AI Summary
5 min readThe Bad Show
One evening, psychology professor David Buss was at a party when he found his host—a mild-mannered, large, strong man with a black belt in karate—in a rage upstairs. His wife had made fun of his shirt in front of friends. "I'm gonna kill her," he said. Buss walked him around the block for half an hour until he calmed down. Hours later, in the middle of the night, the man called: "If I don't leave my house right now, I'm gonna kill her." He had smashed his fist into a bathroom mirror instead of his wife. Across town, she went into hiding for six months.
That story launched Buss into a larger investigation. He asked 5,000 people around the world: Have you ever thought about killing someone? Ninety-one percent of men said yes. Eighty-four percent of women said yes. One woman described inviting her ex-boyfriend to dinner, planning to stab him in the chest while he peeled carrots. She estimated she came sixty percent close to doing it.
This is the territory of Radiolab's "The Bad Show"—an episode that asks whether bad people are fundamentally different from the rest of us, or whether the capacity for terrible acts lives inside everyone.
The Milgram Experiment, Reconsidered
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What you'll learn
- 1 The Bad Show — Radiolab
- 2 Timestamped Outline
- 3 (03:07) **A Professor's Friend Threatens to Kill His Wife** - Psychologist David Buss recounts the night a mild-mannered colleague flew into a rage and said he would murder his wife over a public humiliation about his shirt
- 4 (06:42) **The Homicidal Fantasies Survey** - Buss polled thousands of people worldwide asking if they'd ever thought about killing someone, finding 91% of men and 84% of women said yes
- 5 (11:17) **Reenacting the Milgram Experiment** - The hosts stage a fake shock experiment to introduce Stanley Milgram's famous 1962 obedience study at Yale University
- 6 (16:26) **Milgram's Forgotten Variations** - Psychologist Alex Haslam reveals that Milgram actually ran dozens of versions of the experiment, and the results varied enormously depending on context
- 7 (19:56) **The Four Prods — What Milgram Actually Discovered** - The experimenter had four scripted prompts to push subjects forward, and the critical fourth prod triggered total disobedience
+ Full timestamped outline available in the app
Show Notes
With all of the black-and-white moralizing in our world today, we decided to bring back an old show from 2011 about the little bit of bad that's in all of us...and the little bit of really, really bad that's in some of us.
Cruelty, violence, badness... in this episode we begin with a chilling statistic: 91% of men, and 84% of women, have fantasized about killing someone. We take a look at one particular fantasy lurking behind these numbers, and wonder what this shadow world might tell us about ourselves and our neighbors. Then, we reconsider what Stanley Milgram's famous experiment really revealed about human nature (it's both better and worse than we thought). Next, we meet a man who scrambles our notions of good and evil: chemist Fritz Haber, who won a Nobel Prize in 1918...around the same time officials in the US were calling him a war criminal. And we end with the story of a man who chased one of the most prolific serial killers in US history, then got a chance to ask him the question that had haunted him for years: why?
EPISODE CREDITS:
Reported by - Pat Walters and Latif Nasser
Produced by - Pat Watlers
with help from - Carter Hodge.
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