The bad guys have always had their “fans”. The brutal exploits of highwayman Dick Turpin in the early 18th century were romanticised after his execution.

One of the most compelling figures in English folklore is Robin Hood – an outlaw, a thief with conscience.

The murderous exploits of Bonnie and Clyde became sexily intriguing, the stuff of Hollywood. And the Kray twins, vicious East End gangsters, were cult heroes to some in the swinging sixties.

But what about Raoul Moat – a musclebound thug who shot his ex-partner Samantha Stobbart, killed her partner Chris Brown, shot a police officer PC David Rathband in the face and then, after threats to take out his rage on the wider public, apparently killed himself? How can 37,000 people want to support a Facebook page which calls this man “a legend”?

“There is that sympathy for the anti-hero that you would normally get to some degree, even if it was Al Capone,” says Dr David A Holmes, a psychology lecturer and director of the Forensic Research Group at Manchester Metropolitan University.

“You get this respect for the bad guy, so you get serial killers in prison who get proposals from females and endless mail. That's always gone on.”

We would have expected a few people to shout out that it was unfair for Raoul Moat to die how he did, hunted down by an army of police, Holmes observes. But we would not have expected this Facebook phenomenon.

What we are seeing, the psychologist believes, is a generational change in attitudes.

“In Britain today it is cool to be nasty, even if nasty includes being a killer,” he says. “Being quite close to the young, in my profession, it seems to be quite a culture that is far more widespread and may have only affected a few sarcastic, socially inept individuals in the past.

“It seems now almost to be a broad culture. I put it down as being part of post-Thatcher Britain, where the ground rules are already laid down about being selfish and not really caring for others.

“This seems to have meshed with the worship and respect for the bad guy from, perhaps, the street gang culture which has been adopted to the mainstream, and also this idea that it's good to be smug, to be indifferent, to not have any emotional baggage. To impersonate psychopaths, if you like, has been cool.”

Oddly, the generation in which Holmes identifies such callousness is the same generation so happy to weep in front of the cameras over every trivial event in a reality TV show.

Holmes acknowledges some of the strands to this new attitude include hip hop culture, with its glorification of violence, the gangster lifestyle and misogyny, and also video games.

“Video games sit very nicely into this, whether it's cause or effect,” he says. “The indifference and coolness, the pure excitement, the 'kill kill kill' is a major theme in most of them, which is unfortunate and should be designed out, really. It does depersonalise the interaction with others.

“It is like an autistic generation. They are much happier working with a rule system which does not involve exposure to emotion. Emotion is something which is compartmentalised on Big Brother or TV games and competitions. Then it's OK because it's superficial, it's not real.”

But another explanation for the huge numbers spouting such odious support for Moat on Facebook is that it's just too easy to do it, even if you don't really mean what you are saying. Some putting their comments on Facebook will have “goldfish attention spans” and are living “glib, superficial soundbite lives”, says Holmes.

“They focus on the current. They focus on the impact they can make,” he says. “Someone makes a smart remark and gets lots of comments in support of him, and he gets mini fame and attaches his fame to that of Moat's, if you can call it fame. It is a very parasitic form of fame or infamy.

“I believe many of the people on there are simply doing it for effect and do not believe in what they are putting on. But the size and vociferousness of it is a symptom that there has been a sea change in the younger end of our population.”

If Margaret Thatcher's denial of society and everyone-for-themselves culture has spawned a self-centred generation, that generation is now looking into a bleak future.

“There is a perceived level of injustice in society at the moment, particularly with the recession – a sense of hopelessness about the future,” says Holmes.

“If you have a population disaffected and bitter and quite hardened in this way, and it doesn't take things seriously, when they gravitate towards what is exciting and fearful, and identify with aggressive and nasty individuals, you have a very similar melting pot to what you had with the rise of Nazism. I'm not saying that's what's going to happen, but it's a curious parallel.”

• Dr David A Holmes is the author of Abnormal Clinical and Forensic Psychology, just published in paperback by Pearson Education

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