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The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Free Literature Study Guides
The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Paul Bloom Quotes

Enjoying fiction requires a shift in selfhood. You give up your own identity and try on the identities of other people, adopting their perspectives so as to share their experiences. This allows us to enjoy fictional events that would shock and sadden us in real life.

– Paul Bloom

If our wondrous kindness is evidence for God, is our capacity for great evil proof of the Devil?

– Paul Bloom

Periods of cooperation between political parties shouldn’t be taken for granted; they are a stunning human achievement.

– Paul Bloom

Empathy has some unfortunate features – it is parochial, narrow-minded, and innumerate. We’re often at our best when we’re smart enough not to rely on it.

– Paul Bloom

On many issues, empathy can pull us in the wrong direction. The outrage that comes from adopting the perspective of a victim can drive an appetite for retribution.

– Paul Bloom

It is clear that rituals and sacrifices can bring people together, and it may well be that a group that does such things has an advantage over one that does not. But it is not clear why a religion has to be involved. Why are gods, souls, an afterlife, miracles, divine creation of the universe, and so on brought in?

– Paul Bloom

We are naturally moral beings, but our environments can enhance – or, sadly, degrade – this innate moral sense.

– Paul Bloom

Imagination tends to be truly useful if accompanied by the power of mental control – if the worlds in one’s head can be purposefully manipulated and distinguished from the real one outside it.

– Paul Bloom

Morality is often seen as an innovation, like agriculture and writing. From this perspective, babies are pint-sized psychopaths, self-interested beings who need to be taught moral notions such as the wrongness of harming another person.

– Paul Bloom

We benefit, intellectually and personally, from the interplay between different selves, from the balance between long-term contemplation and short-term impulse. We should be wary about tipping the scales too far. The community of selves shouldn’t be a democracy, but it shouldn’t be a dictatorship, either.

– Paul Bloom

Empty heads, cognitive science has taught us, learn nothing. The powerful cultural and personal flexibility of our species is owed at least in part to our starting off so well-informed; we are good learners because we know what to pay attention to and what questions are the right ones to ask.

– Paul Bloom

I think what a lot of fiction is, is the imagining of the worst so as to prepare ourselves.

– Paul Bloom

I have my own difficulty with movies in which the suffering of the characters is too real, and many find it difficult to watch comedies that rely too heavily on embarrassment; the vicarious reaction to this is too unpleasant.

– Paul Bloom

Too often, our concern for specific individuals today means neglecting crises that will harm countless people in the future.

– Paul Bloom

One way to make a baby cry is to expose it to cries of other babies. There’s sort of contagiousness to the crying. It’s not just crying. We also know that if a baby sees another human in silent pain, it will distress the baby. It seems part of our very nature is to suffer at the suffering of others.

– Paul Bloom

Perhaps looking out through big baby eyes – if we could – would not be as revelatory experience as many imagine. We might see a world inhabited by objects and people, a world infused with causation, agency, and morality – a world that would surprise us not by its freshness but by its familiarity.

– Paul Bloom

Maybe one of the most heartening findings from the psychology of pleasure is there’s more to looking good than your physical appearance. If you like somebody, they look better to you. This is why spouses in happy marriages tend to think that their husband or wife looks much better than anyone else thinks that they do.

– Paul Bloom

Our best hope for the future is not to get people to think of all humanity as family – that’s impossible. It lies, instead, in an appreciation of the fact that, even if we don’t empathize with distant strangers, their lives have the same value as the lives of those we love.

– Paul Bloom

The genetic you and the neural you aren’t alternatives to the conscious you. They are its foundations.

– Paul Bloom

A growing body of evidence suggests that humans do have a rudimentary moral sense from the very start of life.

– Paul Bloom

Humans are social beings, and we are happier, and better, when connected to others.

– Paul Bloom

The enjoyment we get from something is powerfully influenced by what we think that thing really is. This is true for intellectual pleasures, such as the appreciation of paintings and stories, and it is true as well for pleasures that seem simpler and more animalistic, such as the satisfaction of hunger and lust.

– Paul Bloom

More-radical scholars insist that an inherent clash exists between science and our long-held conceptions about consciousness and moral agency: if you accept that our brains are a myriad of smaller components, you must reject such notions as character, praise, blame, and free will.

– Paul Bloom

If you look within the United States, religion seems to make you a better person. Yet atheist societies do very well – better, in many ways, than devout ones.

– Paul Bloom

It’s really difficult working with kids and with babies because they are not cooperative subjects: they are not socialized into the idea that they should cheerfully and cooperatively give you information. They’re not like undergraduates, who you can bribe with beer money or course credit.

– Paul Bloom

Having kids has proven to be this amazing – for me, this amazing source of ideas of anecdotes, of examples, I can test my own kids without human subject permission, so they pilot – I pilot my ideas on them. And so it is a tremendous advantage to have kids if you’re going to be a developmental psychologist.

– Paul Bloom

We can imagine our bodies being destroyed, our brains ceasing to function, our bones turning to dust, but it is harder – some would say impossible – to imagine the end of our very existence.

– Paul Bloom

Most of us know nothing about constitutional law, so it’s hardly surprising that we take sides in the Obamacare debate the way we root for the Red Sox or the Yankees. Loyalty to the team is what matters.

– Paul Bloom

Some scholars argue that although the brain might contain neural subsystems, or modules, specialized for tasks like recognizing faces and understanding language, it also contains a part that constitutes a person, a self: the chief executive of all the subsystems.

– Paul Bloom

Relying on the face might be human nature – even babies prefer to look at attractive people. But, of course, judging someone based on the geometry of his features is, from a moral and legal standpoint, no better than judging him based on the color of his skin.

– Paul Bloom

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