Speaker

Paul Bloom

Paul Bloom

Psychologist at the University of Toronto and professor emeritus at Yale, best known as a public intellectual on the science of morality, emotion, and child development. His books include Against Empathy (2016), The Sweet Spot (2021), and Psych: The Story of the Human Mind (2023). He also writes the Substack Small Potatoes.

Bloom’s research career has spanned infant cognition, moral development, and the psychology of pleasure. His Yale lab’s ‘hill scenario’ experiments — showing that nine-month-old infants prefer a character who helps another over one who blocks it — became some of the most-cited evidence for hard-wired moral intuitions. His popular writing has focused on pressing those findings against hard cases: why we enjoy fiction, suffering, and negative emotions; what our moral instincts get wrong; and how reason should interact with feeling in ethical life.

Core positions

Empathy — feeling what another person feels — is, in Bloom’s view, a poor moral guide: parochial, numerically illiterate, and easily exploited by politicians. Compassion, caring without sharing the feeling, is a better tool. He is still more critical of disgust: he regards it as the most morally damaging emotion in the human repertoire, responsible for prejudice against gay people, interracial couples, and immigrants, and he would remove it from public moral life if he could do so without unpredictable side effects. On children, he holds that a great deal of social and moral cognition is present from birth — babies are not blank slates — and that parents should expect sex differences and in-group/out-group psychology to appear early, because they are partly innate. The success of large language models trained on statistical patterns has, in his view, overturned the previously persuasive Chomskyan argument that an innate language module is a logical necessity for language learning.

In the wiki