Narcissism Doesn't Develop Naturally – It Is a Learned Condition | Alison Gopnik | Big Think

One of the things that we've discovered in the science is that children already have moral intuitions from the time they're extremely young. So even 14-month-olds will go out of their way to try to help someone else who's in trouble. And there's even some evidence that this is true for babies, for infants.

So the old picture that we had about moral development was that children started out being these amoral egocentric creatures and then they had to be socialized into being moral or caring about other people. And that view is sort of exactly the opposite of the view that we have now. There was a column in the New York Times that said someone like Donald Trump is like a two-year-old, and I was extremely irritated. I thought about writing a letter to say that's a terrible insult to two-year-olds.

Two-year-olds are not narcissistic and egocentric and only concerned with their own happiness. They have the potential for caring about other people, taking care of them. It's something that happens between being two and being grown-up that makes the narcissist and the egotists of the world develop. That's a grown-up condition, not a condition of a two-year-old.

And as a parent, the challenge is to try to give children information and encouragement for those natural tendencies towards altruism. Now it has to be said that we have a lot of evidence that that natural tendency towards altruism, toward helping others, being empathic to others, caring for others seems to go hand-in-hand with a tendency to split people up into an in-group, the people that we're empathic for and take care of, and then an out-group, the others.

And the others are the ones that we don't have to take care of. And those two things, from an evolutionary perspective, even from a physiological neuroscience perspective, seem to go hand-in-hand. So the challenge for a parent is to say give children a sense of encouraging that sense of belonging and caring about other people without also having a sense that you only do that for your group and you cannot care about the other group...