Paul Bloom on the Psychology of Children, and the Morality of Empathy and Disgust

Conversations with Tyler is produced by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, bridging the gap between academic ideas and real-world problems. Learn more at mercatus.org. For a full transcript of every conversation enhanced with helpful links, visit conversationswithtyler.com. Hello everyone and welcome back to Conversations with Tyler. Today I'm delighted to be speaking with Paul Bloom, who is a professor of psychology at University of Toronto, emeritus at Yale University. Paul is also one of North America's best-known public intellectuals on children, the psychology of children, empathy, human emotions, various features of cognition, He has numerous excellent books. I've enjoyed all of them. The most recent is called Psych: The Story of the Human Mind. But again, you can read all of them. He has a new Substack, which is excellent, Small Potatoes. He is a bit still on Twitter and is more generally a force of nature. Paul, welcome.

Tyler, it's very nice to talk to you.

I have just some very general questions about psychologists, and I'd like to hear your take on it. And they run along the lines of like, How much do you people understand anyway? So your partner, I believe, is a psychologist. You're a psychologist. If you're sitting in a restaurant and you're listening to a couple talk at the other table, do you two feel you understand them better than like two smart non-psychologists?

No, not in the slightest. Not in the slightest. We have no special ability to manipulate people, to understand people. You could say that that reflects a weakness of the field, and maybe it does, but I don't think psychologists are any savvier about human nature in that sort of day-to-day, on-the-spot way than anybody else.

So you don't think, say, that you're better parents on average?

No, I don't. I think we tend to be good parents because the sort of person who becomes a psychologist is probably more sensitive to other people's feelings, well-educated, you know, and tend to be affluent enough to provide kids with good stuff. But no, not any more so than an anthropologist or a biochemist.

But say I took two economists and I flew them to a poor nation that they didn't really know anything about, and I asked them to make some guesses about what might be wrong with the economy. They would do better than equivalently smart people who are not economists. Like, what's the feature of psychological research that stops it from translating into higher understanding? Like, how do you model what you all produce?

I think we understand certain subdomains. So I think I have a better understanding of memory and the fallibility of memory than a lot of people. I think I have more of a grasp of mental disorders. I know maybe a bit more about child development in the sense of what ages things will come about. I know I could say, I think some reasonably intelligent, maybe surprising things about social movements and how people behave in groups. So it's not like we don't know anything. About the world. It's just, it doesn't translate for whatever reason into day-to-day contact. Talking with you now, I'm no better at figuring out what you want from this conversation than anyone else would be.

But let's say we took a batch of you and trained you for 2 years to do that translation. The people who are the most insightful, who, let's say they're not psychologists, but they're astute observers of human nature, and they train you all for 2 years, like, would you then be better? Than others? Are you trainable?

Maybe. It's a good question. Are people trainable? So Phil Tetlock talks about superforecasters and talks about how do you get people who could better predict the future. And you could imagine either training people either by sort of weeding them out in some sort of program where you try to find the most naturally gifted and understanding people, or training them in certain techniques, which probably are available, that would make them better at understanding other people. It just brings us quite a distance from psychology as it's normally studied.

I commonly hear the view that psychologists have more neuroses than non-psychologists. Is that actually true? Is there data behind it or is that just a poke people want to make?

The joke we make in, in within the department is that the clinical psychologists are all a bit crazy. The ones who study memory and development and neurotransmitters are kind of normal. I don't think it's true. I think it is mostly a joke. It could be true in some degree in clinical psychology where people might go into the field in order to address issues and problems that they have. I mean, it's hard to distinguish some issues of cause and effect here. So I have some friends who— I know a lot of people who are really into mindfulness meditation, and some of the people who are most into it are people actually the most troubled. But maybe they'd be much more troubled if they weren't into mindfulness meditation.

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, quote, what is the most misunderstood thing about children that most parents could practically use to improve their relationships with kids, unquote. 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 is there from the get-go. And there's some research I've been involved in, but researchers like Elizabeth Spelke and Renee Baillargeon have really charted the baby's mind and found some extraordinary things. Now that's a way to sort of 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-them psychology. It's very quick to see, to split the world into the people that they care about and the rest of 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. So I think knowing some of the fact that some of this is innate, that does not mean it can't be changed, but some of this 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 2-year-old know? A 3-year-old?

Well, if you take the notion of jerk broadly enough, the 9-month-old knows. So you show 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. And later on, when exposed to these two characters, the helper and the hinderer, babies prefer the helper. So under that very broad notion of a jerk, you 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.

And what's your theory of how they tell the difference?

Well, the origin of this, I think, is natural selection. I think some part of our moral capacity is hardwired. And then the question is, what do they view as sort of the cues to goodness and badness? And I think it tends to be physical acts like helping or hindering. Like they recognize that creatures have goals and some facilitate goals, some block the goals. It could be something as hitting or caressing. There's some work that says that babies, maybe not surprisingly, prefer caressers to hitters.

What else might they be aware of that we don't necessarily know about? You might know about it, but I don't. Who's a jerk, who's not a jerk? What else?

Well, there's some lovely work by Katie Kinsler on how children break the world up into us versus them. And you might think that they do it like adults do on a basis of race, which is very, very common. And in some way, and sooner or later they do that, but early on they take language very seriously. So children at a very young age prefer to affiliate with, as an American child prefers to affiliate with an English speaker. Than a French speaker also prefers to affiliate, to give toys with, to play with somebody who speaks English without an accent than someone who speaks English with a faint accent. So the importance of language as a sort of marker of group affiliation shows up very early.

At what age do you think children can quote unquote really believe in God? Hmm.

With a student, Connie Banerjee, we wrote an article a while ago called Would Tarzan believe in God? Will somebody who, without a cultural support, come to believe in God? And we came to the conclusion that he'd end up being polytheistic, that he'd see gods everywhere. He'd see them as triggered by nature and everything. I think children early on believe in invisible agents causing things. They have that sort of bias. Whether it would rise, when it rises to the level where you could coherently say, oh, that kid believes in God, I think that probably is a bit later. I think you need some sort of cultural support. To make it into a god as opposed to just some sort of strange stuff is happening that you can't explain.

But say if you were to give it a number, how many years old? 4. And do you think that's the same age at which a kid can really believe in Santa Claus or there's a difference? Is God a tougher climb or is it the same?

You know, there's fundamentalist parents who don't want their kids to believe in Santa Claus. And the logic is once they hear that Santa Claus isn't real, they'll jettison God as well. I think in some ways Santa Claus is an easier climb because he's just a big guy who looks like, big beard and who climbs down chimneys and gives gifts. It's kind of a small step from a sort of very capable and kind person to Santa Claus. Well, God, in the sense that we're talking about it, is invisible and omniscient and all good. So I think God's a much bigger climb. So I'll say Santa Claus at 2 or 3.

Okay. And you may see Santa Claus in a department store, right? That's going to make it really easy.

You don't sit on God's lap, but Santa, you do.

Now, if you think Tarzan is going to start off polytheistic, why is it in the world we see so much monotheism? So there's a billion Muslims, over a billion Christians. Now, maybe they're not all very strictly monotheistic, but still monotheism has been the trend for a long time. It has been. It has been. Why that? Why something that runs counter to instinct that would be dominating?

So one idea, and this is Robert Wright's claim, but I think other people have argued this, polytheism is sort of the default. Societies start off polytheistic. Even in the Hebrew Bible, it might begin rather polytheistic. When God talks about not worshiping other gods instead of him, he's literally talking about other gods. But you're right, monotheism has won. And then so there has to be some sort of design features that allow it to win, even though it may not be our natural default. One argument, the answer is I don't know, but one argument that I have heard is that these singular big gods actually serve moral purposes. They hold communities together. If you believe in a single omniscient god that looks at you and looks at me, it could govern our behavior in certain ways, coordinate it, cause us to be nicer when we're not being observed and so on. And so the claim is that societies that have that have an advantage over societies that have 100 mischievous little gods running around.

So that's enforced through some kind of group selection? Mechanism?

That would— cultural group selection would be the idea.

Yeah. In general, how bullish are you on the notion of group selection as a mechanism?

Very critical of it as an evolutionary mechanism. I've been convinced that it almost certainly— it could happen in principle, but I've been convinced to sort of Dawkins view that it doesn't happen in practice. But it seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to talk in terms of cultures, to say that some cultures do better than others. Those cultures thrive. And now we're not talking about genes, we're talking about communities of people.

At what age do infants on net actually start enjoying life? That on the Benthamite calculus, they're a plus rather than a minus.

I did a Twitter poll asking people, are babies overall happy or sad based on your experience? And it came out and the happy sort of won. It probably depends on the baby.

But averaging, right? Average 100 babies.

In our society, I think the life of a baby is actually of a young baby is probably pretty difficult. If your needs are not immediately satisfied, you have a lot of needs, you're in a lot of pain all the time. You have gas pain, you're hungry, you have to, you're struggling, you're afraid. I would think that roughly around the age of 2, you get much more autonomy and then life starts looking up and then it just gets better and better.

I would think at 1.5 on that they're happy based on my limited data sample.

Do you think it corresponds to the burgeoning of language?

No, I just think in wealthy countries, they're fed enough and they just smile more, it seems to me. They take pleasure in more things. Seeing a dog on TV or something, or seeing a car go by, they seem to enjoy in a way where I at least don't witness them enjoying that at 7 months.

Yeah, that makes sense. There's a sense in which wealthy countries might be at a disadvantage where in a lot of wealthy countries, babies sleep apart from their parents. There's a separate room with a crib, you cry it out and so on. And I'm not judging. I did that with one of my kids a long time ago, but it's very hard on the kid. And in less wealthy countries, the kid co-sleeps and sleeps in the same room. And I think that's better off for the kid. Rough on the parents, but better for the kid.

Now, as you've noted in your research, young children sometimes, maybe often, will think that the lives of 10 dogs are worth more than the life of a single human. Are they wrong?

Yes.

Why?

Well, I'm not—

And what's the right number? Like a million dogs?

This is a challenge because if I say I'm wrong, you could just keep that, that no, one human is worth more. You could keep upping. The number of dogs. Your view aligns with that of Maddie Wilkes, who is my collaborator and ex-postdoc who ran this research. And she's very much of a utilitarian and an animal rights person. And so she thinks kids are superior. She finds in this work you're talking about, kids are less speciesist than adults. They even will favor 10 pigs over 1 human. And adults in our sample never do that. And gradually, the speciesism comes in until you get to a person like me, We think, oh my God, a person's so much more valuable. And Mattie would say what happens is this irrational prejudice creeps in that I have, and maybe you don't have. I don't know. I'm a troubled utilitarian where for the most part I am. I just would find it very difficult to trade any number of dogs for a human life. What about you? If you would make the trade-off, how many dogs?

I don't think we can make utility comparisons across species. I think we can make limited claims about potential gains from trade with humans and dogs, a lot. Humans and pigs, quite a bit less, but still somewhat. And that ultimately maybe we can apply some semi-Christian-like idea of mercy to how we should treat animals, and that we only have partial comparisons. That would be my answer.

We have to make some— I mean, maybe we can't, but in some way we have to when we think about animal experimentation or, of course, using animal food. We have to. If somebody said, you know, there's research we're going to do which will save a child's life, but it will involve killing a million dogs. I think people might balk at it, but if it was killing two dogs, people wouldn't. But I also can't fix a number.

There's that other question you've asked in your work. How much would you have to be paid to strangle a cat?

It's not my question, but yes.

But you can take that money and save human lives. I think Oxfam has claimed it's a few thousand dollars well spent could save a human life. Whatever the sum is, it's not ginormous, right? So how much would you have to be paid to strangle a cat?

One reason why I've liked that question is people want a lot of money. And in fact, this is an experiment done by Thorndike, the great behaviorist over 100 years ago. And he asked that question. He also asked people, how much would I have to pay you for you to take a pair of pliers and pull out one of your front tooth? And people want more money to strangle a cat than to have this painful, agonizing, disfiguring thing, which I think says something nice about people. But then the fact is that it's not so nice about people from sort of a strict utilitarian calculus. You should actually ask to be paid some amount of money for which you could then save many, many lives, or for that matter, save many, many cats. And our morality doesn't work that way. We have a sort of visceral response to certain behavior. It doesn't translate to a sort of cold-blooded assessment of pain and pleasure.

And do you feel you should try to train yourself out of being unwilling to strangle the cat, or you're going to double down on how you are?

I double down on a few things. So my utilitarian friends tell me that my affection and the resources I put into my children are irrational, that I should not be favoring them over strangers, certainly not to the extent I do. And I hold back on that. If you offered me a pill that would get rid of my favoring my children, I would not take it. For animals and treatment of animals and cat strangling, I think we should try to talk ourselves out of this. I think we should in some way try to make— reason to make the world a better place, even if it involves strangling some cats.

I have some questions about intelligence for you. If we think of large language models, should we let them feel disgust in order so that they avoid left-wing bias?

That's a— so why would— is the idea— why would disgust make them avoid left-wing bias?

Maybe we're not sure it would, but there are various claims in the literature that for people on the right, disgust is a more fundamental emotion and that a greater capacity to feel disgust encourages people in some ways to be more socially conservative. Debatable, but I don't think it's a crazy view. So if you build LLMs and you give them, say, a lot of empathy and not much or any disgust, You're gonna get left-leaning LLMs, which you might say, well, that was my goal, but obviously not everyone will accept that conclusion either.

Yeah, I wouldn't want woke LLMs. I wouldn't want, I think there's a lot.

You've got them, of course.

I've got them. I think Gemini is the one if I wanted to go the woke LLM of choice, because I think, you know, the doctrine called wokeness leads to a lot of moral problems and makes the world worse in certain ways. But I wouldn't mind left-wing. LLMs, and in fact, I'm not a fan of disgust. You're right that disgust is often associated with the right wing, but in the very worst instantiation of it. So disgust is what drives hatred towards gay people. It involves hatred of interracial marriage, the exclusion of immigrants, exclusion of other races. So if there's one emotion I would take away from people, it would be disgust, at least disgust in sort of the moral realm. They could keep their disgust towards rotten food and that sort of thing. And so I wouldn't, that's the one thing I wouldn't put into LMs. I'd rather put, I don't know, anger, pity, gratitude. Disgust is the one thing I'd keep away.

So you wouldn't just cut back on it at the margin. You would just take disgust out of people if you could?

I'm conscious enough about the limits of our knowledge, which is that I would be very trepidatious before removing an emotion from people because you don't know what the consequences would be. But yeah, it's hard to think, and maybe you could think of an example where disgust has made the world better.

Well, disgust combined with other views might make people more cautious. So if you take Canada, well, I've been very positive on Canada's pro-migration policies. There needs to be some limit, right? And maybe it's some form of disgust mixed in with other views that will enforce that limit.

So your view is, and I think, and I've written on empathy and I've heard a sort of similar argument for this, which is you could have a decision which you ground, and you may be thinking about immigration on a sort of rational cost-benefit analysis, but you might say, look, for people to act towards this decision, your average person won't do it my way. They would need some emotion. So maybe they need disgust or empathy to take them there. And so you might want to argue that without— would the argument go that without disgust, Canadians wouldn't be motivated to do a policy that on balance would be better for them?

Possibly. And I just think back and I figure, well, disgust must have been socially functional at some stage of development, not perfectly functional, but it had some benefits. And you might have a very detailed argument for why all those earlier benefits have vanished. But I think I would be skeptical. And I'm surprised you think that, say, your views toward migration are not equally emotional as, say, the social conservatives. Yours might be correct, but do you think yours are that much less emotional and more rational?

I think on a whole, some views are more rational. Than others. So I mean, I'm the wrong person to ask. Everybody's going to tell you their views are grounded in a sort of rational equation. They thought them out and everything like that. And I'm sympathetic enough to John Haidt's line that often we delude ourselves and we're driven by these emotions. But I don't know. I wouldn't say that the person who says Black people and white people shouldn't marry because it grosses me out, should be thought of on the same level as somebody who says, "Eh, you know, what harm does it do?" I think the "what harm does it do" person is being a better person.

Your view that there's too much empathy, you wrote a book called Against Empathy. What emotion in you does that come from? For me, it comes from frustration with other people. So I hold that same view, but I feel it's rooted in my emotions as much as my reason, and I then rationalize it with my reason. I see ex post my emotions are actually somewhat correct, but it stems from my frustration with others.

Maybe for me, shame and guilt. I think I've made a lot of mistakes and moral mistakes in my life by being too caught up in empathy. And so my argument against empathy is limited. It argues that empathy is a poor moral guide. It leads to bad decisions. And if I have to ground in my own emotions, it might be regret over my own bad decisions. I think I suffer from an abundance of empathy.

I think at the margin I've moved against empathy more being a podcast host that I'll ask a question.

Wait, wait, wait, why, why, why being a podcast host?

Well, I'll ask a question and a lot of guests think it's high status simply to signal empathy rather than giving a substantive answer. And the signaling empathy answers I find quite uninteresting. And I think a lot of my listeners do too. Yet people will just keep on doing this., and I get frustrated, and then I think, well, Tyler, you should turn a bit more against empathy for this reason, and I think that's correct.

Okay. Well, I appreciate where you're coming from, and I feel your frustration.

What do you think we learned about language from large language models being so good?

You know, the success of large language models is the biggest surprise in my intellectual life. And we learned that a lot of what we used to believe may be false. And what I used to believe may be false. So I used to really accept to a large degree the Chomsky argument that the structures of language are too complex and not manifest in the input so that you need to have innate machinery to learn them. You need to have a language module or language instinct, and it's impossible to learn them simply by observing statistics in the environment. If it's true, that, and I think it is true, the LLMs learn language through statistical analysis. This shows the Chomsky view is wrong. This shows that at least in theory, it's possible to learn language just by observing a billion tokens of language. Doesn't mean that that's how children do it. It's possible. And I think, I do believe that kids have some sort of innate apparatus that helps them do it, but it's no longer a sort of logical truth. It's something which you have to do empirical research. If you gave an LLM, and I know people are doing this very research, gave an LLM the the same speech that your average developing child gets, will it learn to talk?

Now, the day we're taping this, coincidentally, it's the same day that GPT-4o came out, which probably you haven't played around with yet. It's only been out for about an hour. I was with it before taping. It seems to me amazing. But how good are LLMs as therapists?

There's been experiments which have pitted them against people in short-term interactions. Like you talk about your troubles, And then you get a person like me to give a response. Then you get GPT-4 to respond. And over and over and over again, people rate the AI responses more empathic, more understanding. Now, I think that this is impressive. I think what we have yet to see is whether they could have a long sustained conversation, holding in memory over multiple sessions. You know, part of me being a good therapist and actually just being a good friend is I remember what you're worried about. I could go back to it. I could talk about it and so on.. And I don't think they're at that stage yet. I don't see any reason why they can't get there.

You know, there's a version of GPT-4 which does have memory. It's only been, I think, for about a week and I haven't tested it yet. I don't know how good the memory is. Some people prefer to turn the memory off actually, but it's very much on the verge of being here. But say 2, 3 years from now, what percentage of therapy done do you think will be done with humans rather than LLMs? 'Cause the LLM is free and you can stay at home. Well, you can with the therapist with Zoom, but the LLM is super easy.

If you include by therapy, somebody just regularly talking to LLM about their problems and getting some advice and everything, I think that human interaction within not too many years will be the minority of interactions. I think people, people will be very drawn to AI therapists. There's some evidence that we have a prejudice against AIs. There was a paper recently that gave the same sort of response, the exact same response to two groups of people, told one of them it's a person, the other one it's an AI. The people told it was an AI said, "Oh, that wasn't very empathic. That wasn't very understanding." But my feeling is this prejudice will fade over time and that it's mostly people more our age than people who are, you know, 18 or 20.

The people who are best at working with LLMs, what kind of psychological intelligence do you think they have? Who's going to be good at that?

I think you need a certain flexibility, a certain degree of patience, and you need to develop a theory of mind with LLMs that is different from the theory of mind you need for people. So I was recently asked Claude, who I, Claude, Claude, anyway, I use it, I use it a lot. And I asked it, I said, there's a phenomenon in children I found. Does the same phenomenon show up in adults? And I plainly framed the question that I wanted the answer to be yes. And it said, yes, there is. Here are 3 papers that show it decisively. None of the papers were real. It hallucinated it because it's what I wanted. And then I went back and I said, look, I'll lose my job if you give me papers that are false, that are made up. You've got to be accurate. I'm in big trouble. Then it did much better. So you got to game them to some extent in a very different way than you'd game a person. And that capacity is something which I think is essential for dealing with them, at least with the current models.

Here's a simple question. What's the best test of whether someone or something has a theory of mind?

I think conversation. I think a sustained conver— So there are technical tests like the false belief task or reading the mind in the eyes task, but those are easily gamed. Those are— LLMs will succeed on them because they've seen thousands and thousands of instances on them. I think in conversation, a lack of theory of mind quickly reveals itself. So success at solving a sort of Turing test is success at theory of mind.

Well, but Claude 3 can converse very well, but I'm pretty sure it doesn't have a theory of mind, or do you think it does?

Well, I'm using theory of mind, a word like theory of mind, meaning the manifestation as if it did. Does it really think that other people have minds? Does it have a model of people's psychology? When it says, I understand exactly what you're feeling, does it sort of call back its own experiences? I doubt it. So maybe in some way you're asking an even easier question, which is what will show that it has consciousness?

But you could have consciousness and not a theory of mind, right?

Yes. But you were saying, I think that theory of mind involves something you might call consciousness.

But what's the extra thing above having consciousness that indicates a person has a theory of mind? So we reject the false belief test. That makes sense to me.

Yeah.

What is it then? What's the test?

I think what you'd have to do, and you could do this on the fly or you could work it out, would be develop a, uh, well, okay, here's a good test. Read it half of a good novel and then ask what's going on here? What's going to happen next? Show it half of a TV episode. And when we do these things, our theory of mind is fully operational. We say, "That detective is going to get his revenge because he will not take that sort of stuff. And she's going to leave him the first moment she has a chance." Da-da-da-da. And I think that shows theory of mind at work. And if you do it in that way, you can't cheat. If it's a novel novel or a novel episode, then it would have to do it on the fly.

I'm afraid I'm going to fail that test. I always think up strange imaginary endings that are improbable, and occasionally they come to pass. And I think my endings are often much better than what they end up putting on the screen.

My dad is great. When we watched TV together as a kid, he would— and of course the TV was very different and much more predictable— but a character would be about to say something and then he would say it. He would say it simultaneously with the character.

My wife does this too. Yeah. She's great at this. Yeah. Do monkeys have cognitive dissonance?

I've done some research suggesting that they might of a sort. The cognitive dissonance, the sort of cognitive dissonance we were interested in is that when you choose something that makes you, say out of a choice of two things, that makes you like it more and makes you like the things that you didn't choose less. In some work with Laurie Santos, who had a thriving monkey lab, we found that capuchins did the same thing. We also around 3-year-olds did the same thing.

Endowment effects, right?

That's a separate thing, but I think there's some evidence that monkeys also show endowment effects.

Are we sure that's dissonance?

The endowment effects, I'm less sure that it's dissonance. It might— there's alternative explanations. The favoring that which you chose is kind of a textbook example of dissonance. That's dissonance if anything is.

But what if you want to carry a story with you of what it meant to you and your act of choosing helped create and define the story, and you value things through this narrative function, and you actually ought to be that way. Is that so improbable?

No, no. I guess the experiments that test that aren't open to that kind of interpretation. It can often be like, you know, we give you two M&Ms and you just choose one at random. And then later when you rank the taste of the M&Ms, you'd say, oh, the one I picked is tastier than the one I didn't pick. Well, if we simply handed it to you, you wouldn't get that effect. So there's not much of a narrative to that. But I agree that when you get it more complicated in life, it could serve all sorts of other functions.

How much does formal education boost IQ?

The data are a little bit. Each year you're in school, your IQ goes a little bit up. And the skeptics will say, I think Bryan Kaplan says, you get better at taking tests. You get better at a scholastic way of thinking. I do think, though, that education, period, does play a role in making you smarter. It gives you practice in dealing with abstractions, with hypotheticals, the sort of things that we often view as markers of intelligence.

Do people overestimate or underestimate your intelligence? You.

My own?

Yeah. You must know.

Seemingly either way, it's a humiliating answer. But I would imagine, particularly when I was at Yale, I think they overestimate it. People sometimes ask me questions about domains which I have no knowledge about, and they take me seriously about that. Isn't that an overestimation? What about you?

Oh, they way overestimate my intelligence, but they underestimate how much I know. It's interesting. I know a lot, and they mistake that for innate intelligence is what happens in my case.

So you know even more than you seem to know, which is quite a lot.

In my opinion. So I'm being like both modest and not modest with each part of the answer, but I think I take good care to try to apply what I know. And people mistake that for, again, high IQ.

It's not entirely clear that isn't high IQ, that IQ might be largely built on a scaffolding of a lot of knowledge.

Partly, yeah. But it's something else as well. Like there's some kind of G. Where I think I'm actually much weaker.

Maybe there's a trade-off, which is the more knowledge you have, the less G you need to get to the same point where somebody with less knowledge would need a lot of G to get to that point.

And why do you think it's worked out the way it has that people overestimate your intelligence? Because you are at Yale?

Yeah, prestige bias. I'm a university professor. I'm at Yale. Maybe I benefit from other forms of privilege being an older white man. But I don't know. But I show all the markers of a smart guy.

Do you think when you interact with other people that you're too much impressed by their intelligence or not enough?

Too much.

Because a lot of smart people overvalue smarts in others. And why not just drive that out of your calculus? Is it so hard?

No, I read your talent book and it was actually very, very useful to me because it taught me other ways, other things to look for. When it comes to choosing graduate students, for instance, I tend to rank intelligence very highly and, and, you know, a good conversation with someone who's quicker than me and smart on their feet and everything. I value that very highly. It's only recently I started to try to also value things like, you know, productivity and work ethic and, and, and, and other things and a certain degree of creativity. But I would just, I go too much for smarts.

What do you think is psychologically the hardest trait for us to value properly? Disagreeableness or something else? Because after all, they might be disagreeing with you, right?

Yeah, disagreeableness, probably honesty. One of the tropes on social media I hate the most is when somebody says, you know, well, here I am and now I'm a professor and I want to say to somebody who was my advisor many years ago said I'd never make it. Well, you're a jerk. And everybody laughs at the person who said they'd never make it. And to be honest with somebody, and in that case they were wrong, but, but even if you're right, people hate you. To be honest with somebody when they say to you, what do you think of my book? Do you think I'm suited for this job? Stuff like that can be doing them a huge service. Am I with the right person? Can be doing them a huge service. And the reward you will get is hatred and resentment.

So on your Substack, Small Potatoes, you wrote a post on doing academic interviews. The interviewers at a general level, what's the bias they're most likely to have?

Oh, all sorts of biases. And I'm almost leaning towards, you know, your book aside, jettisoning interviews sometimes, getting rid of them, but all sorts of biases. They're biased by charm. They're biased by quickness. They're biased by flattery. And in fact, my advice, part of my advice to put it somewhat cynically is for people on job interviews, know the person you're talking to, do their research. Because it's kind of flattering. Somebody comes into my office and said, oh my God, it's such an honor to meet you. I read Against Empathy and it changed my life. I don't want it to sway me, but it's hard for it not to. Yeah, that's our weakness.

I've wondered quite often, why is flattery undersupplied in these contexts? Because by no means does everyone do it. It's not very costly. Even if you're not fully believed, it can have a positive impact on the person. So why isn't the supply of flattery just way, way up there? Every job interview— such a cheap thing.

Yeah, yeah.

Starts off with, oh, I read your articles 2 years ago, it was wonderful, it changed how I think about tax incidents. But not every interview starts that way. Most do not. Why not?

I tell this, I tell the story in my Substack of very famous senior figure. I never met him before, comes to my office, oh my God, it is such a delight to meet you, and talks all about my work extensively. And I fully knew Even my ego was not— I fully knew he read up on me, but it still felt great. It still felt— I don't know. I feel maybe people are uncomfortable flattering. Maybe there's an awkwardness when you're talking to somebody who is of a higher status than you and you want a job from them. Maybe it feels inappropriate to flatter. Like, who am I to tell this person their work is great? I don't know.

You still think they ought to do it more, right? As do I. I do. Yeah.

I do. I do. There's a flattery shortage in the world. And it's going back to kind of a criticism abundance sometimes, where I think people have a false theory of mind where they go to somebody and they say, you know, I read your stuff and I think it's really poorly thought out. Could be very helpful from a friend, not a good tactic when you're looking for a job.

So how can we train people to be better flatterers? What do we need to do?

Maybe it's some degree of sort of theory of mind. Which is you just ask people, how do you feel when somebody tells you how wonderful you are? I think that that will help them do it. It doesn't seem like a very difficult thing to pick up. So I don't know. It's a mystery.

So if we should train flattery, how do you think we should best tax empathy? In the broad sense of tax, right?

Yeah. Yeah. I think we should tax empathy through social disapproval. And here's what I'm thinking. A lot of American politicians say racist things and have racist policies, but almost always they cloak it. They dog whistle it, they cloak it. Maybe they aren't even aware of it themselves. Because if, when somebody says something avowed, clearly racist, people boo them. People, they suffer a huge social cost. I'd like to see the same thing with regard to overt displays of empathy. So I would like to see that, you know, When a politician comes up and says, I want to talk about a healthcare plan, and says, I want to read you a letter I got from an 8-year-old who told me the story about her father, I want the crowd to boo and to shout, don't treat us like children. I think empathy could easily be used as a tool for all sorts of things. And if we stop putting up with it, it would discourage it.

Where is the empathy problem worse, Canada or the United States?

I think everything is both worse and better in the United States.

Just broader variance?

There's broader variance. The politics is more intense, is a lot more interesting. I think the degree of empathic pandering, as well as the degree of everything else, is more accelerated in the States. I think part of Canadian politics with Parliament encourages more vibrant debate and discussion, often at a pretty high level. That you don't see in the States.

Do you think there are any humans who are what I would call truly egalitarian? So there's plenty of people who genuinely want to redistribute wealth, but typically I think they have other status markers. It could be intellect, it could be empathy, it could be a certain kind of left-wing politics. Are there people who are genuinely egalitarian across all dimensions? No.

I think you'd cease to become a person. I mean, to become indifferent between the present and the future, indifferent between your child and a stranger, to not care about somebody's looks or intelligence or kindness would be— you could imagine an LLM program for that, but I think when we encountered an LLM, we'd find it repellent.

And the person would disgust us. Yes. And that's the case where disgust might be useful, right?

Yes. Okay. You have, you have come full circle on me. Yes.

Why do so many people enjoy horror movies? For the most part, I do not. I'll interject, but clearly many do.

Do you enjoy any, any movies that, that scare you of a lighter sort? Not, not gory, not chainsaw stuff, but lighter.

That I enjoy. So Darth Vader comes on the screen. I wouldn't say I'm scared, but I feel the negative evil presence and I respond to that in an aesthetically positive way.

Yeah. I think that that's right, where we take some sort of pleasure from negative emotions, but like sadness and fear and disgust and even guilt, shame. But there's a lot of variation in which emotions people like. Some people like a good cry. Some people like to scream. And the intensity of it, where I do like scary movies, but for me, it's like The Babadook or something like, or, you know, It Follows, the gory ones. I can't bear to watch. I think there's different sources for our appetite for them, but one is it might reflect what's sometimes been called safe practice, where our minds are drawn to worst-case scenarios as a way to practice encountering them. An analogy I like is that of a flight simulator, which you got a flight simulator, you would often program it for difficult situations to get you practice into coping with them. You got them in real life. And sometimes I think our enjoyment of fiction and fantasy is sort of like we're running off a flight simulator.

You've posed this question in your work as a hypothetical. Is consenting sex between adult siblings morally wrong? What's your view?

Yes.

Why?

I do think it's morally wrong.

Why?

Because although as adults, there's a strong supposition that they're free to do what they I think that the problem is that when they're not adults, the fact that later on they could have sex and worse, say between, say a stepfather and a stepdaughter or some other, or an uncle and a niece, the idea that sex is a possibility in the future when they're adults corrodes the relationship early on. Does that make sense? This is my utilitarian attempt to try to do a cost-benefit analysis for what you were going to accuse me of having a disgust reaction I think you have a disgust reaction.

That's fine. It sounds to me like an argument that it's imprudent, which can slide into morally wrong. But I still think there's something out of sync between the strength of our disgust reaction and the degree of moral wrongness it has.

I think that's right. I think that if that was my argument, say, make it— make it— just ratchet it up a bit and make it a relationship between a father and an adult daughter.

But say brother-sister. I could reword the question. Adult sibling. I said siblings. So brother and sister, or two sisters for that matter.

Yeah.

That seems much less wrong than the stepfather and the daughter.

It does. It does. Because in some way, going back to my point about as it brings us down to childhood, there's less of a power asymmetry. There's less of a case of an adult carefully grooming a child so that when she is of age, they could then have sex and it would be okay. I have a visceral response to it. I'll give another argument, which is again, trying not to be disgust-based, which is that I think that there's a range of human relationships that are tremendously valuable and sometimes they're better off without sex. I think it's, you know, the relationship, certain sex is great, connects to romance, connects to sort of a great degree of intimate relationships, but some relationships are sex-free. Like the relationship between most people and their adult children. And that's good.

Now, as a CWT listener, might you be up for a round of overrated versus underrated?

Yeah, I was hoping for this. Hit me.

Okay, these are all easy. Jean Piaget, overrated or underrated?

Underrated. He is wrong in just about everything he said about kids. There's been studies finding that just about every claim he makes is mistaken and overridden. But he was a great scientist with a great encompassing theory. A lot of his theoretical foundations, particularly the notion that children are like scientists exploring the world, have stood the test of time. Also, he was a sweet guy. Unlike Freud, he was, you know, he was, Biagi was a genuinely decent guy. So I'd say he's underrated.

The notion of mirror neurons.

Oh, It shouldn't be rated at all.

So it's just false, right?

I'm not enough of a neuroscientist to say it's entirely dead. Maybe, and people have talked about mirror neurons in primates being involved in certain aspects of motor learning, and I'm not expert enough to say that that's all bogus, but was once hugely overrated in that this was the solution to everything. Explained autism, explained language learning, explained empathy, and the whole field, I think, crash and it's still overrated because some people don't know it crashed. That was an easy one.

Sociopaths, overrated or underrated? That's harder, right?

You mean the idea or the people?

No, the actual ones. They're very productive, a lot of them, right?

They are. They are. I think they're overrated. I think that there's a sort of sexiness to this. There was a woman who was profiled in New York Times recently who described herself as a sociopath or a psychopath. And I don't know, I think there's a lot of allure to it and a lot of drama. Many studies of psychopaths and sociopaths find that they're actually often below normal intelligence. They tend to be depressed. They're more likely to kill themselves. They kind of live lousy lives. They're not the sort of sexy, conscience-free people we like to imagine, suggesting that some degree that you and I, We, the non-sociopaths, are sensitive to this. And when we see a sociopath, we kind of run away.

You're assuming I'm a non-sociopath, right?

Oh, I know you well from the podcasts.

But a lot of people just think they're psychopaths, like they're all serial killers. And that's not true at all.

Yeah. No.

So maybe they lack a moral sense, but if they can learn to behave according to incentives, maybe a lot just fit in. They learn how to flatter, say, because they're not held back by these other weird feelings that you shouldn't flatter your interviewer.

You could get very far, but the thing about the people we want to be around is we want them to be nice to us even when incentives aren't present.

Carl Jung, overrated or underrated?

Oh yeah, hardly, hardly rated at all these days. I think maybe just because of Jordan Peterson, who has been been sort of promoting him, I often get people saying, why didn't you talk about Carl Jung in your book? I would say, I'll say underrated in that what little I know about him seems quite interesting. And I think maybe he's been so eclipsed by Freud that nobody gives his ideas any attention. Certainly ideas about, some of his ideas about the conscious are worth study. So mildly underrated.

Memories, Dreams, and Recollections is a great book, I think. And I believe with LLMs, Jung will make a comeback. In a sense, LLMs are tapping into a kind of Jungian subconscious of all the data we've put out there.

A sort of collective unconscious is now coming online.

But there's reinforcement learning applied to it, so it's also suppressed in a kind of Freudian way. So you get this weird mix of Jung and Freud in contemporary LLMs.

There's a book, there's a book there somewhere.

Yeah. Asian tiger parenting, over or underrated?

Ha! Amy Chua, who is a friend of mine, who brought the idea in her battle hymn of the tiger mother. I think underrated. I tend to be a rather permissive parent, but the thing about it is a lot of these tiger parents end up with kids who are not merely successful, but happy and love their parents. So it doesn't work for everybody, either— not for every kid nor for every parent. I could not fashion myself as a Tiger Dad, but I think we should take it more seriously.

Do you need the whole community for it to work?

Oh, yes. Yes. It's like everything else, cell phones, smartphones, and social media, and I don't know, sex, alcohol, where if you're one individual, within the community doing it, it's extremely difficult. It's much easier to be any sort of parent if everybody else around you is the same sort of parent.

Big Five personality theory.

Ah, underrated. Stood the test of time. And often when people complain about the replication crisis, they throw away all of psychology. But personality psychology has proven surprisingly robust. And I think there's a lot of sense and the idea. I know you actually were somewhat critical of this in your book Talent, the idea of the Big Five, but the idea that you could characterize somebody in terms of sort of 5 numbers determining their openness and their conscientiousness and so on. What do you think on that?

I think it's overrated by people who use it in hiring, but I still think in general it's somewhat underrated. So we're maybe not far apart.

Okay.

People who don't know about the categories at all would do well to learn them. That's how I would put it. Yes.

And once you know about them, you should be flexible and not take them too, too seriously.

What's a neglected classic in psychology that more people should read?

Well, psychologists don't read. We don't read books. We don't read anything from the past.

But you read.

I have gone through my adult life, my whole life, without ever reading Principles of Psychology by William James. And then a couple of friends of mine invited me on their podcast to talk about his chapter on habits. And I read it and it blew me away.

It's an incredible book.

It's an incredible book. It is well written. It is sharp. He talks about instinct. He talks about nothing. It is a very contemporary voice. He's a lyrical, beautiful writer and it's full of insights. And maybe it's an embarrassment to psychology that, you know, you could use it for an intro psych class and you would gain a lot.

Why do religious people cry when their loved ones die? Assuming they believe in heaven, of course. Not all religions do. Yeah.

I think the answer is more— so some people say, and I have atheist friends, "Well, they're hypocrites. They don't really believe in heaven. If they really believed in heaven, they wouldn't cry. They would rejoice." And same thing with their own death. I think there's belief and there's belief. I could have a very confident belief in heaven. Maybe I'm even 100% sure that I'll go to heaven when I die. But when faced with my own death, there are other systems that lead to tremendous fear. And when faced with the death of somebody I love, there are other systems in the head that could lead to terrible grief. So we're not unitary beings. It's possible for, upon learning my son has a terminal disease, for part of me to think, oh, he'll be reunited and God and heaven will be paradise and feel good about it and feel horrible grief. And yes, they conflict with one another, but that doesn't mean, it doesn't negate the existence of either one.

What does the Hebrew Bible most get right and wrong about social psychology? So it has mimetic desire, right? Peter Thiel will tell us that. I mean, how good is it as a kind of text in social psychology?

I think it's a great text in social psychology and personality psychology and even a little bit of cognitive psychology. It captures in a very stark way The us/them biases that are present, that social psychology makes so much out of. It captures the idea of prejudice. It captures the idea of thinking about men and women, children and adults, in-group, out-group separately. I've been very interested, I've long been interested in the portrayal of God in the Hebrew Bible, which is absolutely fascinating because people who haven't read it think, oh, God, all-knowing, all-loving and everything. But in fact, He's this wonderful character, and this goes beyond social psychology, sort of talking about internal workings of the mind. I wrote in my Substack about the Passover story where, you know, he sets the plagues loose on the Pharaoh unless he lets the Jews go. And the Pharaoh says, "Fine, fine, fine." And then the Pharaoh bends, breaks, and says, "Fine, you win." And then God fiddles with the Pharaoh's mind. In this wonderful twist to say, to make him refuse. And he says later, "I wanted to show off my powers. We had gone this far." It's like, I don't know, it's the invasion of Iraq or something. There are lovely stories there.

I think it's brilliant on the mentality of whiners, like Book of Job, even Moses at times. You should write a book on social psychology in the Hebrew Bible.

That's an idea. You know what I like? God has So much patience for whiners in that there's so many scenes where God destroys people who, the slightest lack of faith with him. When it comes to Moses pushing back, "I don't want to do this," you know, God said, "Okay, let's compromise." Or about the— he ends up negotiating over how many, when he destroys the world in a flood, over how many people to leave behind. If you whine to God, as Job did, sometimes he listens.

What do you, Paul Bloom, maximize?

Most recently, time with those I love. That's what I try. Also time writing my Substack.

The ones you love, they're all busy right now, and thus you're talking to me.

That's right. Well, you can—

They all turned you down, right?

Well, you know, our relationship is just beginning. Who knows?

That's right.

But I maximize different things than I did when I was younger. I try to maximize money less. I still take money very seriously because we want to renovate our house, want to travel and stuff like that. But I've been very lucky to have deep connections with friends, my wife, with my children who are now adults. And I sometimes have to remind myself, you end up forgetting that this is what I ultimately want to maximize.

And what's your most unusual successful work habit?

No, this is an easy one.

As you— They're all easy in this. In this episode?

No, the one about lessons from social psychology from the Hebrew Bible was not an easy one. My oddest work habit is that I work on, not always, but often in 6-minute bursts. So I have a whiteboard right next to me. I'll work on a Substack for 6 minutes, then a reference letter for 6 minutes, then I'll rush and fold my laundry for 6 minutes, and then I'll answer email for 6 minutes, go on social media for 6 minutes, And then do this for 10 more things and go back to the Substack and repeat. And then 3, 4 hours will go by. I don't recommend it for everybody.

And that's an approximation or you've set it like a timer or is the timing internal?

Not an approximation. I have a timer. I try, when my timer beeps, I could be mid-word, I'll stop and go on to next. And for me, A, I have very short, this keeps me from getting bored. And also by stopping mid-word, or stopping wherever I'm stopping, when I go back to it, the energy is still there to want to continue. I highly recommend it to everybody.

I've advocated a similar system that you should stop writing each day before you feel you're done.

Yes, that's right.

That's right. When you don't want to stop, you're just about to write something really good. That's when, shh, no more.

Yes.

Back to it tomorrow.

Many people do the opposite. They have nice closure on this. They ended the paragraph, they ended the chapter, and then it's hard to start up next time.

That's right.

That's excellent advice.

And they're a little exhausted. Very last question. What will you do next?

I'm thinking I want to write a new book, but I'm not exactly sure of the topic. I've been playing around with different topics. I have something which I kind of like, but it's too early for me to talk about, but I really want to write a new book.

And what's the algorithm you use to decide which topic it will be?

Well, for this book, I started to write a proposal on an idea and I just couldn't make it interesting enough. It just, it just so, so Because I work by writing a proposal and sending it to my agent and so on, often if I could write a good proposal, then I know I have a good book. Not that the book's going to match the proposal in any interesting sense, but it means that the material is there. I guess another way of putting it is by the time I'm done with that, I know it'll be a good book, or a good book for me, if I couldn't live without writing it. If nobody wanted it, I'd write it anyway.

Paul Bloom, thank you very much. And listeners, you can buy all of Paul's books. And again, his new Substack is Small Potatoes. Just Google Paul Bloom, B-L-O-O-M, Small Potatoes. Thank you, Paul.

Thank you, Tyler. That was great.

Thanks for listening to Conversations with Tyler. You can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. If you like this podcast, please consider giving us a rating and leaving a review. This helps other listeners find the show. On Twitter, I'm @TylerCowen and the show is @CowenConvos. Until next time, please keep listening and learning.