Paul Bloom: The Psychology of Everything | Big Think

Hello, my name is Paul Bloom and I’m a Professor of Psychology at Yale University.

And what I want to do today is present a brief introduction to psychology, which is the science of the human mind.

Now, I’m admittedly biased, but I think psychology is the most interesting of all scientific fields. It’s the most interesting because it’s about us. It’s about the most important and intimate aspects of our lives.

So psychologists study everything from language, perception, memory, motivation, dreams, love, hate. We study the development of a child. We study mental illnesses like schizophrenia and psychopathy, we study morality, we study happiness.

Now, psychology is such a huge field that it breaks up into different subfields. Some psychologists study neuroscience, which is the study how the brain gives rise to mental life. Others, like me, are Developmental Psychologists.

We study what happens to make a baby turn into a child and a child turn into adults. We study what makes a baby turn into a child and a child turn into an adult. We ask questions like, how does a baby think about the world? What do we start off knowing? What do we have to learn?

Other psychologists are Social Psychologists. They study human interaction. What’s the nature of prejudice? How do we persuade one another? Some Psychologists are Cognitive Psychologists.

What that means is they study the mind as a computational device looking particularly at capacities like language, perception, memory, and decision-making. Some Psychologists are Evolutionary Psychologists, which means they’re particularly interested in biological origin of the human mind.

There are Evolutionary Psychologists. Evolutionary Psychologists are particularly interested in the evolutionary origin of our psychologies. So they study the mind with an eye towards how it has evolved. What adaptive problems it’s been constructed to solve.

Finally, there’s clinical psychology. For many people, this is what psychology means. Many people associate psychology with clinical psychology, and in fact, it’s a very important aspect of psychology.

Clinical psychologists are interested in the diagnosis that the causes and the treatment of mental disorders, disorders like schizophrenia, depression and anxiety disorders. It would be impossible for me to provide a full spectrum introduction to all of these subfields of psychology in the time I have.

So what I’m going to do instead is I’m going to focus on three case studies. I’m going to focus on compassion, racism, and sex. I’ve chosen these case studies for two reasons.

First, each of them is particularly interesting in its own light. These are questions we’re interested in as people, as scientists, but also in our everyday lives. And I want to try to persuade you that psychologists have some interesting things to say about them.

Second, together they illustrate the range of approaches that psychologists use. The sort of theories that we construct, the sorts of methods we use when approaching a domain. I want to try to give you a feeling for what psychology looks like when we actually carry it out.

The first case study is compassion. Compassion… by what I mean by compassion is concern for other people. This is particularly interesting to me.

This is my own research program and my own laboratory at Yale; we look at the emergence of morality in babies and young children. And we particularly focus on the emergence of compassion.

At what point in development do babies care about others? At what point in development do feelings of empathy and sympathy, sometimes anger, guilt, other moral emotions? How do they arise? To what extent are they built in? To what extent do they have to be learned?

As a starting point, I have here a picture of a baby and inside the baby’s head is the baby’s brain. The baby’s brain is an extraordinary computing machine. The baby’s brain is composed of neurons.

Now neurons are basic cells that process and transmit information. They receive input from other neurons and then if the sum of the in...