2016 Personality Lecture 04: Piaget Constructivism

Okay, so we're going to talk about Piaget today. As I believe I mentioned to you before, Piaget was perhaps the 20th century's foremost developmental psychologist. He didn't really regard himself as a psychologist, however; in fact, a lot of the people who've been great psychologists have come in from outside the field. It's often engineers, for example. Engineers have helped us establish most of our statistics.

Anyways, Piaget, I suppose, would have regarded himself more as a biologist. He called himself a genetic epistemologist. By genetic, he didn't mean the genes that organize your cells and spin you up out of nothing; he meant beginnings, as in Genesis. An epistemologist was someone who was interested in how structures of knowledge emerge and how they were constituted. So he actually thought of himself as a biological philosopher.

Now, you know, one of the things that's kind of sad about learning about great theories is that you hardly ever learn about how peculiar the people who formulate them are. Because generally, they're extraordinarily interesting people. You know, and that in some ways, they often get sanitized in some way once they've become respectable, and that's really quite unfortunate.

Piaget was really a genius. He was offered a position at a large museum, and I remember correctly, it was perhaps, it wasn't director, but it was a position of approximately that stature. He was offered that when he was 10 years old. He'd written a paper on mollusk behavior, which was published, and his parents told the museum people that he, of course, they didn't know he was 10, that he probably wasn't up for the job at that time. So, but that gives you some example, some idea about the magnitude of his intellect.

Piaget wrote a lot, and you know, usually what you hear about if you study Piaget in North America, if you hear about Piaget, you hear about his stages of development, sensory motor, etc. And that really wasn't what Piaget was all that interested in. There was something about the idea of countable stages that seemed to appeal to North American developmental psychologists, but Piaget didn't really regard that necessarily as either the central or the most important part of his theoretical edifice.

And, you know, part of what Piaget has been criticized for in recent years is that the stages don't necessarily occur either as he described or in the order that he described. But in some ways, he wouldn't have found that particularly distressing, because it was more of an attempt to explain how the personality emerged out of nothing in some ways. Because, in some ways, you kind of emerge out of nothing. You know, and it's not that easy to figure out. For Piaget, in some ways, you sort of booted up, although he wouldn't have used that metaphor, obviously, having existed in a time before that was a commonly known phenomenon.

So, he also was concerned about high-level metaphysical problems. One of the things that really motivated Piaget was the contradiction between science and religion. That was very painful for him. One of the things that he had set out to do as a young man was to bridge the gap between science and religion. In some ways, you might think about that in relationship to the sorts of things we talked about last class. He was attempting to bridge the gap between a description of the world and a prescriptive description of the world, which means what the world is and how the world should be, or what the world is and how you should act.

I think that's the most straightforward way of thinking about the division between religion and science, because you need to know how to act. You can think about it as a division between morality and science, or you can think about it as a division between behavioral wisdom and science, which I think is even a better way of thinking about it because it takes the specifically religious element out of it.

So, but anyways, Piaget wanted to devote his life to solving that problem, and I would say that's what he did. He also identified an interesting stage that you also hear very little about but seems to be something worthy of note and also worthy of consideration. He thought that many people in their late adolescence went through a messianic stage. What he meant by that was that when late adolescents or young adults were trying to orient themselves in the world, they were trying to figure out how they might plot their path forward in life so that they actually made a difference.

You know, so they started to become concerned about the state of the world and about their role in determining that state, and getting interested in and perhaps involved in large-scale political or social movements. He was the only psychologist that I've ever seen who actually identified that as a stage, but it's worth considering because it certainly is the case that many young people do pass through a stage that's something like that.

It's interesting to speculate on it as a standard part of human development. Now, I think it's probably more characteristic of people with certain personality types, so I suspect if you're more extroverted and you're more open, particularly more open, which is the creativity dimension in the big five, that you're more likely to be politically and socially compelled. You know, so we know, for example, that openness is a very good predictor of things like political liberalism.

Certainly, a lot of the Millennial movements and the religious-like movements that you see on campus that have what would arguably now be a political base seem to be associated with high openness. Maybe that stage doesn't occur in everyone's life, but it certainly seems to occur in many people's lives.

Okay, so now you might ask yourself, well, what was Piaget up to? Well, he wanted to figure out a lot of things, and he was interested in very, very fundamental issues. So, for example, his theories dealt with things like number and space. You probably can't see that very well; it doesn't matter. I'll tell you what it says: time and speed, permanent objects. How did a person develop the notion of what constituted a permanent object? How do you know when one thing is the same when it changes into something different?

So, for example, if you pour one bit of liquid from one container into another, how do you know that the amount of liquid is the same? How do children develop their ideas of chance and causality? How do they develop their concerns about morality and their moral knowledge? What are they doing when they're playing?

I think actually Piaget's most fundamental contribution, as far as I'm concerned, came in his studies and analysis of play. Also, to some degree, his analysis of dreams. He also spent a lot of time giving serious consideration to the role that imitation played in the scaffolding of the human personality.

Some of the—so Piaget believed that, oh, I think this is the easiest way to talk about it; actually, we'll use this little diagram here. Oh, fire! It took me a long time to construct this diagram. Not because it's all that technically difficult, but it took a while to think it up. So I want to give you a little bit of background to it.

So imagine that one of the things that distinguishes a human being from a computational device, say, or at least the standard sort of computational devices, is that our primary cognitive problem is how to perceive the world so that we can act in it. So that we can get what we need to have or want, okay? So all three of those things are roughly of equivalent importance, right? You have to be able to perceive, and you have to be able to act, because if you can't act, then you can't get what you need, and if you can't get what you need, then of course there isn't.

And so we're trying to always solve those problems simultaneously, and we're also trying to do it in a way that's sustainable. Now, what that means in part is that the knowledge structures of human beings are organized—or they're organized along those three dimensions. Those three dimensions also constitute the problem space, in some sense, that has to be addressed for a solution to be useful.

Not only do you have to be able to perceive in some accurate manner, but the accuracy is determined in part in terms of whether or not the way that you're perceiving helps you pursue something that you want to pursue. Then the utility of wanting to pursue something is dependent to some degree on the relationship between the utility of that and the things that you need to continue to survive.

Now, some psychologists have addressed that by thinking about such things as fundamental drives, you know, and that was mostly a behavioral idea in some ways. And a drive might be hunger, and the idea of a drive would be that hunger is a motivator that helps you put together strings of motor behaviors that sort of run out in automatic sequence so that you can get the end that you want and continue on, perhaps, to fulfill another drive.

But the idea of drive is a little bit on the oversimplified side, although it has its place. I think that you can conceptualize the relationship between all of these by thinking in the following manner. So imagine, first of all, that people are after something generally speaking. Now, if you look at us, you can kind of tell that we're the sorts of creatures that are after things.

The way that you can tell that is, first of all, that we can move and do so frequently. So we're always on a voyage of some sort, or a journey of some sort, from point one to point two, or from point A to point B. I would say, as well, that that's also the hallmark of a simple story. If you're telling someone a story, generally what you do is you tell them about a time that you were somewhere, and then you did some things, and you went somewhere else.

It's a very, very simple story. Now, the advantage of thinking about it as a story is that it helps you understand that the entire cognitive structure can't be reduced to necessarily anything that's, for example, that's drive-like. You have to think about it as more personality-like. So you want something; you orient yourself towards it.

Now, the way you do that, generally speaking, is with your sensory and your conceptual systems, right? So, for example, if you want to walk towards the door, then you turn your head and you make yourself a model of the door, and that model has to be bounded by its relevance to your actions. So, you know, the things that are going to be relevant to you about the door, for example, might be whether or not it's tall enough for you to walk through or whether or not the door is open or closed so that you can, as you're walking towards it, organize your body so that you can interact with the object as you see fit.

Now, you pick your goals for all sorts of different reasons, and some of those reasons are more fundamental than others. So, for example, by fundamental, I would mean likely—what I mean by fundamental is something like evolutionarily ancient, you know? So the older the necessity, or the older the system that's evolved to allow you to pursue the necessity, the more fundamental it is.

There are ways of identifying what constitute the fundamental elements of goal-seeking behavior, and you can do that in part by comparing yourself to other animals, you know? And so mammals, for example, all seem to experience something that you might regard as anger, or at least defensive aggression. They're all hungry, you know? They all act as if they highly value sexual behavior and so forth. So those you can't really think of those things as specifically human; they're lower level than that.

Now, so at a fundamental level, you have biological systems that are setting forth what might constitute a goal. You can think about that—you can think that what the system is doing is setting the goal, or you can think that the system is driving behavior. But a better way of thinking about it is that the fundamental motivation system sets up a framework that's like a personality that then acts in the world.

This personality has something in mind that it wants. It has a collection of perceptions that organizes itself around that thing that it wants, and then it has a plan or associated motor behaviors that it can lay out in the world that will take it from the point where it is to the point that it wants to be.

Okay, now so once you know that, then you can start to think about these plans or these goals or these stories or these frameworks. I think those are all—you can even think about them as games in some ways. You can think about them at different levels of complexity.

Now, what Piaget was trying to do in part was to describe how a framework of this sort, or a sub-element of personality, might develop itself in complexity over time. So the diagram I have here before you shows these little oval-like figures, and in the bottom left-hand corner, there's a box that says "what is," and in the top right-hand corner, there's a box that says "what should be."

Then there's some arrows showing a planned sequence of behavior, and the idea is that you have a sense of where you are, and you have a sense of where you're going, and that constitutes the framework within which you're looking at the world. Within that framework, there's different things that you can do with your body in order to advance from the first point to the second point.

Now, it's important to understand that this sort of thing is grounded in behavior and not in conception because it helps you also understand the nature of these fundamental elements of personality. The fundamental elements of personality are not descriptions of the world; they're tools for acting in the world, including the associated behaviors.

Now, whether they're behavioral or conceptual, to some degree depends on their level of abstraction. So here's how to think about that. Imagine that you say that someone's a good person, and you might say, well, that's a description of them. When you think about description, you tend to think about description the way that you would describe an object in the world, like a scientific description.

But when you talk about someone as a good person, you're actually not describing them as an object in the world. You wouldn't even describe yourself as an object in the world that way. What you're doing is using a shorthand to represent a higher hierarchical arrangement of their personality.

You can get away with it because when you say good person to someone, they already have an understanding of good person, and they know what that hierarchy is, and so you don't have to explain the whole thing to them, and you can understand each other without even necessarily knowing exactly the details of what you're talking about.

But I'm going to tell you now what I think you mean when you say that sort of thing. So imagine that a good person is a description at the very top end of a hierarchy, okay? Because good—the good is a very high-level philosophical abstraction. It's a high-level value: be good.

Okay, so what does that mean if you decompose it? Well, we'll do it in a relatively straightforward manner, one that isn't really—it's more observational than philosophical. So let's say you take someone who's a 40-year-old mother for the sake of argument, and who will say she also has a job. So if she's a good person and she's a mother, you might think that's one sub-element of her personality if she's a good person is being a good parent, right?

I think you put person above parent in the hierarchy because to be a good person, you can be a good parent without being a good person, but it's hard to see how you could be a good person without being a good parent. So maybe if you're a good person, you're more than a good parent. You know, you're probably a good partner, and maybe you're good at your job.

There are large domains of activity that you're good at or good in, and if you sum your behavior across that, or average your behavior across that or something like that, then you end up reasonably being described as a good person. Maybe you're a good friend as well.

Good person has levels of hierarchy underneath it. Then each of those things that have levels of hierarchy, each of those entities at the level of hierarchy right underneath good persons can also be decomposed. So, we're going to decompose them, and we're going to see what happens, because partly what happens is if you decompose them, you get right to the bottom.

It's not an infinite decomposition, and so I also think this is one way that you can think about the relationship between the mind and the body because the relationship between the mind and the body is a very tricky thing. The mind seems to be made of stuff that's other than the body. I think there's some truth to that, partly because we don't really understand consciousness, but that's a complex problem.

I think you can get a fair ways in addressing the mind-body problem without having to drag in the problem of consciousness. So, okay, so we could say, well, good person, sub-element of that is good parent. Then you might think, well, what is it that you need to be doing to be a good parent?

We might say, well, um, you have to have a good job. Maybe that's one up in the hierarchy, but whatever. You have to have a good job because otherwise you can't provide for your children. You have to be able to care for the children. You might say, well, someone's good at caring for children.

Then you might ask, well, what does it mean to be good at caring for children? Then you have to sort of think of the sub-elements that would go into caring for children. One of them here is you have to know how to cook a meal or complete a meal.

Then you also have to know how to play with the baby. So, we could concentrate on playing with the baby. What do you do when you're playing with a baby? You might play peekaboo; you might tickle the baby, and you might clean the baby.

Now, you start thinking, well, obviously once you're starting to get down to that level of detail, so that's a high-resolution model, right? You're starting to move from a low-resolution model—good person—to a high-resolution model. What are precisely the multitude of elements that make up being a good person?

Well, if you're playing peekaboo with a baby, for example, all of a sudden you're doing something that's not exactly conceptual. Being a good person is conceptual, but playing peekaboo isn't conceptual. The reason it's not conceptual is because you actually have to move your hands to do it.

If you get to a high enough level of resolution in the description of a personality, what you start describing are patterns of behavior. Now, they have associated—you know, they have an associated motivational framework and a viewpoint that goes along with them.

So I would say, well, even while you're playing peekaboo with the baby, the element of you that's playing peekaboo is best described as a sub-personality. It's a playful sub-personality, and it's the sub-personality that specifically knows how and is motivated to play peekaboo. But what it's composed of is no longer a sub-personality; it's starting to be composed of actual movements.

So then underneath that, if you go to higher resolution, like okay, what's the movement composed of? Obviously, you start to have to talk about musculature, and then if you go below that, it's molecular movements and so on. But once you're down below voluntary movement, there's really no you there anymore, right? You sort of fade into unconsciousness because, you know how to go like this, but you don't exactly know how to move the specific muscles that enable you to go like that.

Even if you do, you don't know how to twitch the muscle fibers or something like that, right? There's some—you don't know how to operate the cells. There's some level of resolution underneath the voluntary motor control that basically runs on automatic. To some degree, you're capable of steering it, but you're not really capable of—you’re certainly not capable of being conscious of it.

The abstract moral conception, which is also a description, good person, hits the world at the level of motor output. Now, a lot—like even your sensory movement, a lot of that's motor output, right? Because a lot of what you're doing with your eyes is moving them.

So alright, now what does that have to do with Piaget? Well, one of the ways of understanding Piaget is that he built—he was really interested in understanding how that entire system came to be. His theory is a bottom-up theory. He says, okay, yeah, this is—he hasn't said this, but it's a very useful way of thinking about it because Piaget believed that you started with small elements of what he called reflexive behavior, and then you learned to chain them together in increasingly complex structures.

Then you chain those complex structures into more and more complex structures and so on and so forth until you built up the entire hierarchy. But you tended to start from the bottom. So Piaget was particularly interested in what the minimum conditions were for something to emerge into the world so that it could build itself out of nothing.

That's really what he was interested in when he was starting to talk about infant development. Piaget's hypothesis was something like this: Well, infants—babies are born very, very immature. You might even say that they're born premature.

A human baby, if you took a mammal of about human size and you said, well, what's its average gestation period across the animal kingdom, you'd find out that for a mammal of our size, we should have a gestation period—a pregnancy period of two years.

So we don't; we have a gestation period of nine months. So, you might ask, well, why is that? The answer is complicated, obviously. But here's some of the reasons, as far as people can tell. We have big heads, and they've really been expanding rapidly, particularly over the last two million years. But let's say since we split off from chimps—that's about six million years.

We have very, very large heads, and you know, if you look at a baby, a baby's head is pretty damn disproportionately large compared to its body. Like that, a baby's like a third head. Even when the baby is little—nine months old, well, nine months after conception, and maybe a year and three months before it's supposed to be born, its head is already extremely big.

Now, you think, well, what's the problem with that? The problem with that is, well, the bigger your head is, the harder it is to be born. You might say, well, why haven't the pelvic areas of human beings adjusted—females in particular—adjusted so that they could handle the birth with a larger head? The answer to that is, well, they have to some degree, which is why women have wider hips than men do.

But the problem is that evolution is a conservative business, and it can only, in some sense, tinker with what it's already got. If you look at your basic body plan—your basic body plan at most, in its most fundamental levels, was established some tens of millions or even hundreds of millions of years ago. The basic mammalian body plan was established, say, 60 million years ago.

I went to the Smithsonian once, and they have a skeleton museum at the Smithsonian—it's sort of like a zoo for skeletons, and it's a really interesting place to go because you can see much better how alike mammals are when you see their skeletons.

For example, if you see a bat skeleton, it looks just like a human skeleton, except the fingers are really, really long. But the rest of it, it's like, yeah, that's basically the same skeleton as a human being; it's just that the pieces have blown up in size or shrunk or contorted or something like that. But it's exactly the same damn structure.

So, as the brain was growing and the skull was getting larger, women's bodies had to adapt to that while there were parameters within which the body had to work. It turns out that if you make the hips any wider and you make the hole in the middle of them any bigger, then the hips start to lose structural integrity.

The other thing that starts to happen is the woman can't run. So there's this weird—imagine that evolution takes place within this set of constraints, and so what's happened is the baby gets born way earlier. Women's hips are wider with a larger pelvic hole, but not so wide they can't run, and not so wide they're not strong.

The baby's head is collapsible, roughly, because the bones aren't completely fused at birth. Generally, especially if it's larger, maybe if it's born just after birth, its head is quite compressed—cone-shaped even. So, and that's hard on the baby, but it's not nearly as hard on the baby or the mother as not being born at all.

So, anyways, babies are born pretty premature, and you know, that puts a tremendous burden on human parents, because, of course, the child is, you know, can't even walk for the first year. Whereas you take a deer, when a deer is born, or an animal like that, you know, it's three minutes later, it's wobbling around on its feet, and then it's running away from lions the next morning. It's like, that's not us.

You think, why not? It's well, we're born very, very premature and very, very vulnerable, and you know, it's a major load on the parents.

Anyways, one question Piaget was interested in is, well, what exactly is a baby born with? He thought, well, they're born with a couple of things. Here's three things: in a sense, you might think they're born with a couple of reflexes. What you might think of as a reflex is that it's a built-in module of sensory motor capability, and maybe there's a motivational element to it as well.

So I would say it's a built-in sub-personality that's a very narrow sub-personality has a very narrow task. One thing babies can do is root. So, if you touch them on the side of their cheek, then they root. What that means is they use their mouth and their head to search for something to latch onto with their mouth.

That would generally be a nipple, so they come pre-wired to be able to use their mouth and their tongue and certain muscles of their head in order to figure out how to feed. That's actually a very complicated behavior. So, one of the things you see with babies is that their mouth and their tongue is all quite wired up already.

If you're looking at a newborn baby, the intelligent part of the baby, in some sense, like the part that's already there, is very much oriented towards its mouth and its tongue. That's sort of like Freud's idea of an oral stage, in some sense, although, you know, you could debate that. But that's partly why Freud thought that way; he knew that people were very mouth-oriented.

Once they can start using their hands and they can pick up objects, what do they do with objects? They put them in their mouth, right? Why? Well, because that's what babies do, partly. But that's not the only reason. If you look at a two-year-old...

Okay, so back in the 50s, 40s, maybe even earlier than that, there was a neurosurgeon named Wilder Penfield, who worked at the Montreal Neurological Institute. He was one of the people who first did surgery, for example, for epilepsy. If you have epilepsy, what happens is generally you kind of have a short circuit—there's a malfunctioning set of neurons, usually in the hippocampus, and they produce like a positive feedback electrical circuit, and it's like a little electrical storm, and it'll start in damaged tissue and then spread across the whole brain.

One of the things the early neurosurgeons were doing was dividing the brain in two to stop the hemisphere that had the damage from being able to spread pathological electricity across the entire brain. Now, when you're doing brain surgery, you don't want to take out anything that isn't absolutely necessary, and so one of the things brain surgeons do and still do is that they do brain surgery when you're conscious, which is quite a horrifying thought, really.

Because, you know, your head is stuck in this little machine that doesn't let it move, and then they're poking around in your brain, and you have to tell them what's going on while you're doing it. If you stop being able to respond, then I presume they assume that they've made a mistake and, you know, tough luck for you. But anyways, Penfield was interested not only in conducting his surgery properly, but also in mapping out the brain to figure out, well, what parts of it could you use, and you know, what do you have to keep in, what parts can you maybe get rid of.

Part of that was because there was an idea for a long time among neurologists called equal potentiality, which meant that the cortex was an undifferentiated mass of tissue, and you could take out parts of it without really much loss of function at all, which that turned out not to be exactly right.

Although it wasn't as stupid an idea as it might seem, because the cortex is less differentiated than other parts of the brain. But it turns out that if you take out parts of it, like the prefrontal cortex, the damage that it does is not immediately evident. But if you watch the person for any length of time, usually, their lives fall apart if their prefrontal process is being damaged enough.

Anyways, Penfield was trying to figure out what the brain does, and so he was using electrodes to touch the surface. What he found, if you imagine that this is the frontal part of your brain here—and it's called that because it's at the front, right? So there's a—the back part of it has to do more with sensory processing, and then there's a fissure down the middle. On the front side of the fissure, there's an area that's roughly triangle-shaped. On the back of the fissure, there's another area that's roughly triangle-shaped.

The front part—if you touch it with an electrode, like of the right current, obviously, then people will report feeling something on different parts of their body. If you touch the part that's behind the fissure, so roughly about here, then they'll be inclined to move or feel the impulse to move.

What Penfield did was draw a little map of what parts of the brain were connected to what sensory sensations in the body and what parts of the brain were connected to what motor sensations. He built this thing called a homunculus—it's a little picture, and the picture is of this creature that's laid out on the cortex. It's sort of like a dismembered body in some sense, and the size of each part corresponds to the amount of tissue that's devoted to processing that brain or that bodily area.

What you see is very, very interesting, because if you look, there's a sensory homunculus—that's how your body looks to your brain from a sensory perspective—and there's a motor homunculus, which is how your body looks to your brain from the perspective of being able to operate it. What you see, for example, is with both the sensory and the motor cortex, the hand is as big as the whole body, and the thumb is as big as the rest of the hand.

Then the mouth and the tongue are also that big, and so is the face. So you've got this little itty-bitty body because, what are you going to do with your back? You can't pick up anything with your back, and you're also not very good, really. Your sensory perception on your back is not very high resolution.

If I had one of you stand up and I put three fingers on your back this far apart, and I said how many fingers were there, you wouldn't be able to tell. You'd say one, probably. But you can't tell even if you space them out quite a bit if you push simultaneously, whereas on the surface of the hand, you can tell immediately, because this is a high-resolution part of your body.

Of course, you know, you can really move your little tentacle appendages here, and they're highly wired up to the brain as well and very, very sensitive. But the reason I told you all that is because it's also particularly true with the mouth and the lips and the tongue and then also the entire face. That's because your face is extraordinarily mobile, and you know, you broadcast emotion with it, and so it's a communication device of the highest order.

It has to be really wired up. You have so much neural control over your face that you can actually teach yourself to fire single neurons in the tissue underneath your eye, which you certainly are not going to be able to do with your back. Then, of course, well, why would you?

Anyways, so now I'm telling you that in part so that you get some more understanding of how the child is wired up, because that mouth, tongue, lip sort of arrangement that the baby is born with is a very, very powerful learning circuit. It's established quite nicely right at birth, and so then the baby can start exploring the world using parts of it that are already there.

A big chunk of that is the mouth, and you know, you know how this works. Some of you have recently had dental surgery of one form or another, or at least you can remember when you had it; maybe you had a tooth pulled or a filling or you had braces put in or something.

One of the things you'll notice when you lose a tooth is that your damn tongue is in there where the tooth was for the next six months, right, fiddling around. You can do it consciously, which you will sometimes, but even if you're not attending to it, your tongue will be in there checking out every tiny little crack and crevice in the new area.

What it's doing is updating your map of the body, because your mouth wants to know what part of it is you and what part of it isn't. Because, first of all, you're not supposed to chew the parts that are you, and second of all, if there's any foreign body in the mouth, obviously you want to get that out of there for endless numbers of reasons.

So you can detect surface variation with your lips and tongue with tremendous accuracy. Of course, you know there's all sorts of uses that people put that ability to. It's also one of the ways that people test each other out for sexual compatibility, right? Because that's all mouth and tongue work, rough—not all of it, obviously, but at least some reasonable proportion of it.

So that's also a part of exploratory behavior. So you're testing for things like health with kissing and with smell. So anyways, it's a major part of you, you know? And not only is it a part that you explore the world with so that you can figure out what to eat and what not to eat, which is a big problem for omnivores, right? Because we can eat damn near anything, and that's a complex cognitive problem.

But you also can use it as a tool for exploring the contours of the world. Now, animals really do that with smell, right? Because your typical animal is a smell-based creature, whereas human beings aren't really so much that probably because we became upright and for a bunch of other reasons. But smell is a tremendously powerful modality, and it's pretty much fully there at birth as well.

Mothers report that they can distinguish their baby by smell virtually, you know, a day or two after they're born. They know the smell, and babies can certainly smell their mothers and their fathers as well. It doesn't take very long at all, so.

Anyways, the baby's got its mouth, and so it can start getting somewhere with that. Then it's also got basic reflexes, you know? Now, what a baby does, in some sense, is it starts developing from the middle and the top downward and outward.

So the mouth and the nose are all wired up; the eyes start to get wired up fairly quickly. They're not much to begin with because a baby will move its eyes independently, and it's not very good at focusing. Although its focal length—its natural focal length is pretty much exactly the distance from breast to mother's eye, which makes perfect sense, right?

Because the baby wants to be able to communicate extraordinarily well to produce a bond with the mother. That happens most frequently during breastfeeding, which is also extremely good for the baby because the baby gets touched. Babies really, really, really, really need to be touched. If you don't touch them, they die.

So, even if you feed them and shelter them and all those sorts of things, they have to be touched. It's very good for the baby's development. So anyways, the baby starts out with its ability to explore with its mouth and its tongue and its ability to smell, and then it starts to develop its eyes, but it does that in concert with developing other parts of its body.

So, the baby—if you put the baby on its stomach, then it starts to exercise its ability to lift up its head, and so it kind of gets that going. It starts to learn how to use its arms and its legs, and so one thing you can do for a baby, for example, to help it get going—let's say the baby's in its crib; it's laying face upward, okay?

You can give it a mobile. If you go into a baby store and you look at mobiles, what you'll see is maybe the top part is like two coat hangers, right? It's like a cross, and then there's things hanging from it; and the things will be, I don't know, maybe they're cute; who knows? Hello Kitty things or some damn thing like that, you know? And they're facing you.

Well, that's a stupid mobile because you aren't the person who's supposed to be looking at the Hello Kitty things. The baby's supposed to be looking at it. So those should be facing down, and they never are. They're always facing sideways, so when the baby looks up, all it sees is a bunch of horizontal lines.

But so let's assume that you're reasonably bright, and you get one that the baby can see. Maybe it should be black and white or at least really, really bright primary colors because it's easier for a baby to detect that. Black and white is really good because a baby's pretty good at detecting edges.

And so that thing will move around; the baby will lay there and watch it, you know. Babies, I think, they kind of look like they're stoned on LSD, you know? And I actually think that's technically correct because one of the things that hallucinogens do is reduce the inhibiting power of memory on perception.

Of course, babies have no inhibiting power of memory on perception because they have no memory, so they're pretty much you know completely overwhelmed by the world all the time. So they're laying there watching this mobile, and you know, you can shake it, and maybe they’ll have a little reflex at that, or you can interact with it in some way, and the baby will start checking that out.

It will watch it and watch it and watch it. It'll watch partly so that it can get its eyes organized. It does that in concert to some degree with its motor ability, you know, because you might say, imagine you're cross-eyed a little bit like a baby, and you're looking at that thing, and there are two of them, and you might think, well, how do you know there’s not two of them?

The answer to that is, well, you have to whack it with your hand. As soon as you whack it with your hand, you're going to find out if it's one thing or two things. Once you figure out whether that's one arm or two arms, you know, the baby is starting to whack itself against the world and watch the consequences to help it start to build up its ability to interact with the world and its ability to model the world.

One of the things you'll watch, for example—if you put a baby in a crib and it's got a mobile there, you want to kind of move the mobile down so that it's close enough so that the baby might be able to bump it. Because babies, if you don't swaddle them, they lay there and their hands and legs sort of float in space like this, and it's because they're not really very well connected to them.

That's why a baby will poke itself in the eye now and then, and it's rather amusing to watch in a kind of cliched manner. So, a baby will lay there, and it'll poke itself; it'll go like that, and what it just discovered is that there's some relationship between that random movement and that sensation.

Okay, now let's say it's laying there and it's floating around in space, and it's fortunate enough so that its leg comes into contact with an element of the mobile. Well, that'll make the mobile do something interesting and novel. When the mobile does something interesting and novel, that triggers a reflex in the baby, and the reflex is that the baby will orient towards it and look.

So, for Piaget, that was the circuit that was the beginning of the baby's ability to sort of start bootstrapping itself up in the world. He thought what you needed was the ability to move a little bit at least, so that would be the reflex, say, or even randomness. Then you needed the ability to refine that movement so that you needed to be able to practice it, and you needed to be able to improve with practice, and you needed to be able to imitate.

One of the things that Piaget thought, which I think is so smart, so smart, is that what a lot of what babies did was imitate themselves. For example, maybe they're laying in bed and they're starting to get some sense of the connection between how their arms and legs work. So they can maybe make start to make sort of broad gestures, and that's it. But now and then, they’re lucky, and they're sort of flinging their arms around, and they hit the mobile, and they get a little reflex out of that. It's a startle and an indication of interest, and then they'll sit there and practice how to whack that thing with their hand.

So then, what they're doing is they kind of accidentally produced a phenomenon of interest, and they noted the consequence. What they do is try to reduplicate the phenomenon of interest. Basically, what they're doing is manifesting different patterns of quasi-voluntarily reflexive behavior.

Then, if that produces something of note, they'll practice imitating it. So, when my daughter was about 18 months—maybe not even that old, 13, 14 months, maybe old enough to sit up—anyways, and old enough to start to do some things by herself, we bought her these books. They were Disney books, hardcover cardboard books, you know, five pages long or something. Each of the pages was quite thick, because it was made out of cardboard, and four of them would come in a little box, which is about four inches high and about an inch and a half wide.

If you were really careful, you could take out the books, and then you could put all of them back. It wasn't that easy, because the first one wasn't too hard, but they got consistently more difficult as you kept putting each of them in because the parameters of the exercise changed. She must have spent, I don't know, 150 hours dumping those out, picking them up, putting them in. You might say, well, what was she doing? You know, you'd say, well, she was putting books in a box.

That's not what she was doing! First of all, they weren't books to her, and it wasn't a box because she didn't know what a box was. What she was doing was practicing going like this. You know, matching the size of something to the size of something else. And that's very complicated.

Maybe, you know, there's a jar of apple juice. Okay, so you might say, well, pick that up. Okay, well, you can pick it up like this, you can pick it up like this, you can pick it up like this, you can pick it up like this. There's a lot of things to practice, and each of those movements is a different sensory motor capacity that has an incredibly wide range of potential applications.

So a child will sit there and fiddle about with their hands and their arms and the rest of their body for untold hours because what they're doing is building up these basic sensory motor systems from the bottom up so that they can, you know, so, so they practice them in one domain where there's some challenge, and then they're starting to build new exploratory tools that they can go out and practice on the rest of the world.

So, you know, once you can grip—let's say once you can grip a mobile and you can let go, which is something babies actually have a hard time doing because they have a grip reflex, and they're quite strong when they're first born—if you put your fingers in their hands, you can lift them right off the ground. They'll cling to you, and that's probably old chimpanzee gripping behavior, because chimps grab to their mother's fur, and then they're carried around like that for about three years.

Now, since you don't have much fur, it's kind of useless for the baby, although they're pretty good at getting your hair and your glasses and your nose. You've got to get them to let go. So, anyways, they'll sit there and practice all these little subroutines.

So you'll see this, too. If you have a baby, you've got your baby in the high chair; maybe it's nine months old, and you're trying to feed the baby, which is often very challenging because babies are very curious and annoying and troublesome and tough and ornery and exploratory and misbehaving and provocative and all those things because they need that to learn about the world.

They'll do something like maybe they'll eat and they'll drop the spoon, and a mess will go on the floor, and they think, wow, gravity, that's interesting! So then you'll give them their spoon again, and the first thing they'll do is take their food and put it on the floor. Then they'll do that launch because they're kind of interested in this whole twisting the spoon and having things fall on the floor phenomena.

Part of the reason why it's often hard to feed babies is because even if they're hungry, you feed them three things, and then they're not starving. Then they're so hyper-curious that they're going to, you know, try to do something else. But what they're doing is they're continually utilizing their basic reflexive behavior and building more and more complex structures up on the basis of that.

With each time they do that, it opens up a new toolbox for them, and they, you know, expand outward and start to interact with the world. That's one way also of understanding where a baby's personality comes from.

Now, this is complicated because there are things about babies that are sort of their parameters of personality are somewhat determined at birth. So, I'll tell you how I've conceptualized this. It's how you might conceptualize the relationship between nature and nurture. I don't know if this is a good metaphor or not; it's not the most elegant metaphor in the world, but it's worked for me.

Imagine, for example, that a baby at three months of age can be a calm baby or a nervous baby. Now, that is the case—we know that even right at birth, you could kind of figure out whether a baby is a calm baby or a nervous baby. That's neuroticism; that's the fundamental dimension of negative emotion.

You might say that one baby's nervous behavior might have this range, and another baby's nervous behavior might have this range, and most of the time, it's sort of in the middle of that range. Now and then, it'll manifest behaviors that are associated with what's extreme for it.

So even if you have a calm baby, sometimes it'll get upset, and even if you have a baby that's always upset, sometimes it will be calm. So then, you might ask yourself, well, to what degree can you modulate the baby's nervous behavior? So let's say you want to have a more calm baby, and so you're going to do some things to make that baby calm.

The question is, how much transformation can you make? The answer to that, to some degree, is it depends on how much effort you make. Changes that are close to the average of the baby's natural curve of responses are fairly easy to make.

So you can shift the baby a little bit towards being calmer without too much work, but if you want to shift it more towards being calm, then that's going to take more work. If you're going to shift it more to be calm, that's going to take more work, and it's not linear.

What happens is at some point, you kind of reach a practical limit. You're not going to make your baby more calm than, you know, maybe you could move it one standard deviation or two standard deviations from its natural resting place when it first emerged as a creature.

But if you're going to move it three standard deviations, like from the fifth percentile to the 95th percentile, you're going to be working up; you're not going to be doing anything else with the baby. So you can sort of conceptualize the relationship between nature and nurture as a cost relationship.

For example, IQ is quite stable, but you can move IQ, but it's really expensive. There's a practical limit to it. So, I think if you take twins that are adopted out at birth, in order to get a 15-point difference in IQ between the twins by the time they become adults, one twin has to be at the 95th percentile for wealth in their family, and the other twin has to be at the fifth percentile for wealth.

So, that's a massive difference, right? It's huge, and so it's such a big difference you're not going to produce that with any degree of ease in the real world. But, so environmental transformations of biological parameters cost. That's a very useful way of thinking about it.

So, anyways, back to the baby. Now the baby is starting to organize itself from the bottom up. Here's kind of a way to think about how that works. Piaget pointed out that—and this is quite well known in the development literature—that babies that are younger than three don't really play well with others.

It's complicated because they can play some things with others. For example, you can play peekaboo quite well with the nine-month-old. So, there are some sorts of simple games that babies can play with you pretty much as soon as you’re smart enough to figure out what the baby is up to, roughly speaking, because they appreciate humor absurdly early, and it's very difficult to understand why.

Anyways, it doesn't matter. The Piagetian idea was, in some sense, that what the baby does to begin with is first play games with itself. It's exploring, you know, and then it produces some phenomenon of interest, and then it replicates that until it masters it.

Then, you know, it just keeps doing that, and it gets to be more and more complex. By the time it's about three, it's complex enough so that all of its little micro-systems are kind of integrated into one thing.

You know, so it's got a set of routines for being hungry, it's got a set of routines for being anxious, it's got a set of routines for being exploratory, it's got a set of routines for seeking attention from its parent and so on. Then it's starting to build some overarching unity among all of those micro-processes so that it can segue smoothly between them.

You can really see this starting to happen at two because, you know, you've heard of the terrible twos. What happens in the terrible twos is that the child is still fairly unintegrated, and so they're quite a riot to be around because they're staggeringly emotional. You know, they'll go from giddy beyond belief to crying outrageously to so angry that if you ever saw an adult that angry, you'd immediately run away and call the police.

They can do that like in 15 minutes. They just cycle through these things very, very rapidly. So—and weirdly enough, adults will notice behaviors, or they'll see behaviors in children that would be absolutely outrageous in adults, and they don't even really—it doesn't phase them at all.

It shows you how well adapted we are to children because, you know, a child who's having a tantrum, if the child's good at it, you know, they'll fling themselves onto the floor, which you rarely see an adult do. Then they'll pound and kick and scream, and then if they're really good at it, some of them get really amazingly good at it; they'll hold their breath until they turn blue and pass out.

It's like, try that one night when you're, you know, when you don't have anything to do and the power is off, you know? Just see if you can kick and scream on the floor for a while and then hold your breath till you turn blue and pass out. You can't, and that just shows you how committed to the tantrum a child can be.

So, it's easy to stop that sort of behavior, by the way. So if your child throws a tantrum at home, just go away. Eventually, the child will turn blue and, you know, pass out, and then they'll come to and there isn't anyone there, and that's not really an exciting outcome.

If you do that two or three times, the child usually figures out that it's really not worth the hassle. If you want the child to continue, wait until they turn blue and pass out, and then really freak out, especially if you can do that randomly a few times. Man, you'll get that child just having tantrums, turning blue and passing out pretty much everywhere.

Yeah, so don't do that—that's a bad idea. Alright, now, so the Piagetian idea in some sense is the child builds up these little reflexes and these little—we'll call them sub-personalities because it's a better way of thinking about it. Then it starts to build them around, modern psychologists would think more that it starts to build them around motivational systems.

Piaget wouldn't have necessarily said that, but at some point, the child starts to enter the social world. Now, it's simple in some ways to think of the child before three as not social and then the child after three as social, but it's not really accurate, right?

Because if you think about it, the child is being social right from the beginning of its development. Because, first of all, it has to figure out, for example, how to feed. Even if it's not being breastfed, it has to figure out how to participate in a playful and social manner around feeding.

That's particularly the case if the child has to breastfeed because breastfeeding is a very complex process. First of all, you have to get the mother to cooperate, and you can't bite her, for example. There are all sorts of rules about breastfeeding that the baby has to follow.

The baby's actually entering into fairly complex social relationships and games right from the beginning, and that's especially true if it also has siblings. Because if you have a baby and maybe you have a two-year-old, the two-year-old and the baby are playing right off the bat. Two-year-olds are amazingly good at playing with newborns.

It's quite staggering to watch them. If you're thinking about having children, I also recommend not just having one because one child is way more work than three, because you have to amuse one child all the time.

Whereas if you have three, you can ignore them completely, and they'll just raise each other. It's actually much better for the children, you know, as long as you're there not to make sure they don't light each other on fire and that sort of thing, which is basically your job.

So, okay, but we'll act for the time being as if the child isn't social till three, because that's a simplification, but it's a useful one. So Piaget was also extremely interested in how the child became social.

I think apart from his ideas about, you know, the self-generation of the baby from the bottom upward using its own reflexes and its own capacity to explore, the other thing that Piaget was extraordinarily good at laying out and remarkable at discovering was the role of games.

Piaget was the first psychologist, I would say, who discovered just how important it is to have kids play. Now, the problem with play is that it's fun. So, utilitarian people—especially ones that are really conscientious—have this idea that if it's fun, it can't really be good for you.

Because of that, the role of play in children was not, and still isn't, appreciated in the full dimensions of its importance. So, for example, we take little kids that are in grade one; they're like six. You know, what do we do with them? We put them in chairs, like the ones you've been in.

You've been in that damn chair for like 16 years. We take those little characters and we put them in chairs, and we expect them to sit there and listen to adults for six hours a day. It's so idiotic that it's beyond comprehension.

It's no wonder the little blighters are hyperactive. You know, that just means they're alive. They should be taken out into the schoolyard and supervised while playing until they're completely exhausted. Then they should have a little nap. Then maybe you could teach them something for a while.

Stopping them from playing and—not facilitating play among them—is absolutely crazy because that's exactly how children come to become social in the world. The reason for that is that the games children play are analogs of the activities that adults engage in.

Well, it's not that hard to figure that out if you think about it. I mean, think about playing Monopoly. Who here has played Monopoly? Great, everybody's played Monopoly. Well, what are you doing? It's like, "evil capitalist pig" game, right?

If you're going to grow up to be an evil capitalist pig, then you can get some good practice going by playing Monopoly. You can become part of the one percent, which is what you have to do to win, right? You need to have all the hotels, and so no one else has any hotels.

You know, you play that, and it's fun. It's fun, so it's an analog of real life. Now, it's an analog of real life in many ways, because most of the things that you do with other people involve adhering to a set of shared rules, and most of the things that you do with other people involve cooperating and competing with them.

So if you're playing Monopoly, are you cooperating or competing? How many people think competing? Okay, how many people think cooperating? Okay, you're cooperating. Are you playing the same rules? Are you playing by the same rules?

Well, yes, unless you're cheating. If you're cheating, you're not playing Monopoly, right? You're cheating; that's a different game. To play Monopoly, you have to cooperate because you have to all agree to sit in the same place. You have to agree not to steal the money, and you have to agree that the stupid rules—which are completely arbitrary—are the ones that are going to govern your life for the next two hours.

You have to agree to try, you have to agree to try to have fun, and you have to agree to try to be like a good player—which means you don't get all snively and whiny when someone lands on your boardwalk and they completely bankrupt you. You know, so you're cooperating like mad.

Another thing Piaget pointed out, which is absolutely lovely, is that you can't have a game without cooperation and competition at the same time. So there's no such thing as cooperative games. You have to—for it to be a game, it has to be competition within cooperation, or it can be cooperation within competition within cooperation.

You know, these things are very complexly nested. So if you're playing hockey, for example, is hockey an aggressive game or a cooperative game? Well, you have to play by the rules.

So both teams agree to that. You're on the ice at the same time; you don't bring a basketball, you don't bring a chess game. You're there to play hockey. Are you cooperating or competing with your teammates? Well, both, right? You're cooperating with them because you want everyone to win. Plus, you want everybody to get better at playing across time. But you're competing with them because maybe you could be the star of the game, and everybody's happy about that.

And then with the other team, are you cooperating or competing with them? Well, as long as you're playing by the rules, you're cooperating. But there's obviously an element of competition.

Now almost every human activity has those elements. There's a body of rules underneath it, or if they're not rules, they're at least social conventions, right? They're things that people understand are allowed and not allowed, and then there's a competitive and a cooperative element.

Alright, so that's what children start to become particularly exposed to when they're about three. How Piaget pointed out that there were, in some sense, two classes of children's games. There were the games that have a really clearly defined aim, and that would be the goal, and that would be like, you know, in the little circles that we were talking about—that's where you're trying to go.

Now, the thing about it being a game is that all of you have to be trying to go there at the same time. What Piaget realized was that just as the child is trying to integrate all of their little micro games inside them into some sort of unified thing, which would be the child—a stable personality across time and capable of weathering the storms of life—when a group of children get together, they build another one of those routines.

But it includes all of them. So the kids might say, well, let's play hide and go seek. That's a good one. Everyone knows the rules to hide and go seek, and you can win or lose at hide and go seek.

What you're trying to do is you have to bring your sub-personalities all the way up to their integrated state underneath a meta-structure that's organized by the collection of children. So the child would say, well, do you want to play hide and go seek? You're supposed to say yes or perhaps pause at another game. You're not supposed to freak out or get angry or say that it's a stupid game or run back to your mom, because then you're not going to be very popular, and you’re not going to get to play.

If you don't get to play, well then you're you're ruined, because if you don't learn how to play with others between two and four, you never learn. Then you're some poor outcast, and maybe you end up in jail, or at least you end up isolated and awkward and poorly socially integrated.

And that's not good because if you don't get into the kids’ games at three, all of them start moving ahead, and you don't. The farther they've moved ahead past you, the less likely it is that they're going to play with you. So one of the things that's really worth thinking about if you're going to have kids is you have a job as a parent, and your job as a parent is to make your child socially acceptable, especially to other children by the time they're three.

And if you don't do that, well, that's not very good. You’ll pay for it. And so will your child. There have been lots of long-term follow-ups on this sort of thing, and it seems pretty evident that if the kid isn't socialized by four, then good luck.

There's no evidence at all from the developmental literature—it's quite a dismal literature—that you can fix that. So, anyways, alright, so the children all get together, and they say, well, here's what we're going to do, and everyone says yes. They orient their personalities towards that goal, and then they interact in a cooperative and competitive way in pursuing the goal, and that's a game.

What they're doing is practicing being social human beings. They do that with all sorts of different games. Then you might say, well, here's something really worth thinking about: what does it mean to be a functional human being?

To me, it means to be the sort of human being that can be a good player across multiple games. So you might think, for example, I'll tell you the story about a hockey game that I saw once. Harkey parents—say, ten of them—should just be jailed as soon as they enter the arena.

When my kid played, he played at a high level high-level hockey for a while when he was a kid. Anyway, he was a good hockey player, but it was really unbearable, so we didn't do it for very long for a variety of reasons.

Anyways, on his way to learning how to play hockey, he was in one of these local leagues. We had an arena just around the corner, fortunately enough, and he wasn't the best player on the team. There was another kid on the team who was better, I would say, and he was in a championship game at one point. He hadn't been in very many championship games because his teams often weren't very good.

But anyways, it was local championship, and we went and watched, and it was a really fun game, you know? It was really close. I think it was 3-3 till the final 15 or 20 seconds, and then some kid from the other team scored a really good goal.

It wasn't one of those things where they accidentally kicked the puck into the net or something—it was a really nice play. It was a tight game; the teams were well-matched. The local league had made sure, like, they'd set up teams together, and then if one team kept winning too consistently or one losing too consistently, they'd sort of revamped the team so they were roughly equal, which I really liked because, you know, all the kids got a reasonably equal shot at it, and everybody got to develop.

So, anyways, we were watching that; it was pretty fun. The star kid, he was skating around out there, and the game ended, and he smashed his hockey stick onto the cement because he was all irritated. And, you know, which was pretty pathetic.

Then his father came running up to him and said, oh, you got robbed! It was really terrible. You know, the reffing was bad, and you played very well, and you should have won the game. He didn't say, you know, stop being a little rat and smashing your hockey stick onto the cement like you're three, which is what he should have said.

He basically rewarded his child for narcissistic, immature misbehavior. It was pretty pathetic; it was child abuse as far as I'm concerned—sort of up the side, really. Man, that's stupid. What are you going to do? You're going to train your child to be a narcissist? It's like, of course, that's child abuse—it's moronic.

Of course, it was due to his own foolishness, but I don't know if that's criminal, right? But it was really pathetic. But no, but think about this now for a minute. So you might think, well, what did that kid do wrong? It's like, well, he wanted to win. So that's okay. You should want to win. If you're playing a game, I mean, you're not any fun if you're playing a game and you're not trying to win, and there's nothing more miserable than playing a game with someone, and at the end, they say, well, you won because I wasn't really trying.

It's like, you know, you're not going to play with them again if they do that. And that's kind of interesting because it means they've done something wrong, you know? Even a kid can figure that out.

So you might tell your kid to be a good sport, and it doesn't matter whether you win or not. It matters how you play the game. Now, what the hell does a kid not know how to make of that? And you hardly even believe it, right? You think, yeah, it does matter if you win.

So I don't know what this means, but you'll tell the child that. Then you might think, well, what does it mean to be a good sport, and that how you play the game is more important than whether you win or lose?

Okay, so think about it this way: What's your goal? Well, you might say to win the hockey game, but that implies you're only going to play one hockey game. But if you can play a hundred hockey games, then forget about that. What if you're going to play a hundred hockey games in 200 basketball games and 50 chess games, and you're going to have a bunch of jobs and you're going to have a bunch of friends and you're going to have a bunch of relationships, and all of those have a game-like structure?

Let's say that you're a real son of a—you know, when you play hockey, and so no one ever invites you to do any of those other things? It's like, well, you win the game, but you lose the meta-game. The meta-game is the game that's made up of all the games you're ever going to play.

What a parent means when they say it doesn't matter whether you win or lose; it matters how you play the game is that the meta-game is more important than the game. You should learn how to play games so that whether or not you win or lose, people really want to play with you. Because if they want to play with you, man, you're set!

So here's a cool game. So, okay, you two are gonna play this game. Are you ready? Okay, here's the deal: I'm going to give you twenty dollars. You have to give some of that to him. You want to get the offer once. If he rejects it, neither of you get anything.

Okay, how much are you going to give him? Ten? Would you take that? Okay, okay, what? Why? First is better than nothing. Exactly! Yeah, it's fair, right? So, this experiment is being done all over the world, and so basically what they find is that people pretty much offer 50-50.

Now here's something cool: let’s say you go play this game, you use twenty bucks, and you're playing it with really poor people. You set the game up, and you say, look, offer him two bucks. He's poor; he'll take it.

So you offer him two bucks. What does he do? Tells you to screw off, right? And he's more likely to do that if he's poorer. So that's pretty interesting because a classical economist would say, look, what you should have done was offered him a dollar. It's like, you get 19. You get 19; he gets a dollar; he’s going to take the damn dollar because it's better than nothing.

But that isn't what people are like. It's like, you give them a dollar, and you get 19, they want to punch you, right? They're not going to take that, and that's because they don't want to play the game that way. They want to play the game so that it's fair across multiple games.

Now you might say, let’s say you're playing that in front of a whole bunch of people like we were now. Let's say all these people are going to be able to invite you to play the same game, and so maybe you're going to be able to make $400 in the next hour.

Then you might say, well, what should I do if I wanted everybody to invite me to play this game as much as possible? Then how much would you offer? Fifteen? Exactly!

That's cool. So that means actually you lost the game—the one game, right? Because you only get fifteen, five, and he gets fifteen. But like everyone's thinking, hey, I want to play a game with her!

Well, that's what it means when you tell someone to play the game properly. You say, act as if while you're playing a specific game that there's a higher-order moral principle that has to do with the total number of games that you're going to play across your entire life, and play that game properly.

Yeah, well, that's the evolution of higher moral thinking, in part, from a Piagetian perspective. It's bloody brilliant! So, alright, we'll see you Tuesday.
[Applause]