The My Lai Massacre of March 16, 1968 resulted in the slaughter of nearly 500 innocent Vietnamese men, women and children by US soldiers. For Dr Donald Dutton, nothing could be more fascinating to study.

“I don’t know why I have always been drawn to violence because I’m not a violent person…to me it is interesting because it is so inexplicable that people could do such things. I have always been drawn to the inexplicable,” explained Dutton.

Dutton is a forensic psychologist at UBC. For over four decades he has been investigating the minds of the malevolent, publishing over 100 peer-reviewed papers on the psychology of abusive personalities and written nine books divulging the obscurity of domestic violence. Dutton’s most recent work, The Psychology of Genocide, Massacres and Extreme Violence, is an attempt to comprehend the darkest depths of the human mind.

Dutton does not prescribe to any one particular model of behavior to understand the human condition. Instead, he works with “narrow neurological models” and works his way up to broad sociological theories. “I go where the data takes me,” he said.

In 1994, after writing several high-profile academic papers on abusive personalities, Dutton received a phone call: he was asked to serve as an expert witness to the OJ Simpson trial.

“I was on a holiday in Puerto Vallarta and I got a phone call from the LA District Attorney’s Office. They were asking me about my research and all the while there were donkeys walking around me. It was very surrealistic. That whole trial was very surrealistic,” he explained.

“There were a series of things in OJ’s profile that would push him to be the kind of guy that wouldn’t take kindly to separation…he had an ego that just couldn’t handle those things well,” he said. A guilty verdict, according to Dutton, should have been a “slam dunk.”

A lifetime of studying violent behavior has made Dutton somewhat cynical about the human condition. “The book on genocide and extreme violence I wound up dedicating to my dog. I just thought that if every human being on the planet had the qualities my dog had, we’d be a lot better off,” he said.

Dutton acknowledged that there do exist people who are just the opposite: heroes who will risk their lives to save others.

“Guys like that I find fascinating,” he said. “They…do the right thing in the face of everyone around them doing the wrong thing.”

Dutton says he loves his job. “I just can’t imagine doing anything other than what I’m doing right now.”

(No Ratings Yet)

 Loading ...