom Jensen: Why?]

JEFF JENSEN: "Why?"

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Gary Leon Ridgway: Um ...]

JEFF JENSEN: "Why did you do this?"

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Tom Jensen: Did you need to kill?]

JEFF JENSEN: And that was a question that had haunted my father for decades.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Tom Jensen: Why?]

JEFF JENSEN: In that 'why,' in that one simple 'why' that he asked Gary, there was a lot of questions he was asking. Why did you inflict all this suffering on them, on us? Why did you take these women off the streets and want to destroy them?

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Tom Jensen: Why?]

JEFF JENSEN: Why? And the answer is unsatisfying.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Gary Leon Ridgway: Yes, I did mean to kill. I needed to kill her because of that.]

JAD: Wait, what?

AARON: I just needed to kill because of that. And then he just trails off.

JAD: "I need to kill because of that." That's it?

AARON: Yeah.

JEFF JENSEN: You know, "I just want to kill them. I just needed to kill them." In that moment, my father, he stands up and he says ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Tom Jensen: You touched me, Gary.]

JEFF JENSEN: "You touched me, Gary."]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Tom Jensen: You've touched me. I'm gonna take a break.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, John Natson: Okay, we're going off tape now. It's 09:24 hours on June 17, year 2003.]

JEFF JENSEN: He walked out of the room and just started weeping.

AARON: They spent the next six months interrogating him. They brought in psychiatrists and forensic psychologists to try to get an answer. And Gary said, "I needed to kill them," they go, "Why?" And he says, "Because of the rage." And "Well, why the rage?" And "Because women have stepped on me all my life." "Well, why can't you deal with it in a normal way?" Each answer just begs another why. And even though in the end they got him to confess to these 49 murders, they never really get any closer to an answer than this first one.

JEFF JENSEN: That afternoon, he gets in his car, goes home. He finds my mom on the deck, sits down next to her. She says, "What happened today?" My dad said, "I don't want to talk about it." And to this day they have not talked about that day. And he hasn't talked about it with anyone until I interviewed him for the book.

AARON: And why is it so important, do you think, to understand the why behind such an evil act?

JEFF JENSEN: Well, the thing that haunts me about the 'why' question that I'm reminded of one of the oldest stories in the Bible, which is the story of Job. The story of Job is that one day God and Satan were having a conversation. And they're saying, "Have you checked out Job? You know, I'm really proud of Job. He believes in me and he trusts me so much, and he has such great faith in me." And Satan's like, "Well, I bet I can change his mind." And so Satan basically systematically destroys Job's life: takes away his wife, his children, all his material possessions. What follows is this ongoing conversation between Job and his friends about why does this happen? Why does God allow this to happen? Only then does God speak up and kind of say, like, "You're gonna question me?" Like, you know, "Who are you?"

JEFF JENSEN: My point is sometimes when we ask the 'why' in the face of profound evil I kind of wonder if what we're doing is that we're daring God to show himself. And I think what we want out of the why is meaning, meaning to life, to reveal itself in a way that restores order and give us hope that all of this isn't just meaningless chaos.

ROBERT: Jeff Jensen's book is the Green River Killer: A True Detective Story. It's a graphic or an illustrated novel.

JAD: Thanks also to reporter Aaron Scott for that story.

ROBERT: This is Radiolab.

JAD: Thanks for listening.

[LISTENER: Hi, this is Lauren from Winnipeg. Radiolab was created by Jad Abumrad and is produced by Soren Wheeler. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Maria Matasar-Padilla is our managing director. Our staff includes: Simon Adler, Maggie Bartolomeo, Becca Bressler, Rachael Cusick, David Gebel, Bethel Habte, Tracie Hunte, Matt Kielty, the lovely Robert Krulwich, Annie McEwen, Latif Nasser, Malissa O'Donnell, Arianne Wack, Pat Walters and Molly Webster. With help from Shima Oliaee, Carter Hodge and Liza Yaeger. Our fact-checker is Michelle Harris, because facts matter.]

 

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