When you have these prejudices that you believe rationally to be unfounded, but you feel they guide you whether you know it or not and you have to override them.

Welcome to the Art of Charm. I'm your host Jordan Harbinger. Today we're talking with author and developmental psychologist Paul Bloom. We'll discuss where good and evil come from. We'll ask why it evolved in us and you should listen to the show if you want to know how that affects us today.

Whether or not we're all just closet racists and last but not least what we can do about it. So enjoy this one with Paul Bloom and enjoy this episode of the Art of Charm. We bring together the best thought leaders, teachers and exceptional individuals to teach you how to be a top performer in life in your relationships and at work.

If you're new to the show, we'd love to send you some top episodes in the toolbox where we discuss things like body language and nonverbal communication, persuasion, networking, negotiation, mentorship and everything else we teach here at AOC. In the US just text charmed that's CHAR MED to 3-3-4-4. Everywhere else go to the art of charm.com. We may not have all the answers, but we definitely have all the right questions. All right, here's Paul Bloom.

Paul, one of the reasons that I wanted to have you come on the show is because I was very surprised by the concept that morality and conscience and things like that may or may not be hardwired. There's so many mysteries of where bad behavior comes from. We seldom look at good behavior as well.

Is the cover of your book implies some of us are born good and some of us are born evil, but obviously it's not that simple, right?

It isn't. I mean, sometimes the question comes up, are we naturally good or naturally evil? And to me, the answer to that question is yes. In that there's just a lot of evidence for a natural goodness and natural kindness.

But then there's also a lot of evidence that are very worse traits are very most ugly and malicious tendencies are also there from the start.

So there's a fundamental duality to human nature which shows up, I think, as young as you look.

What does that really mean? When do we start seeing these behaviors and how did you test for these things?

It's a good question because if you've ever seen a baby, babies don't do much. They coup, they roll around, they poop, they feed.

And the idea of a small baby manifesting any moral knowledge seems ridiculous to many people.

But what you need is some fairly clever methods, some clever and indirect methods to discover what babies know.

And so for instance, we use looking time. A lot of developmental psychologists have discovered that if you study where babies look and how long they look, you get some grass with their expectations and what they expect.

We study what they reach for. So an eight month old, a ten month old can reach for some things. And then you can find out about its preferences.

When you get to about a one year old, you could look up who they reward and who they punish.

I'm presenting all this in sort of an abstract general way, but here's a specific example. This is a specific study that got us going.

Where what we do is we show babies a one-act play. And in this one-act play, there's a character struggling to make it up a hill.

And another character gently helps it up the hill, but in a third character shoves it down the hill.

Now if you were to see this, you would say the guy who helped us a nice guy's a manch, the guy who pushed down as a jerk.

It turns out that babies seem to have the same intuitions. So they prefer to reach for the good guy. They avoid the bad guy.

And when given the opportunity to punish somebody, they'll punish the bad guy.

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