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When a Killer Explains Himself: Insight, Remorse, or Both? · Inside The Criminal Mind

• 0:01
  Speaker 1: Welcome back, everybody. Today we're going to be looking at
• 0:04
  Speaker 1: the difference between explaining and feeling. The scene that gives
• 0:09
  Speaker 1: this episode its unsettling power is not a confession. It
• 0:13
  Speaker 1: is a conversation, a calm one, almost collegial, in which
• 0:16
  Speaker 1: a fictionalized version of Ed Kemper walks Holden Ford through
• 0:21
  Speaker 1: his own violence with the fluency of someone describing a hobby.
• 0:25
  Speaker 1: This is something that we saw in Mindhunter's second episode.
• 0:29
  Speaker 1: where it stages a conversation between a young FBI agent
• 0:32
  Speaker 1: and a dramatized version of Edmund Kemper. Kemper can locate
• 0:36
  Speaker 1: the psychological mechanisms behind what he did. He can narrate
• 0:40
  Speaker 1: his childhood, his mother, the escalation, the aftermath. What he
• 0:43
  Speaker 1: cannot seem to do, and what the show never quite resolves,
• 0:46
  Speaker 1: is feel any of it the way the explanation implies
• 0:49
  Speaker 1: he should. This gap is not a dramatic device. Researchers
• 0:53
  Speaker 1: studying communication styles associated with psychopathy have found something specific
• 0:57
  Speaker 1: and slightly counterintuitive A study found that naive observers could
• 1:04
  Speaker 1: often detect elevated psychopathic traits from very brief exposure to
• 1:08
  Speaker 1: someone's behavior catching something in short, unguarded interactions. But that
• 1:13
  Speaker 1: accuracy degraded the longer the observation continued. Extended exposure did
• 1:18
  Speaker 1: not sharpen judgment. It dulled it. The more someone talks, explains,
• 1:24
  Speaker 1: and elaborates, the more room they have to construct a coherent,
• 1:27
  Speaker 1: sympathetic account and the more that construction can override the
• 1:31
  Speaker 1: instinct the listener had in the first 30 seconds. In
• 1:35
  Speaker 1: another study, it asked young men to describe a time
• 1:38
  Speaker 1: they hurt someone without remorse, but to perform remorse for
• 1:41
  Speaker 1: the camera with a reward attached to convincing an audience.
• 1:45
  Speaker 1: Participants who scored higher on a self-report measure of a
• 1:47
  Speaker 1: psychopathic trait were rated as more convincing in their fabricated
• 1:51
  Speaker 1: remorse than participants who scored lower. The traits associated with
• 1:55
  Speaker 1: psychopathy did not just fall or failed to prevent this
• 1:59
  Speaker 1: kind of performance, they appeared to assist it. Separate research
• 2:03
  Speaker 1: summarized by forensic psychologist Adol Forth points to a related
• 2:07
  Speaker 1: mechanism that many individuals with psychopathic traits can accurately identify
• 2:12
  Speaker 1: what emotion a situation calls for and produce a recognizable
• 2:15
  Speaker 1: performance of it even while experiencing a genuinely attenuated version
• 2:20
  Speaker 1: of the feeling itself. None of this means fluent self-explanation
• 2:24
  Speaker 1: is always hollow, and the show is not careful to
• 2:26
  Speaker 1: claim that either. Most people who talk about their own
• 2:30
  Speaker 1: past harm, in therapy, in court, are doing something genuine
• 2:34
  Speaker 1: when they narrate it, and insight is not inherently suspicious.
• 2:37
  Speaker 1: The problem is that insight and remorse are separable capacities
• 2:40
  Speaker 1: that happen to look identical from the outside. And only
• 2:44
  Speaker 1: one of them, though, requires actually caring about the person
• 2:46
  Speaker 1: who was harmed. A detailed, coherent, even self-critical account demonstrates
• 2:51
  Speaker 1: that someone understands how the mind works. It says nothing
• 2:54
  Speaker 1: on its own about whether that understanding is oriented toward
• 2:57
  Speaker 1: change or simply toward a more effective account. This is
• 3:00
  Speaker 1: where the show's real question sharpens into something clinically useful.
• 3:04
  Speaker 1: Explaining yourself and taking responsibility can look nearly identical in
• 3:08
  Speaker 1: the moment, with calm delivery, willingness to engage, apparent self-awareness.
• 3:13
  Speaker 1: Responsibility shows up in what someone does when the story
• 3:16
  Speaker 1: stops being useful to them. Insight on its own only
• 3:19
  Speaker 1: shows up in how well they can tell it. That's
• 3:25
  Speaker 1: it for now, folks.