Paul Bloom
Paul Bloom
Paul Bloomis a Canadian American professor of psychology and cognitive science at Yale University. His research explores how children and adults understand the physical and social world, with special focus on language, morality, religion, fiction, and art...
NationalityCanadian
ProfessionPsychologist
Date of Birth24 December 1963
CountryCanada
war people empathy
Because of empathy, stories of the suffering of one person could lead us into a war that could kill millions of people.
empathy be-kind arguing
I argue that we should be kind, we should be compassionate, and we should definitely be reasonable and rational, but that empathy leads us astray.
war thinking people
I'm not a pacifist. I think the suffering of innocent people can be a catalyst for moral action. But empathy puts too much weight on the scale in favor of war. Empathy can really lead to violence.
giving charity kidneys
In my own life, I do not live like an effective altruist. An effective altruist would really disapprove of my life. I don't give enough to charity and I still have both my kidneys.
interesting people psychology
The effects of Twitter and Facebook and all those things on people's psychologies is a really interesting question to which nobody knows the answer.
teenage son media
I have two teenage sons, and they're both surviving, thriving, and having a great time, and they're always on social media.
brother teenager kids
My brother is severely autistic, so when I was a kid I spent a lot of time as a teenager in camps and programs for autistic kids. When I went to McGill as an undergraduate, I figured I'd be a therapist working with these kids. The truth is, and I knew this even back then, I'm just not good at this. I'm too empathic to do this sort of thing.
hands people hammers
Individuals differ in how empathic they are. Some people would really flinch if they watched me hitting my hand with a hammer, and other people would just not care.
nice interesting people
It would be nice if everybody who had something interesting to say about my work could say it politely and civilly, but it doesn't work that way... Sometimes people are just really nasty.
kindness buddhism thinking
I draw a lot from Buddhism, which focuses on compassion and kindness, loving kindness, as they call it, but rejects empathy because it's a poor moral guide. And I think there's a lot of evidence suggesting that they're right.
smart media perspective
I kind of like social media, and I like hearing from people. I don't like the ugly stuff, but there are some people - smart people - who have a very different perspective, and I'll get a backlash from them. And this isn't necessarily a bad thing.
dog writing islam
I am never going to write about dogs again. You can write about Islam, you can write about sexuality, but no, not dogs.
writing interesting trying
When you start writing things to try to persuade someone who's not already part of your guild or your profession that something is interesting, it forces you to ask yourself, "Well, why is this interesting?"
compassion people empathy
It's hard to pull apart empathy from compassion. What is really clear is that we innately care for other people at least to some extent.