The Murderer Next Door: Why the Mind Is Designed to Kill - Hardcover

Buss, David M.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1594200432 ISBN 13: 9781594200434

Publisher: Penguin Press HC, The, 2005

Synopsis

A controversial analysis of the psyche of murderers draws on the author's investigations into their underlying motives and circumstances, theorizing that the human psyche has evolved special adaptations that enable murder to become a logical option, and identifying at which point people are most vulnerable to being killed or becoming killers. 25,000 first printing.

About this title

About the Author

David Buss is a professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin. His path-breaking research has received extensive media coverage, including features in Newsweek, U.S. News & World Report, The New York Times, and The Washington Post, and he has appeared on Dateline, 20/20, the Today show, and CBS This Morning. His books include The Evolution of Desire and The Dangerous Passion.

Reviews

Reviewers with scientific training have no kind words for The Murderer Next Door. The author’s investiture in the controversial field of evolutionary psychology—which posits that human behavior is the product of evolution—leads him to assert that homicidal fantasies are more common than the reader might believe, and smacks of self promotion. While Buss’s argument is internally consistent, his premise runs counter to established anthropological and biological studies. Readers unversed in those sciences might receive Buss’s claims about homicide’s roots more openly, and find them both credible and disturbing.

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

Psychology professor Buss first became interested in the roots of homicide when a close friend flew into a murderous rage against his wife at a party. The fact that this gentle man came close to murdering a loved one contradicted a number of beliefs Buss had always held about homicide, chief among them that murderers are necessarily insane. This book, the result of Buss' research into a never-used file of more than 400,000 murders and a close collaboration with psychiatrists at the Michigan Center for Forensic Psychiatry, led him to a new view: that murder is the product of evolutionary forces and that the homicidal act, in evolutionary terms, conveys advantages to the killer. Buss sets out to dispel what he terms some misperceptions about murder, misperceptions based largely on the media's focus on serial killers. Well argued and unsettling. Connie Fletcher
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Edition details

• Publisher: Penguin Press HC, The
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1594200432
• ISBN 13: 9781594200434
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288