The Murderer Next Door Summary

The Murderer Next Door, written by evolutionary psychologist David M. Buss (2005), argues that murder actually has a valuable evolutionary function to humans, as opposed to being a maladaptive sign of illness, as is often believed. Buss earned his doctorate at the University of California, Berkeley, and he taught at Harvard. He has also taught at the University of Texas for over a decade, and he has published widely on various psychology topics, many of them involving violence. As such, he does seem very well qualified to write this book. The major topic that the author addresses is the root cause of murder; he points out that though he had once believed murderers to be aberrant and mentally ill, he realized that this was actually not the case

As his goal is to show murder as an act on the extreme end of normal human behavior, it does make sense that he would focus most of his discussion on normality and its relationship to murder, as well as the evolutionary mechanisms that he believes have led to this behavior. However, to dissuade the reader of existing dominant paradigms about murder, it would also better serve his argument to focus more on typical beliefs circulated about murder, as this would help him to argue against these paradigms and to then better prove his point to his

Cases feature such extreme examples as stalking ex-boyfriends and close friends who have disrupted intimate relationships through telling lies about infidelity. In these cases, the reader can identify with the person telling the story, placing himself or herself in the teller’s position and identifying with the extreme emotions involved and, perhaps, the desire to murder. It is this feature that then most effectively supports Buss’s argument about normality and evolutionary function and permits connection with the reader in his text. Though the statistics and other evidence show some compelling support, the link to Buss’s claims is not always as clear as it is in the personal accounts, which do seem to support the idea of mentally healthy people being those who most often murder, as opposed to the severely mentally