Airdate: Are You Good or Evil?

Tomorrow night SBS screens the potentially contentious doco Are You Good or Evil? that asks whether psychopathic killers are genetically driven to crime and indeed whether this can be changed.

Home operations not encouraged….

What makes people good or evil is a simple but deeply unsettling question, and one that scientists are now starting to answer.

In Are You Good or Evil? scientists study some of the most terrifying people behind bars – psychopathic killers – to try and identify what it is that separates them from everyone else, and expose the biology that divides vice from virtue.

But there is a shock in store for one of these scientists, Professor Jim Fallon, when he discovers that he has the profile of a psychopath. The reason he didn’t turn out to be a killer holds important lessons for everyone. He attributes the fact that he had not killed anyone to his supportive family, perfect childhood and subsequent happiness, which left the genetic tendencies dormant.

Another scientist believes he has found the moral molecule, and is using this new understanding to rewrite ideas of crime and punishment.

Tuesday 19 June 2012, 9.30pm on SBS ONE.