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

Conversations with Tyler

Society & Culture, Education

4.8 • 2.4K Ratings

🗓️ 7 August 2024

⏱️ 59 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Paul Bloom is a renowned psychologist and writer specializing in moral psychology, particularly how moral thoughts and actions develop in children. But his interests and books explore a wide range of topics, including the science of pleasure, the morality of empathy, dehumanization, immoral vs moral punishments, and our feelings about animals and robots. Bloom is a professor at the University of Toronto and previously taught at Yale for over 20 years.

Together Paul and Tyler explore whether psychologists understand day-to-day human behavior any better than normal folk, how babies can tell if you’re a jerk, at what age children have the capacity to believe in God, why the trend in religion is toward monotheism, the morality of getting paid to strangle cats, whether disgust should be built into LLMs, the possibilities of AI therapists, the best test for a theory of mind, why people overestimate Paul’s (and Tyler’s) intelligence, why flattery is undersupplied, why we should train flattery and tax empathy, Carl Jung, Big Five personality theory, Principles of Psychology by William James, the social psychology of the Hebrew Bible, his most successful unusual work habit, what he’ll work on next, and more.

Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video.

Recorded May 13th, 2024.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Conversations with Tyler is produced by the Mercadus Center at George Mason University,
0:09.0	bridging the gap between academic ideas and real world problems.
0:13.0	Learn more at Merkatus.org.
0:16.0	For a full transcript of every conversation, enhanced with helpful links,
0:20.0	visit Conversations with Tyler.com.
0:24.0	Hello everyone and welcome back to Conversations with Tyler.
0:31.0	Today I'm delighted to be speaking with Paul Bloom, who is a professor of psychology at University of Toronto, Emeritus at Yale University.
0:42.0	Paul is also one of North America's best-known public
0:45.6	intellectuals on children, the psychology of children, empathy, human emotions,
0:51.3	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 sub stack which is
1:04.6	excellent small potatoes he is a bit still on Twitter and is more generally a
1:10.9	force of nature. Paul, welcome.
1:14.0	Tyler, it's very nice to talk to you.
1:16.0	I have just some very general questions about psychologists and I'd like to hear your take on it.
1:22.0	And they run along the lines of like,
1:24.2	how much do you people understand anyway?
1:27.4	So your partner, I believe, is a psychologist,
1:29.7	you're a psychologist.
1:31.2	If you're sitting in a restaurant and you're listening to a couple talk at the other table,
1:36.9	do you too feel you understand them better than like too smart and on a psychologist?
1:43.0	No, not in the slightest.
1:45.3	Not in the slightest.
	...

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