Paul Bloom: belief

Transcript context

…Now, on infants and children, there’s a question my daughter — who’s a big fan of yours — wanted me to ask you, and that’s, “What is the most misunderstood thing about children that most parents could practically use to improve their relationships with kids?” Oh, that’s nice. Probably the most misunderstood thing, period, is that they’re blank slates. A lot of people walk around thinking that babies know nothing, and that’s not true. There’s a tremendous body of evidence now showing a quite sophisticated understanding of the physical and social world was there from the get-go. It’s some research I’ve been involved in, but researchers like Elizabeth Spelke and Renée Baillargeon have really charted the baby’s mind and found some extraordinary things. Now, that’s the way to enjoy your baby, watching those things develop. From a useful standpoint, it might be useful to know that some of the negative aspects of humans are present early on, and so you shouldn’t be too surprised when your child has an us-versus-them psychology. It’s very quick to split the world into the people that they care about and the rest of the people, and you should take that in stride. It’s not because you taught them anything bad. I think certain sex differences are largely hardwired, and so, parents shouldn’t blame themselves if they find their son is walking around pretending to fire guns at people, and their daughter’s doing more maternal play. I think knowing that some of this is innate — that does not mean it can’t be changed — that if some of this is innate is actually pretty useful for a parent. 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?…

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