Paul Bloom: belief

Transcript context

…Let’s say two people are having an argument, and one is being a jerk and the other is not being a jerk. At what age are young children old enough to figure out who’s being the jerk? Does a two-year-old know? A three-year-old? [laughs] Well, if you take the notion of jerk broadly enough, the nine-month-old knows. In some experiments that I’ve been involved in at Yale, you show babies little one-act plays where you have this little thing trying to get up a hill, and one character helps it up the hill, and the other one shoves it down. Later on, when exposed to these two characters, the helper and the hinderer, babies prefer the helper. Under that very broad notion of a jerk, they get it pretty early on. I think, in other ways — I think that that’s actually a very emerging ability, the ability to tell the good from the bad. What’s your theory of how they tell the difference?…

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