EVERY SPOKEN WORD
150 min read · 30,322 words- 0:00 – 0:25
Intro
- PBPaul Bloom
... it's not what we think it is. And sometimes when people tell me, you know, "Oh, psychology is just common sense. Tell me something I didn't know." Well, I- I got a list and memory is one thing on the list, where a lot of people think what happens in memory, it's like you hold up your iPhone and it's just recording the world. And also it stays in this hard drive, and then later on through hypnosis or a kind therapist, it could all come out. It's just there. And this is total nonsense.
- CWChris Williamson
What
- 0:25 – 7:42
What Do We Know About Human Consciousness?
- CWChris Williamson
do we actually know about human consciousness? Do we know why it evolved or what its function is?
- PBPaul Bloom
No. We don't know, uh, we don't know why we're conscious as opposed to zombies that are fully functional. We don't know, um, how the brain gives rise to consciousness. We know it is the brain. I mean, the best science tells us that, that, uh, conscious emerges from our very physical brain, but one of the great puzzles in psychology is how does a three-pound piece of meat, bloody meat, gives rise to, you know, love and hate and the feeling of, uh, of a first kiss and slamming your hand in a car door and being on a podcast. Um, there's a lot we do know about consciousness. We know, um, we know how, how it, uh, we know how it works in attention and perception. We, we, we have theories of differences in conscious experience. But the big questions at this point elude us.
- CWChris Williamson
I've heard that one potential explanation for the reason that consciousness comes about is that it's kind of a byproduct of us being able to have quite a complex theory of mind, of other people, that when you have a large social group and I need to be able to predict what Paul thinks-
- PBPaul Bloom
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... about me thinking about that person and what they think about him thinking about me, uh, that you end up having a lot of layers of abstraction, and that basically consciousness is potentially kind of like a side effect, like how a lightbulb gives off light but it also gives off heat.
- PBPaul Bloom
Okay.
- CWChris Williamson
That all of the fancy mental imagery that we get is just kind of, uh, dressing on the side of that.
- PBPaul Bloom
I think it's, it's possible. One issue here is there's two senses of consciousness at least, but two as any people talk about. One is sort of what science, science call access consciousness, which is idea of information being available to us. You can mull it over, you can analyze that, and I think that's really necessary for, for high-level reasoning, for language use, for making sense of, of, um, of what other people are doing. So I'm not right now directly conscious of my blood pressure and heart rate. This is unconscious, this is fine, but I'm conscious that I'm talking to you and I know you, we met before. And the fact that I'm conscious of it means I could talk about it, I could reason about it, and we have good theories of that. The more mysterious thing is what's called phenomenological consciousness, the feel. And some philosophers think you could have one without the other, like we could have, we got to be fully reasoning... And maybe AIs are like this, or will be like this, where they have, or where they're able to reason and make arguments and have a- and, and, and, and understand other people, other... in people. But, um, but the feel of it, the feel of being a person right now, the feel as you're sitting there, the, of, of the seat against your behind, the feeling of i- headphones in your ears. Where does that come from? And that's kind of a m- a mystery. And it may be epiphenomenal of something else, but then you have to explain why is it epiphenomenal of that?
- CWChris Williamson
What do you mean? What's the word epiphenomenal mean?
- PBPaul Bloom
It means, um, that you, you have, um, a certain, something with a certain function and then something else comes as an accident from it. And-
- CWChris Williamson
What would be another epiphenomenon that humans have?
- PBPaul Bloom
The, the, say, one example is there's all sorts of things about blood which are really essential for what blood does, but the fact it's the color red when brought into the light is, is epiphenomenal. It didn't have to be red. It could be green, it could be brown. Doesn't matter. It's just, it's just... there, there, there's no point to it. Um-
- CWChris Williamson
I, I learned the other day that there is, uh, a particular genetic mutation in some Asian people which causes them to have both, I think it's low blood pressure and extra dry ear wax.
- PBPaul Bloom
Ha.
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs) Anything you want to...
- PBPaul Bloom
Yes. So that's-
- CWChris Williamson
Give me the, give me the adaptive reason.
- PBPaul Bloom
So that's another, that's another example. There's some people when they stare into the sun will sneeze. Now, you know-
- CWChris Williamson
What? Why?
- PBPaul Bloom
Yeah. Uh, well, that's a good question. I don't know. There's a story behind it, but the story isn't our ancestors who did this reproduced more than those who didn't.
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- PBPaul Bloom
I mean, I'm, I'm as much of a fan of evolutionary explanations as anybody and, and, and my book is full of them, and, you know, reasonable stories for perception and sexuality and, and reasoning. But, but when it comes to the feel of consciousness, some people say it's as mu- it's, uh, as much of an accident as, a, as, as, uh, the, the sneezing. I don't know. One thing which is kind of cool, which is something I've been getting interested in recently is how our consciousness differs. And, um, so there's people, as you know, synesthesia, whose senses blip over from one to another. So there's a, there's a story of this Russian guy who, um, who when he looks at words, tastes them. And this is so much he can't read the newspaper while he's eating breakfast because it spoils his meal, you know. Um, then there's other people on the other extreme who have things called afantasia, no visual imagery. There's
- NANarrator
(laughs)
- PBPaul Bloom
... a guy on Twitter who said, "I don't..." However, like 30, 40, something like that, way into his adulthood says, "I always thought when people said they have images in their heads, they were just, it was just a metaphor." But, you know, he had none. You close your eyes, nothing. Can't see anything. Can't, can't draw up anything. Um, some people have voices in their heads. I'm not talking about schizophrenics, I'm talking about sort of a narrator, like in these, you know, these comedies or these, these, these movies where there's a narrator, an oral narrator. Some people don't. Maybe we experience pain differently. Maybe we see colors differently. That's kind of cool.
- CWChris Williamson
The fact that we're able to hear a voice in our heads when we think it-... when you think about a interaction that you had with someone, an embarrassing one, or an enjoyable one, or a loving one, or whatever, and that you can hear a sound. But you can't hear the sound, there's no sound being-
- PBPaul Bloom
No.
- CWChris Williamson
... played anywhere.
- PBPaul Bloom
No.
- CWChris Williamson
That, and I think that this may be because my... I've heard that, um, certain people are more image-oriented-
- PBPaul Bloom
Yeah.
- 7:42 – 15:47
The Usefulness of the Human Memory System
- CWChris Williamson
talk in your new book about the system of human memory, and I think that you've just nudged there on one of the ways in which it could be a little bit more fallible. Just how useless of a system is the, uh, human memory construct?
- PBPaul Bloom
The human memory construct is extraordinarily useful. Just, just try getting amnesia and seeing how well it works for you. You know, these disorders where you, you lose your memories of the past or, or these cases like this famous case where people can't form new memories. It's in the excellent movie, Memento, Christopher Nolan's film. This guy can't form new memories. Um, but it's not what we think it is. And sometimes when people tell me, you know, "Oh, psychology is just common sense. Tell me something I didn't know." Well, I, I got a list and, and memory is one thing on the list, where a lot of people think what happens in memory, it's like you, um, you, you, you hold up your, uh, your iPhone, and it's just, it's just, you know, recording the world. And then, and also it stays in this hard drive, and then later on through hypno- hypnosis or a kind therapist, it could all come out. It's just there. And this is total nonsense. Most of what we experience is lost forever. You don't intend to, it just doesn't get in. And then when we recover a memory, when you say, "What happened to you?" "We talked a while ago." "How did that conversation go? Where were you? Where was I? What was said?" In some part, you know, we go back and we... there's a storage system there. But in some part is a reconstruction, you know. If a, if you said to me, um, said to me, "Boy, that was quite a storm the day we talked." And then a week later, you asked me to remember to tell you about the day we talked. You say, I might say, "Yeah, there was a storm, wasn't there?" Because what you tell me fits it, creates the story, and leading questions can create false memories. You know, there's a study. After 9/11, a couple of my colleagues, um, came and they asked people, "Where were you when the, when the planes hit?" And, um, these were obviously a bit older colleagues, yeah. And, uh, and people gave their stories, and then t- they went back and asked them, like, five years later, 10 years later, and the stories are entirely different. We just, we just... Our memories are deeply unreliable.
- CWChris Williamson
I'd heard a broscience rumor that nothing is forgotten, everything is kept, and it is a case of us-
- PBPaul Bloom
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... unlocking that. Are you def-
- PBPaul Bloom
Totally wrong. Totally wrong.
- CWChris Williamson
You're definitively saying that that's horse shit?
- PBPaul Bloom
Horse shit.
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- PBPaul Bloom
There's, it's, it's-
- CWChris Williamson
How do you know it's horse shit?
- PBPaul Bloom
It's horse shit in a couple ways. One way is that some things that ex- that you experience, that you're, they're sort of right in front of your eyes, you don't attend to them. Most of the world you don't attend to. You tend to like a percentage of the world. If you don't attend to it, it's not that gone six months later. It's gone five seconds later. 'Cause you-
- CWChris Williamson
What do you mean when you say, "Attend to it?"
- PBPaul Bloom
So, there's a wonderful experiment done, a classic experiment, people have probably heard of it before, where you wi- you're gonna watch a film and, um, and you get the... There's gonna be people wearing different color T-shirts and tossing basketballs back and forth. And you're gonna ask them, "At the end of the film, how many basketballs are tossed? How many times was there a toss?" And you'll say, "Oh, was it 18? Was it 17?" That's not what the study's about. The trick is that in the film, somebody with a gorilla suit walks into the middle, pounds his chest, and walks out, and people don't notice even though it was in front of their faces. And, and because their attention is drawn one way, the rest of the world is invisible to them. In fact, it became to a book called Invisible Gorilla summarized by, by, uh, Dan Simons and Chris Chabris. And you're not gonna remember the gorilla 'cause you didn't attend to it. If you don't focus on something, it's gone. So, that's one way it's horse shit. The second way is there's just no evidence for this sort of perfect recording. People... The reason why there's this, I guess, broscience thing has come up is you kind of feel that way. You feel, "Oh, my God, I have photographic memory. I remember exactly what it is. I can recreate it exactly." And people have memories that are, are confident and powerful and genuine and false. So, and, and I think we, we mistake the confidence for the reality.
- CWChris Williamson
And this-
- PBPaul Bloom
And this, by the way, this, by the way... So much of my book is sort of theoretical stuff, which I think is really cool, but, but not of much practical value. This has practical value 'cause of eyewitness testimony.... somebody, somebody sits on a, on a, on a witness stand and says, "That was the man who attacked me." And they point to somebody. And juries hear this and say, "Wow, wow, that's, that's sincere. It can't, that can't be wrong, the person's so confident." People are confident. Then you do a DNA test or you check back and the person didn't do it. And so now, we have a better understanding of the weakness of eyewitness testimony. We're particularly bad when it comes to other races, recognizing and remembering their faces. And, and, you know, so there's a practical value in knowing this.
- CWChris Williamson
I remember learning, before I even started this show, about a study that was done on babies when they were young, being shown different images of sheep.
- PBPaul Bloom
(laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
And what the babies would do, because they hadn't learned to condense together all sheep faces into-
- PBPaul Bloom
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... just a sheep, that they s- were paying more attention because they could see that's one sheep, that's another sheep, but a different sheep, that's a third sheep-
- PBPaul Bloom
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... different to the first two. Whereas, and I think it was maybe around age either six months to a year or so, that they lose that ability, presumably the same way that I always heard that we can wiggle our ears, but because the muscles don't get used, they atrophy away.
- PBPaul Bloom
I didn't know that.
- CWChris Williamson
I h- I heard-
- PBPaul Bloom
That's very cool.
- CWChris Williamson
... uh, I might be just spouting total bro science at you today.
- PBPaul Bloom
(laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
Um, I heard that that is a similar system that's online as to the reason as to why we struggle more so with different races to be able to pick their faces apart. Do you think that that sounds accurate?
- PBPaul Bloom
It might be. Um, you, you can use, in some ways, babies are the perfect, you know, amateurs. They, they, they don't have experience in anything, while we are, who are amateur in some way versus other ways. Um, uh, sort of, so, so the story for adult... I'll tell you the story for adults and you can tell me if it connects to the baby story. The story for adults is it, it's... The race effect has nothing to do with your own race. It's just who you had the most experience with. So if I, if I see 10,000 white faces and I regularly have to distinguish them more or less, maybe from like a hundred of them, I get very attuned to small differences. Just like, just like if, if you're really into, um, I don't know, um, classic rock. You'll distinguish this Pink Floyd song from that Pink Floyd song, this Zeppelin song, that Zeppelin song. But if you don't have much experience or interest in something, it all blurs together. "Oh, that's more classical." You know? Or, "That's another Asian face, that's another Black face." I can't pull them apart. And so it's a matter of sort of discrimination with expertise. And their faces are just like songs, they're just like foods, they're just like wines. Um, when you zoom in on something, you get better at it, but then when you're in a sort of separate domain you're not used to, you get worse at it. Does that sound like the baby thing? Yeah.
- 15:47 – 21:22
Does Our Tribal Nature Make Us Racist?
- PBPaul Bloom
- CWChris Williamson
When it comes to our biases that are, uh, trained heavily, seems slightly less in-built, uh, humans are incredibly tribal.
- PBPaul Bloom
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
Do you think that we have a predisposition to a small amount of racism in all of us?
- PBPaul Bloom
I think tribal is a great word here. Racism carries some extra baggage. So I, I wanna be conscious-
- CWChris Williamson
Does it? I've not, I've not, no, I've never noticed that racism carries a little bit of extra baggage before. (laughs)
- PBPaul Bloom
Well, you've, you've heard it, you've heard it before. Have you heard it as a fraud issue?
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- PBPaul Bloom
I, they're like, "You're, you're not of this country, are you?" So it's not... (laughs) It's, um, no, um, so yeah. Uh-
- CWChris Williamson
Tribal.
- PBPaul Bloom
Fr-
- CWChris Williamson
Are humans predisposed to be tribal?
- PBPaul Bloom
I've, I've written about this, and people have summarized it. There was a Gawker headline, "Babies are a Little Racist." It's not quite true. And in fact, it's not quite true in an interesting way. We're very tribal. But here's a cool finding from the babies, from the baby work and toddler work. Babies show strong preferences very early on, age one, age two, age three, into who to interact with, who to take a toy from, who to accept food from. And they've done these experiments where babies, I wanna say a white baby, is given something by a white person or Black person and they have to choose. And the cool finding is, up to a certain point, they don't care about color. They recognize color, they notice color, they have a preference sometimes to look. They just don't care about it. They care deeply about language.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- PBPaul Bloom
So... And it's not just... Y- you see how a baby raised in the States, they have, um, a, a Black person speaking English offering them a toy, and a white person speaking French, uh, offering them a toy. They'll choose it from the Black person speaking English.
- CWChris Williamson
Fuck the French. Fuck the French.
- PBPaul Bloom
(laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
That's what they're saying.
- PBPaul Bloom
It's not specific to the French.
- CWChris Williamson
We're not racist again-
- PBPaul Bloom
(laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
We're not racist against anybody except for the French.
- PBPaul Bloom
Y- you're taking this too, too, uh, too literally.
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- PBPaul Bloom
But yes, yes, they hate the French. There we go. That's what I want people to take from my book.
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- PBPaul Bloom
When they... You know, I will say something actually pro-French, which is, they did a study a while ago where, um, where they exposed babies born in France to, um, to either French or Russian. And babies preferred to listen to French. So they concluded in this, in this... Uh, this is, this is a story I heard from the researchers. It may or may not be true. But they concluded, well, you like to listen to the language you were exposed to early on. The, the, the rhythms resonate through the womb and everything like that. And then some reviewers said, "What if French just sounds better, period?"... for everybody. So they had to go do this study in Russia, and then they found Russian kids preferred Russian to French. So it's not that there's a universal preference for French.
- CWChris Williamson
Ah.
- PBPaul Bloom
But the very idea somebody would, would say that is just a bit of pro-French to respond to your anti-French.
- CWChris Williamson
Right, rightly so. That's fine. We've balanced it out. The French people are still listening. Um, I also was, uh, looking at a study from, uh, who is the guy that wrote this psychopath book? British dude that lives in Australia.
- 21:22 – 25:57
How to Improve Attention
- CWChris Williamson
Just rounding out that conversation about memory, what does it suggest about our, um, what we should do, uh, uh, how our attention system works, what people should do if they feel bad about their memory and remembering things, that stuff that isn't attended to is so easily forgotten?
- PBPaul Bloom
Yeah. Yeah. Um, nothing. You're kind of stuck to it. The, the funnel of attention is very limited. So I mean, it would be maybe a bit of concrete advice, or a couple of bit of concrete advice, pieces of concrete advice. One is you could choose what to attend to. But if you want to remember what people wear when you talk to them, focus on what they wear. But to tell you the truth, you ha- you can't expect it to get into the system without making it through the sort of, the sort of bottleneck of attention. So you need to, you need to attend. And people who are skilled at that sort of thing, like, um, in some way radiologists who are looking for signs of cancer or air traffic controllers monitoring trajectory, you know, a lot of their training is what do you attend to. You know? If you put somebody who does, who never played football, um, and, and, and, and they're all of a sudden they're playing a game of football, they don't know where to look. They don't know this counts and that counts, you know. They're looking at people's hairstyles, they're looking at, you know, watching the, the, the ice cream truck roll by. You know, there's certain thing... Part of becoming experts on it is knowing what to attend to. Now, putting that aside, there are memory techniques. Um, when I taught my intro psych course, I had, uh, uh, Joshua Foer come in and give a guest lecture. He wanted... He's a writer. He wrote a book called Moonwalking with Einstein where he outlays the sort, the, the historical, the classical memory techniques where you basically got to make vivid associations between things. And, you know, with a couple of hours of training, you could learn to do really powerful tricks of memory. But here's the thing, and he gave me permission to tell this story, which I tell in my book. He, he, he gives this bang up lecture in my class about memory techniques, students love it. Um, I get an email from him, um, like a couple of hours later saying, "Uh, dude, I left my phone in the class." (laughs) 'Cause he doesn't have good normal memory. That sort of stuff you can't train.
- CWChris Williamson
Wow. Yeah. I, um, I have a bunch of friends who were medical students, Anki, Ebbinghaus forgetting curve, spaced repetition-
- PBPaul Bloom
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... all of that. Uh, Peter C. Brown that wrote Make It Stick was, like, episode 20 on the show, I think, and, um, yet we do things like leave our keys-
- PBPaul Bloom
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... and-
- PBPaul Bloom
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... m- meet someone and as they are telling us their name, forget the name. Forget the first half of the name as they speak the second half of the name because our mind is just somewhere else.
- PBPaul Bloom
Yes. Yeah. And they're right. And that's actually a really good example which is, which is you want to remember people's names, you gotta make a freaking effort, you know?
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah.
- PBPaul Bloom
... Chris. And then I sort of, I see your f- And there's all these techniques which sound ridic- I see your face and I imagine the sea around or something. I don't know. But, but, which I'm, I'm horrible at that. But, um, names you could use techniques, faces are tougher and that's actually a huge, enormous difference. Are you good with faces?
- CWChris Williamson
Mm, not bad. As a, uh, club promoter for a long time that was something that was pretty good for me. But what's worse is being good with faces and bad with names, because what the fuck does it mean to be good with faces? Like, I've met this person before, which is even more awkward for you to say... Well, I suppose it mediates you going-
- PBPaul Bloom
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... "Hi, nice to meet you," and they say, "Oh, we've already met," but it's only half a step away from, "Hi, we've, I know we've already met and I forgot your name."
- PBPaul Bloom
I am so, so bad at both faces and names. I have said, "Good to see you," in the hopes that it's ambiguous between meeting them for the first time and, and meeting them and having met them before.
- CWChris Williamson
Oh, you're hedging your bets. You're, you're-
- PBPaul Bloom
I'm hedging my bets.
- CWChris Williamson
Very interesting.
- PBPaul Bloom
Because if they, if they say... Well, okay, so true story. When I was at Yale we had a party for incoming graduate students, uh, to try to lure them into, into coming to the program. We had a party at our house and I go up to somebody and I say, you know, "Hi, it's really, uh, it's, it's really nice to meet you. Welcome to the..." And they stare at me and says, "I've been in a graduate program for three years here."
- CWChris Williamson
Oh.
- PBPaul Bloom
And since, since, and you know, it's, let's, and it's not... I don't know. There's just enormous variation. We have to forgive, forgive w- each other, and mostly me, for, for things out of our control.
- CWChris Williamson
Okay.
- PBPaul Bloom
And being bad at faces is a thing.
- CWChris Williamson
I know very little about Freud.
- 25:57 – 35:51
Should Freud Be Taken Seriously in 2023?
- CWChris Williamson
My, um, completely self-taught psychology experience has almost exclusively missed out-
- PBPaul Bloom
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... everything that he did. How much of him should anybody be taking seriously now in 2023?
- PBPaul Bloom
So first, I bet you know more about Freud than, than, than you think you do, because Freud has sort of trickled into modern culture. So, if you've ever heard somebody say to somebody else, you know, you know, "Look, I'm not your mother," or, "He has an anal personality," or, you know, uh, something like that, these are Freudian ideas. I don't think you need to know anything specific about Freud's theory because for the most part it's wrong. The, the details, the oral stage, the anal stage, the phallic stage-
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- PBPaul Bloom
... the oedipal complex, the primal scene. The idea that for every kid the most pivotal moment of their life is when they see their parents having sex or fantasize about it. It's, a lot is just, just nonsense. It's just like-
- CWChris Williamson
You think a lot of this was just projection from him?
- PBPaul Bloom
No, I think that's... There, there's... He was actually, I think a, a, f- He was not a nice man. Uh, he, he was vicious to his enemies and sometimes to his friends and he was ruthless in his pursuits. He was pretty, seems psychologically normal in many ways, um, I do think he was a genius, really wonderful writer, brilliant scholar. What, what it was, was very much of a construction of his time which was extraordinarily repressed about sex. And, um, and people really did come in with bizarre hysterical symptoms, for instance, that may well have been rooted to sexual repression. Um, there were issues of he struggled his whole career making sense of stories of, of sexual abuse that women told him. At one point believing they were real and then, then they, and then later on saying that they were, they were fantasies by these women and struggling with that. But wherever his views came from, they have not stood the test of time, with the exception of the most important thing at all, of all, which is Freud championed more than anybody else the idea that we have a dynamic unconscious. That, um, what we think and what we do, who we f- who we fall in love with, who we vote for, who we hate, when we make mistakes, when we miss an appointment we were set up to do, um, he would view all of this as generated by factors that are not conscious to us, that we're not aware of. And this idea, he wasn't the first but he was the one who developed it most, this idea, I think, is right. Like, sometimes I do political psychology or moral psychology and people say, you know, "We're really interested in why people vote, voted for Trump, or why other people voted for Biden." Well, you're not gonna find out by just asking them, because it's not that they lie to you, though they'll do that too, it's that they don't know. We don't know.
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- PBPaul Bloom
You, you know, we tell narratives. I could say, "So you have a very popular podcast. How did you get into it? What made you da, da, da?" And you'll have a story. That's what we do, we have stories. Is your story true? Probably not. Probably the answer to a lot of this stuff is stuff you're not aware of. And Freud was the first to sort of make such a thing about it, and there he was right. There's like a thousand, a million psychology studies that support the idea we're driven by the unconscious. That's all you need to know about Freud.
- CWChris Williamson
That suggests something that I meant to say earlier on about the eyewitness. So, uh, the eyewitness erroneously points the finger at Paul and said, "It's him. It's him that forgot my name and stole my lunch." And, uh, then, uh, the DNA evidence of her lunch box shows that it wasn't you, it was me, and everybody then points at the eyewitness and says, "Willful deception. She was trying to pin it on-"
- PBPaul Bloom
Yes.
- CWChris Williamson
... "Paul because she had a thing." And you go, no, no, no, no, no. It is possible for you to fully believe what it is that you're saying. Like, the way that the memory system works allows you the, the... The best way to deceive someone you're trying to deceive is to believe it yourself.
- PBPaul Bloom
Yes. I mean, that gets in, that gets us into an really other, an- another interesting topic which very much dovetails on, on Freud which is, why are some things unconscious in the first place? And the standard story is, well, consciousness is limited, you know. If- Unless somebody needs to be conscious, better to keep it out of, out of the system. So this is why we're not conscious of our blood pressure, we're not conscious of our, of, of our, our body temperature, uh, our heart rate. We can infer them from other things but we don't have direct access to them, and maybe this is true for all sorts of things. You're not conscious of all these systems going on in your head-... but the great evolutionary theorist, Robert Trivers, who's still around, suggested that there's another reason why somebody might be con- unconscious. And this is your reason, which is deception. Which is sometimes, um, the best way to fool somebody else is to fool yourself. So, um, imagine, so take confrontations. You know, I'm in a confronta- physical confrontation with somebody and everything. And, and I wanna, I all of a sudden, you know, wanna act like I w- you know, "I will not back down. I will kill you if come any closer. I'm gonna..." I'm fearless. And I believe it myself, even though I'm not. But to convince the other person, which is what I'm really after, what the sys- how, what the system works is, it's really good to believe in yourself. And the other example is falling in love. Where sometimes the system, what's the best way to convince somebody you're head over heels in love with them? You'll never leave them. You're totally into them. Well, to believe it. And having ulterior motives, like a sort of one, "Well, if this doesn't work out, I have plan B." Having that not available to your consciousness is a wonderful way to deceive other people.
- CWChris Williamson
One of the interesting things about the love example is, I actually don't know what the difference is between believing that you're in love with somebody and being in love with somebody. In the eyewitness example, we have a real world-
- PBPaul Bloom
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... and then we have, uh, uh, an experience, and we can compare those two, right? The DNA on the lunchbox. In this scenario, I, I don't know what it would mean for your mind to... Uh, uh, uh, for my mind to kid me that I'm in love with you when I'm not.
- PBPaul Bloom
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
I, I don't know how that would differ.
- PBPaul Bloom
In a lot of ways, it would overlap, and it's hard to see the believing you're in love with somebody and the being in love with somebody pulling apart too much. But you could imagine that you believe it, but at another level, you're constantly hedging, and that there's, there's a caution to it. Imagine, um, imagine you're getting... (laughs) You're about to, you're about to bond with somebody and say, "I'll never leave you," and what you... And you believe it totally, and then all of a sudden, you know, a part of your head clicks, "Let's get a prenup." Where did that come from? And the fact that that comes to mind maybe suggests that you really don't... That there's part of your head that's kind of looking towards other things. I mean, one of the findings which I kinda like, it's just kinda sweet, is you ask people who are about to be married, "What are the odds of you getting divorced?" And they'll often say, "Zero, 1%, 2%, tiny." "What are the odds of somebody else getting divorced?" "Eh, 50%, 60%. I don't even know."
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- PBPaul Bloom
"But not me." And, you see, that's kinda nice. It's kind of supporting what you're saying. That, that sort of over-optimism is part and parcel of, of, of what it is to be i- in love. You know, if you really thought it was 50%, that's not a good sign, even though that's what the... That, that sort of cold-blooded, uh, uh, math says. But I wonder if at some level you believe it, but you don't believe it. At some level, we hedge these things.
- CWChris Williamson
What do you think intuition is?
- PBPaul Bloom
So, there's many answers to that. I li- here's an answer which I like. It's from Danny Kahneman, who won the Nobel Prize and, and, and talks about two systems of the mind. One, called System 2, is the rational, deliberative system. I think this is extremely important. I think it's what separates us from other creatures, where we, we plan, we, we do cost-benefit analyses. The other one is the system in our gut. Our gut works, metaphorically our gut, fast, intuitive, quick. Um, our System 2 could be egalitarian. Our System 1's almost always racist. Our System 2 can do the math. Our System 1 goes with whatever option's there. I think System 1's the gut. And we have System 1 for a reason. It's really fr- Sometimes we need to move quickly. Sometimes the statistics are the way to go, you don't want it working its way through. But despite what some people say, it's not always right, and sometimes you wanna distrust your gut. I was once asked for a while if I would, um, would put up a billboard that could say anything, what would I say? And I, I, after a while, I, would, said, "Don't listen to your heart." And I think our, our heart, our gut feelings often are, have, are right within a narrow range, but let us down for a lot of things.
- CWChris Williamson
What's a better approach, then?
- PBPaul Bloom
Deliberation. Rational deliberation. With the help of others, because, because we're really kind of sometimes awful deliberators. When I make a decision and I start thinking about it, I'm often thinking, "Well, let's explore all the ways in which I'm right." But if you have good friends, you talk about it and you say, "Well, I'm thinking of, you know, of leaving this person. I'm thinking of, of getting a new job. I'm thinking of moving here, and I'm really enthusiastic about it." And then your friends will say, "Well, let's, let's, let's work this out." And, and I think that that's sort of... If you, if you have the time, if you ha- If you have more than, like, 10 seconds to act, you have some time, deliberate, and it's like, it's like science. It's like, it's like politics at its best. It's like culture, where smart people with different views getting together can bring you way more than you can as an individual.
- 35:51 – 39:00
How to Find a Balance Between Thoughts & Body
- PBPaul Bloom
- CWChris Williamson
I wonder whether I'm seeing a trend at the moment of people being too deliberate with their decision-making. Uh, I think maybe, maybe I'm wrong, but, uh, uh, certainly a lot of my friends out here in Austin, I think, uh, could actually do with a little bit more intuition, could actually do with letting go of some of the deliberate cerebral cognitive horsepower that they're applying to some of th- the decisions that they go through, and that they're, uh, moving more slowly, that they're vacillating, they're talking themselves into and out of decisions that are bad and good for them. Um, and I wonder whether... I don't know. I mean, this is me totally bro science-ing again here-
- PBPaul Bloom
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... but, um...... a lack of embodied practice, a lack of movement, time outside, where you're not just doing the thinking thing. More people have got knowledge worker jobs than ever before. Uh, and also, for the first time in history, your opinions are more important than your deeds now. You know, it's, it's not really about what you do, it's about the takes that you have. And I wonder whether that is causing people to self-identify with their thoughts more than with their, uh, feelings and body.
- PBPaul Bloom
Yeah. So I'm, I'm a, a pro-rational guy, and I've, I've sort of like ... so I'm, I'm inclined to, to, like, disagree with you on that. But I'll give you two reasons why I think you're right, or two cases where you're right. One is, for certain things, um, you don't wanna deliberate. You wanna go with your gut and everything. An obvious example is if you're a really good tennis player. Just return the backhand. Don't sit down, and think about it, and make a diagram or anything. It'll mess you up. And in fact, for, for, for really good athletes, thinking about it kills them. Thinking about it has led to people's careers being destroyed, where all of a sudden they said, you know, "What is it like to catch a fly ball?" You know, "What do you know? How does it feel to throw a punch? Is this the right way? Is it this way? Is it this..." And you're, you're, you're gone, 'cause you have to let the body do it, let the gut system do it. And some things are probably like that. For people, if you're good, if you're socially adept, and someone says something at a party, you know, maybe some repartee, or maybe an argument, go ... Your, your, your gut is better, is statistically better than the rational system. That's one ca- ... Another case is, I think our intelligence, when employed properly, could bring us to places that our gut never can. And I think it really is how to handle good, good choices. I don't think you should decide to get married in a split second. I don't think you should quit your job because you're just really in the mood to do that. But sometimes, and you actually said this, our rational system, all it is, is, uh, um, it defends your initial gut feeling. Jonathan Haidt has this, this, this line where ... I disagree with him in general on this, but I think he's quite wise to point it out a possibility, which is sometimes our deliberating minds are like lawyers, not like judges. So it's not like ... It's ... A judge balance- ... A good judge balances things and make a decision. A lawyer takes something and makes a case for it. And if that's what your rationality is being used for, do less of it.
- CWChris Williamson
At the other end of the spectrum to Freud would be Skinner and his
- 39:00 – 47:26
Why Behaviourism Theory Has Become So Unpopular
- CWChris Williamson
behaviorism. He also seems to have become a little bit, or quite a lot less popular recently. What, what's ... Why has behaviorism-
- PBPaul Bloom
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... been sort of thrown away? I thought that was pretty locked up.
- PBPaul Bloom
It's deservedly so. So I have a lot of love for Freud. I have no love for Skinner. I met him once though, when he was old. He gave a talk. He was a ... You know, he had an enormous influence on psychology, and his insight was these ... It was developing ... He wasn't the first to develop it, but bui- building on this theory of basic learning mechanisms, classical conditioning, sort of Pavlov thing. You know, you hear a dentist drilling, "Wee," and you flinch. You know, you see a commercial for some delicious food, and your mouth waters. But also operant conditioning, rewards and punishment. It's how we train animals. It's very useful. But Skinner was ve- ... Skinner was in some way, I'll put this in the most offensive way possible, led a strange cult where you could only look at what people did and their, their inputs, and you can't talk about their internal states. Some behaviorists would say, "This is not scientific to talk about memories, or beliefs, or desires, dreams, ambitions." Others would say, "These things don't exist at all." We j- ... We're just behaviors. Every-
- CWChris Williamson
It's just-
- PBPaul Bloom
Nothing else.
- CWChris Williamson
... input, response.
- PBPaul Bloom
Input and output.
- CWChris Williamson
Yep.
- PBPaul Bloom
There's a joke about, um, two behaviorists at a conference ha- ... Uh, they have sex, and one of them says to the other one, "Was it good for me?" And the idea is-
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- PBPaul Bloom
... uh, to explain the joke, there's no such thing as monitoring your own states. All you got is your, is your behavior. Um, and that's so weird. Of course, whatever my complaints are with the AI movement, they get something really important right, which is that, that you can't explain and program complex behavior without putting a lot of machinery inside. Statistical analyses, I think also rules, memory bases, and so on. And, you know, Skinner thought this was all unscientific. I think the fact the existence of computers has shown that building machines with stuff inside, and trying to explain the stuff inside, is how you do good science of intelligent behavior, and it's how psychologists do their stuff.
- CWChris Williamson
Are we losing something by casting off the insights of behaviorism in the modern world?
- PBPaul Bloom
It's a good question. Um, I, I, I, I think sometimes Skinner gets it right. Um, (laughs) the time I think about Skinner the most ... So Skinner was, uh ... One of his nice ideas was that of intermittent reinforcement. An the idea is, if I wanna make you learn to do something quickly, I'll reinforce you every time. The you could be a you. It could also be a rat or a pigeon. I'll reinforce you every time. But suppose I want you to do something forever, I want you to stick with it, then I randomly reinforce you rarely, and then, and then you start getting in the behavior. And because you don't expect a reward every time, it's always coming up next, you can't stop yourself. I've never been tempted by slot machines, which was Skinner's favorite example. But like a lot of people, social media gets me. And, uh, and you know, so 3:00 in the morning, I wake up, I decide, "Isn't it a great idea to check my phone and check Twitter?" Just it's a perfect, brilliant idea. So, so, and then I spend an, an hour flicking with my finger, "Uh, oh, that's nice. Huh." You know? And then this intermittent reinforcement, and I'm like, I'm like a rat in Skinner's cage. And so much of the sort of addictive techniques that people on Facebook and Twitter use are straight-up Skinner.... so, you know, w- I'm not a fan, but we ignore them at our own peril.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah, interesting. Do you know Diana Fleischman-
- PBPaul Bloom
Yes. I don't know her personally-
- CWChris Williamson
... evolutionary psychology, leading edge?
- PBPaul Bloom
... but I like her work.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah, she's got a book coming out called How to Train Your Boyfriend.
- PBPaul Bloom
(laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
And she's, uh, I think she's terming it, eh, Evolutionary Behaviorism, that she's trying to use EP to inform, uh, that back and forth that you, that you do have. And I, I, you know, Peterson's touched on this a little bit where he says, you know, if your partner does something that you want them to keep on doing, make sure that you remember to praise them about it. That's not exactly rats in a cage. That just feels a little bit more like not being a shit human. But-
- PBPaul Bloom
Yeah. And people... So, so there is an insight there, but people are complicated in a way. So, suppose you want your kid to read. Let's take it away from that more interesting domain of sex, and let's get boring here. You want your kid to read. So what's gonna... We'll give him, every time he reads a book, give him 20 bucks. Certain age, give us a lot of money 'cause, "Oh my gosh, this is great." Um, and he'll read books. Um, but the argument against this is his ultimate view will be books don't have any intrinsic value. Like a rat's never gonna think this. A rat's gonna, gonna, gonna bang away at, at whatever you, you put in front of him. Go down, shoot down a maze for the reward. It will never think, "Going down this maze is kind of futile. It's just for, it's just for the reward, has no intrinsic..." Right? But people will do that. People will do that. And, you know, imagine, imagine for, for either of us getting some sort of monetary award for doing something. You might do it if the money's big enough, but you, but the minute the money goes away, you'll stop. Sometimes for people, it's almost the opposite where the way to get people to value something, very anti-Freud, sorry, anti-Skinner, is to, is to get them to pay for it. So, so therapists say with some justification, if the clients don't pay, they don't take this seriously. Um-
- CWChris Williamson
Commitment bias.
- PBPaul Bloom
Exactly. Exactly. Uh, politicians like volunteers. Now they like volunteers that are cheaper, but they also like volunteers 'cause after you volunteer for a politician, you, you think, "Oh my God, I'm really believe in this." While if they're doing it for $50,000 a month, they think of doing it for money. Who cares about the politician? So this is a way in which operant conditioning, the logic of it, I'm not sure you want to reinforce your boyfriend for something, um, if you want him to do that thing, uh, when a reinforcement goes away.
- CWChris Williamson
Interesting. That'll be very, very fascinating. I, I, I, I totally understand what you mean. There's always these stories about, um, parents trying to use reverse psychology on kids to get them to want to eat vegetables.
- PBPaul Bloom
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
Like, "Oh, unless you're good, you won't get any vegetables."
- PBPaul Bloom
That's right.
- CWChris Williamson
And then have you seen, have you ever looked at any of this stuff? Is that legit? Does it work?
- PBPaul Bloom
Um, nothing works. (laughs)
- 47:26 – 51:56
How Much Do Babies & Dogs Actually Know?
- PBPaul Bloom
- CWChris Williamson
When it comes to development, we talked about babies and stuff earlier on, have you got any idea how much babies actually know?
- PBPaul Bloom
Yeah. That's one of the, that's one of the great discoveries of psychology. I've been lucky enough to, to be acquainted with, work with some people who really m- m- made these, these great discoveries, like Elizabeth Spelke at Harvard, for instance. Um, babies know surprisingly a lot about the world. By the time they hit about their first birthday, you could test in subtle ways and you find they understand the physical world. They under- they know ... they could reason about gravity. They understand when an object goes out of sight, it still remains. They reason about how things move by contact. They also understand the social world. They know that if one person helps another person, the person who's helped will later go back to that person, uh, who helped them. They know that if one person's messes with another person, the person who got messed with will avoid that first person or sometimes attack them. And you have these, these incredible research programs showing that very early on, we seem to be hardwired with some rich understanding of the world. So people like Plato and Kant and Chomsky, I think are been, been vindicated by the science of developmental psychology. And the idea that the, the mind is a blank slate has been proven to be wrong.
- CWChris Williamson
What do you mean, pre-programmed?
- PBPaul Bloom
It means that just like every other animal starts with certain instincts about the world, some basic understanding of the world, to varying degrees, maybe they already know how to communicate, maybe they already know how to move around, um, we're no exception. So, we come in the world, in some ways, tremendously behaviorally helpless. Babies are extraordinarily vulnerable for a long period of time. And then there's again an argument that this is because you need a long period of time for development because we're such s- social, cultural creatures. There's an enormous period of helplessness, and then an enormous period of waiting before sexual maturity, just to get the system all up to speed, just to do the- the- the- the learning that has to be done. But in addition to the capacity to learn, I think evolution has wired up, us up with a pre-programmed understanding of the world. Some things don't have to be learned.
- CWChris Williamson
Wow. I, so, (clears throat) I was thinking about this before. I w- walking around the park that's next to where I live, and I saw a dog and it does its business and then it does that back leg flicking thing-
- PBPaul Bloom
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... which d- I mean, it just, it- it wasn't even phrasing in the right direction. It was pointless.
- PBPaul Bloom
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
But I always wonder who taught the dog to do that?
- PBPaul Bloom
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
Did the dog learn... Did it watch other dogs? Is it a- a reflex, like putting your hand on a hot stove?
- PBPaul Bloom
For a lot of the behaviors of animals including really complicated behaviors, more complicated than that, um, I think they're just born with it. Now, animals differ. Some animals pop out and they're basically adults. They're basically... They know everything. Other animals, there's a long period of learning. And for other animals, it's kind of a compromise. So, bird song, for instance, is partially innate. But then depending on the community of birds you raised them, it will all... There's a bit of learning, like- like learning English versus French versus Korean, or whatever. Um, I think for humans, there probably are not that many, um, inborn behaviors. A few. You take a baby, you take its hand, you put your hand, the baby will grip. Stuff like that, which you... We were once, we were once, uh, you know, hairy animals that... Or, and there's a bit of a, of a connection with that. So, we have so- few behaviors like that, but I think most of the stuff is just pre-wired understanding of the world.
- CWChris Williamson
You know what my favorite thing, uh, uh, effect that we have that's vestigially carried over from our time as primates, I learned this from Robin Dunbar, and, uh, it's the stroke response that you get.
- PBPaul Bloom
Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
And there is a maximum and a minimum speed that your finger needs to move across something. It's around about three centimeters per second, is the optimal speed. And any quicker than about three centimeters per second, you don't get the same area of the brain lighting up, because-
- PBPaul Bloom
Okay.
- CWChris Williamson
... quicker than three centimeters per second wouldn't be fast enough for you to be able to pick little bits of whatever it is out of fur, and they look and they've done the same thing whilst doing their primatology work, and it's exactly the same. I really-
- PBPaul Bloom
That's great. I had-
- CWChris Williamson
... really, really love that.
- PBPaul Bloom
... I hadn't heard that.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah, that's in his new one, Friends. Uh, I did this book, Friends,
- 51:56 – 57:10
Relationship Between Language & Thought
- CWChris Williamson
really great. So, you mentioned there about language, something that you touch on in your new one. What's the relationship between language and thought? I had this, um, lesson that I learned a little while ago, I think it's, uh, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and he says, "The limits of my language mean the limits of my world." And I'd taken that to mean that a richer vocabulary means a richer life. That basically the more precisely that I can describe the things that have occurred-
- PBPaul Bloom
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... using the best kind of language, the richer I get to experience it. How much bro-science horse shit if I used that?
- PBPaul Bloom
No, um, there's some claims of relationship between language and thought which I think are deep and important and true. Like, you know, we could use language to convey our thoughts, which is what we're doing now. We could use... We could... To some extent, um, the language we have reflects our thoughts. Um, you know, the simple example is by John McWhorter where he points out that, um, that so many of our obscenities have to do with God and damnation and sex. And universally, because these are universally taboo and serious things. A deeper connection is that language, like, language like English uses the same expressions for- for space and time, you know. "I put the coin in my pocket." Uh, "I'll do it in an hour." So, you know, we got a spatial thing right there. Languages all over, uh, work on that model, suggesting that there's a deep relationship between space and time in how we think, and this gets conveyed by language. What isn't true, or what doesn't seem to be true, is the claim that the specific language you learn affects how you think. It's a very popular idea, um, that, you know, people who learn a language like Navajo, which might have a different time system, will think differently from, about time. People learn English versus French versus Korean versus Urdu versus whatever, um, will think differently about the world because of the structure of their language. And it turns out that whenever people look at it, it doesn't seem to be true. It d- it seems to be that langu- that language, languages all around the world, um, have the same sort of communicative power, and don't seem- seem to reflect what we think, but don't seem so much to shape what we think.
- CWChris Williamson
Given that a lot of the time people think in words-
- PBPaul Bloom
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... and the words that they think in are in the language that they're in, what does the fact that the language that you speak doesn't seem to impact the things that you think-
- PBPaul Bloom
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... mean? How do we square this circle?
- PBPaul Bloom
I think what's really interesting is, and this brings us back to what we were talking about before, we have a feeling we think in words, but we really can't in a way. So, suppose you think, you know, "I'm gonna go play baseball 'cause I gotta go and buy a bat." Well, the English word bat is ambiguous between, you know, the baseball bat and the flying animal. But your thought isn't ambiguous.... you know, linguists like, uh, linguists like the, the ambiguous sentence, visiting relatives can be boring, which is ambiguous. It could mean when they visit you it's boring, or when you visit them it's boring. But it's not a... there's no ambiguity when you think. So, the idea we think in English is, I think, to some extent, the fact that you do your thinking and you kind of have a shadow impression of English words that go with it. But, but you don't really think in English in the same sense.
- CWChris Williamson
That's interesting.
- PBPaul Bloom
You, you look unconvinced.
- CWChris Williamson
I just... it's... I'm try- I'm trying to s- I'm trying to work out... I've, I don't speak another language. I don't know whether you do, but I, I only speak English. Uh, and I've heard about people who speak other languages sometimes dream in different languages.
- PBPaul Bloom
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
Uh, and that there's... I forget. I saved a Psychology Today article that I, I... uh, the other week about this. Something to do with the people who dream in different languages, it, it has some, some kind of downstream psychological effect on them. Um, I just can't work out how. I'm so language-heavy when it comes to my thought.
- PBPaul Bloom
Yeah. Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
I c- I can't get myself outside of what, to me, feel like the thermodynamics of thinking.
- PBPaul Bloom
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
You know?
- PBPaul Bloom
Yeah. So, there's this, there is a tight band between language and thought, but here's how it would go. If you were also fluent in Japanese, maybe you'd get to think in Japanese, but your thoughts wouldn't change. I mean, I don't wanna overstate it. Sometimes languages have a flavor to them, in a sense that if you were raised in Italy, learned English as a second language, sometimes thinking and talking in, in Italian will bring back certain memories and feelings of the past, while English will get you in sort of another mode. You know, we do, we do pick up associations. But the mental life of somebody who thinks in Japanese is not different from the mental life of somebody who speaks English.
- CWChris Williamson
Good. Yes. I like that.
- PBPaul Bloom
If it, if it, if it, if it, if it was, it would be a lot different than, than what it is. I mean-
- CWChris Williamson
Each language would essentially be a different sort of species in a, in a-
- PBPaul Bloom
Exactly.
- CWChris Williamson
... psychological sense. Right, yes.
- PBPaul Bloom
Exactly.
- CWChris Williamson
That makes sense. Yes. I understand. You got it. Nailed
- 57:10 – 1:02:34
Biggest Differences Between Male & Female Psychology
- CWChris Williamson
it. Right. What are the biggest differences between male and female psychology?
- PBPaul Bloom
(laughs) Um, we're gonna have a lightning round feel to it. Um, the biggest difference between men and women is that, on average, men are sexually and romantically attracted to women, and on average, women are sexually attracted and romantically attracted to men. That's the biggest difference, you know. Obviously, it's not 100%. A lot of men are attracted to men. A lot of men are attracted to both. A lot of men are attracted to neither. But the majority of men are attracted to women. We're... That's, that's the biggest difference. When you get out of that, um, the big differences have to do very roughly, that men... And this is, this is... Of all the sort of research I talk about in my book, surprisingly, oh, my God, evolutionary stuff, you know, that's very we... This, this is sort of research that gets done in a hundred countries. This is the sort of research, we were talking before about, about the psychologist David Buss. And there's these enormous meta-studies and, uh, across different... And you find big cultural differences, but you always find the same sex differences. And the sex differences typically are, roughly, um, men are more aggressive and risk-taking, and women are kinder and more nurturing. So... And you don't have to go to a psychology lab to see this. You go anywhere in the world and you say, "Who does more of your killing?" It's men. Women may be aggressive in other ways. They may be, I don't wanna make a tribe out of who's verbally aggressive or socially aggressive or whatever, but pure violence is mostly a male, a male activity. Um, the, the care and nurturance of children is mostly a female activity. And this is true for humans and it's true for primates, who are sort of similar to humans. Now, you always gotta have the caveat, that you ended up talking about Bell curves, so... Everywhere in the world, it's also true, men are taller than women. This does not preclude the fact that there are some women taller than the average man and some men shorter than the average woman. You kind of have... Whenever we're talking about human differences, maybe it's worth putting in this caveat. There was a study I, I recently read. What I loved about it, it says all the continents, and just tons and tons of people, like just an enormous amount of people. And it just asks people a simple question. Um, "How many sex partners do you wanna have before you die?" And in every, in every country you look at, men want more than women. But the cool thing was, in addition to that, is you got cultural differences. So, in some countries, like eas- in some parts of the world like Eastern Europe, everything's higher. So, men want a lot and women want a lot. In other cases, and this say Africa, everything's lower. And the way it works is that women in Eastern Europe want more sex partners than men in Africa. So, what you have is you have a sort of, what's psychology call, one effect, a main effect of, of gender. Wherever you go, men want more than women. But you also have an effect of culture. In this place, it's more than this place. And then you have cases where there's this crossover, where the effect of culture is so big, you have the cases where, where, where it kind of flips if you, if you compare it. But to answer your question, um, issues like aggression, risk-taking, um, and then other aspects of sexual preference. Typically, men want, want younger partners, women care less about age, stuff like that.
- CWChris Williamson
Yes. The best example I saw about the, um, disposition, let's say, that, uh, males would do war and women would do care, uh, was from Joyce Benenson, and she spent a ton of time with kindergarten kids. And she says if you look at the games that three and four-year-olds play-... the boys will find an enemy, even if it's-
- PBPaul Bloom
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... an imaginary one. It's aliens, it's cowboys, it's robbers, it's whatever, and the girls will be keeping something alive. That's the-
- PBPaul Bloom
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... way that, that's what they tend to lean toward. And, you know, for all denial of sex differences thing wants to happen, this is replicated in chimps. You know?
- PBPaul Bloom
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
You give a- a- a fluffy little sort of baby chimp toy to a even slightly smaller baby chimp and the same thing happens there too.
- PBPaul Bloom
Yeah. And- and I- I think the stuff, the- the basic difference is grounded in- in- in our evolutionary history. People have looked at cultures where, more egalitarian cultures, you look like at Norway or Sweden, those- those countries, versus less egalitarian cultures, like country in- in the Middle East for instance, the effect is- is- in- in- in, shows up everywhere. In fact, some of these sex differences are bigger in more egalitarian cultures, which might seem, that seems so weird. You'd think that they would just disappear in them. The reason why they're bigger is that if you're in an egalitarian society, you're free to- to sort of express whatever you wanna do. And again, the sort of overlapping bell curves is worth, is worth keeping in mind. As well as the fact that just because something is sort of a natural tendency, um, doesn't mean it's- it's morally good, you know. If some, if some women (laughs) wanna be aggressive, if some men wanna be nurturant, I think they should be free to do whatever- whatever they want. But- but this is the way the trend goes.
- CWChris Williamson
Do
- 1:02:34 – 1:12:55
Is Attachment Theory Nonsense?
- CWChris Williamson
you think that attachment theory is bullshit?
- PBPaul Bloom
(laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
Because I have been seeing this more and more, I have a bunch of friends that work as coaches and therapists that rely very heavily on attachment theory and whatnot, and I don't know how far it's getting out over its skis.
- PBPaul Bloom
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
Have you looked at attachment theory?
- PBPaul Bloom
It's so funny you should say this. I- I got into a discussion a few days ago with somebody, a developmental scholar, and I said, "Attachment theory's bullshit." And we argued back and forth and- and bullshit's too strong, in that there are, um, there are different attachment styles parents and children have, there's different attachment styles we could have as adults. I think the strong claims about them are bullshit. I think, in this domain as in so many others, people tend to forget base- the basics or principles of h- uh, of how traits get passed on from parents to children. So- so the fact that, um, a child in a certain attachment style as a kid might duplicate that attachment style as an adult need not be because of experience. It could be just from the get-go, it was maybe an aggressive parent or a timid parent, and it just got passed onto the kid.
- CWChris Williamson
When you're saying that, you're not talking about a behaviorally aggressive or timid parent, you're talking about a genetically predisposed-
- PBPaul Bloom
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... aggressive or timid parent. You're talking about heritability and behavioral genetics here.
- PBPaul Bloom
Yeah, yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah.
- PBPaul Bloom
That's right. That's right. But, and even if you... So I don't have any deep problem with talking about attachment styles to say that that's one style and that's another style. I think some of the claims about them really do go- go over the skis.
- CWChris Williamson
Why?
- PBPaul Bloom
And, um, I think in general one of the lessons of a lot of research, one of the mor- Again, I keep talking about sort of findings from psychology I think are a little bit shocking, you would expect that the parent's relationship to the kid would have an enormous effect on how, what we grow up to be. It's just, it's just common sense. A loving parent makes a kid later on loving, says a brutal parent, you know, traumatizes a kid, it is not true as much as we think it is. A lot of the traits are just passed on by the genes, and environment doesn't matter very much. And to the extent environment matters, 50%, 60%, 40%, whatever, it doesn't seem to have so much to do with parenting, but more experiences outside the home. So, and what this means is that you take, uh, uh, parents and they have biological kids and then they adopt kids into their family, and if parenting played a huge role, you'd expect the adopted kids to be very much like the biological because they're raised the same way. It doesn't seem to happen as much as it is. And to the extent that attachment styles get folded into those sort of parenting arguments, parenting matters immensely for shaping your personality and- and intelligence, I think there are problems with it.
- CWChris Williamson
So would it be your view that attachment style is, uh, less malleable, you know, uh, for instance, personality, your ocean big five personality-
- PBPaul Bloom
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... doesn't seem to change a massive amount throughout your life. You- you- you can... There are few interventions to massively change that set point-
- PBPaul Bloom
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... at least compared with- with other- other things. Um, would you see attachment style kind of folded in with- with that kind of predisposition?
- PBPaul Bloom
I'd be tempted to think that, but I don't know. I- I- I'd wanna be careful and wanna look at the st- the studies. Um, you're- you're right that for the most part, again, putting aside attachment style, our personality is relatively constant over our lifetime. A kid who at age eight is, um, is introverted and agreeable and studious, you know, of course we (...) introverted, agreeable, and studious. We can to some extent hack our personalities. Um, people, sometimes people do medication if you're over-anxious. Um, there are sometimes people, people claim that disciplines, everything from, you know, mindfulness meditation to Stoicism to Catholicism can transform your personality in certain interesting ways. But for the most part, doesn't change that much. You know, I- I sometimes think that... This is me not being a psychologist, this is just- just me thinking, that the trick to life isn't so much changing yourself but is finding, um, friends, lovers, family, unemployment, fun, that mesh with how you are.... I'm, I'm not an extroverted guy, and I could have tried to be extroverted, more extroverted but in s- and be, and then so I could be a salesman. But maybe that idea's I'm not a salesman. I'm a, I'm a professor, and I could be a bit less in-introverted, uh, less extroverted, and more focused on other things.
- CWChris Williamson
I really like that. I really like that takeaway, especially as someone who recently moved from a country where I was, uh, felt a little discordant-
- PBPaul Bloom
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... a little bit like a, an, an off note, and then to one now where it feels a bit more aligned.
- PBPaul Bloom
Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
And I have people around that I can understand a little bit more. And I went from a career and a job that I was incredibly successful in, and, uh, took t- a ton of pride in what we did running these massive events-
- PBPaul Bloom
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... and one of the biggest events companies in the UK and all the rest of it. But again, with that, there was just something a little bit ... It was, you know, half an octave off, and I thought, "Uh, what's going on here?" Uh, and, you know, I'm now doing something which, again, aligns with my disposition, with the way that I like to live my life, with the things that I like to think about in private, in public.
- PBPaul Bloom
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
Uh, and yeah. I, I, I totally agree. G- If you take, if you take it as relative truth that the person that you are is going to remain pretty constant in terms of your, your disposition throughout your life, that's not to say that you can't change the kind of capacities that you have and learn things, but your propensity toward wanting to learn or wanting-
- PBPaul Bloom
Yeah.
- 1:12:55 – 1:19:37
The Need to Reform Education Around Heritability
- PBPaul Bloom
- CWChris Williamson
My ... We've just touched on behavioral genetics there. I had Robert Plomin on the show-
- PBPaul Bloom
Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
... mm, maybe a year and a half ago, two years ago, and the guy's phenomenal.
- PBPaul Bloom
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
I, I love his work. I feel like if I was to look at the field of science at the moment, not diet, but sort of psychology and, and, and personal development style stuff-... the biggest hole in terms of public education, the longest lever that we could push down on would be teaching people about how behavioral genetics works, about how heritability works. I think that that would help people to make better life choices, better partner choices. It would help parents to feel less culpable or, uh, less neurotic and over-concerned-
- PBPaul Bloom
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... about the outcomes that their kids are going to have. And then when you fold in the, you know, the nurture part of the nature-nurture debate isn't the nurture that you give them, it's the nurture that Jim's dad next door gives them, and it's the nurture of the-
- PBPaul Bloom
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... boxing coach that-
- PBPaul Bloom
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... they give them and the friends that are around them that they impa- impart on them. I feel like that i- from the outside looking in is the biggest hole that we have in terms of sort of public education.
- PBPaul Bloom
I think that's a, I think that's a, that, that's, that, that, that's a wise point. I'll just add two things. One is, as you know, this stuff gets very politicized, um, and, you know, talk about genes and behaviors and everything, for some people brings up a specter of scientific racism and, you know, Holocaust and all of that stuff. So, so I think now we're starting to sort of say, "Well, we could sensibly talk about these things without, um, without it being carried with the ugly baggage of history." Just like, you know, behaviorism, other, other ideas of human nature similarly have an ugly baggage of, of control and totalitarian governments and everything. I think we've got to look at the facts in some... in, in a way that's compassionate and reasoned. The other thing is, at some level, this is w- stuff worth getting out. But at another level, when people aren't on Twitter or Facebook or writing op-eds and everything, people kind of know. There's some really nice stuff done by Emily Willoughby where she just asked people, from a scale of 0 to 100, how heritable are these different traits? You know, how your, your introversion, aggression, religiousness, sexual orientation, eye color, and so on. Explains a little bit what this means. And then graphs it. It turns out your average person is not bad at knowing this. Your average person pretty much matches, with some exceptions, the scientific literature. When, when you're not dealing with people who are ideologues and you ask, people say, "Do you think how shy somebody is is sort of a genetic trait?" people often appreciate it. Yeah, it is to some extent.
- CWChris Williamson
There was a chart in Plomin's book Blueprint, and I think that that's the same study-
- PBPaul Bloom
It might be the same, yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... you're talking about. Yeah. Well, I had, uh, a guy on talking about embryo selection and genetic enhancement, uh, Johnny Anomaly talking about this recently. And that, I think, will force everybody... it will be a, uh, very difficult to avoid red pill for everybody about heritability. Because as soon as you can go in and say, "Well, look, this is... these are the, um, raw materials that we're playing with, and this is how far we can push these different things." And downstream from that, look at the changes that-
- PBPaul Bloom
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... children have from genetic interventions before they were born-
- PBPaul Bloom
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... it kind of bursts this conversation open a little bit. And that technology is not slowing down. It's not stopping. It seems like it's, it's partly already here, and in the future, is only going to be more here.
- PBPaul Bloom
I think that's right, but I'll give you something which is here. And I haven't looked into this, but here's my intuition. Many, many people have kids through, uh, uh, donor sperm and donor eggs. I don't think there's many people who say, "I don't care. It's all, it's all however you are. Send me, get me anybody's sperm, anybody's eggs, I'm in." No. People really want the sperm and eggs of people they see as having, you know, not just good physical health, but they haven't had a history of severe mental illness. They want people who are Nobel Prize winners. They want, they want women who have been to the, to the Ivy Leagues. They want people who are... And, and I think when push comes to shove, people have an understanding that, um, that this stuff matters.
- CWChris Williamson
You know what's very interesting there, I don't know whether you've considered this, but Johnny taught me about this when it comes to sperm donor selection criteria for women. What you get to do as a woman is bypass your own mating psychology with regards to what you're attracted to in terms of what seduces you, which may cause you to downstream use those genetics to form a child. And what you actually do is you optimize for the traits that you want your child to have-
- PBPaul Bloom
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... independent of the attraction. So, a lot of the time, uh, like a, a pleasant disposition or kindness, uh, is something that is really, really optimized for, being like dominance and stuff, which may be something which is-
- PBPaul Bloom
That's right.
- CWChris Williamson
... uh, sexually attractive. But in a child, do I want like a super dominant-
- PBPaul Bloom
No.
- CWChris Williamson
... child? Well, perhaps not.
- PBPaul Bloom
No.
- CWChris Williamson
Uh, and that was the first time that I've ever thought, "Oh my God, look at what happens when you can separate out having sex from the production of the child that comes from it or, or, or attraction from, uh, procreation."
Episode duration: 1:28:39
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