Paul Bloom > Quotes

“Love is a gross exaggeration of the difference between one person and everybody else.”
― Paul Bloom, How Pleasure Works: Why we like what we like

“the egalitarian lifestyles of hunter-gatherers exist because the individuals care a lot about status. Individuals in these societies end up roughly equal because everyone is struggling to ensure that nobody gets too much power over him or her. This is invisible-hand egalitarianism.”
― Paul Bloom, Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil

“For instance, most everyone agrees that a just society promotes equality among its citizens, but blood is spilled over what sort of equality is morally preferable: equality of opportunity or equality of outcome”
― Paul Bloom, Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil

“And it isn’t a mistake in taste, like believing that the Matrix sequels were as good as the original.”
― Paul Bloom, Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil

“Boredom is a cue that needs aren’t being met. It’s a signal that your environment lacks interest, variety, and newness. Just as the pain of a burn tells us where the damage is and motivates us to respond appropriately, boredom motivates us to seek out intellectual stimulation and social contact, to learn and engage and act. To be without boredom would be a curse.”
― Paul Bloom, The Sweet Spot: The Pleasures of Suffering and the Search for Meaning

“This distinction between empathy and compassion is critical for the argument I’ve been making throughout this book. And it is supported by neuroscience research. In a review article, Tania Singer and Olga Klimecki describe how they make sense of this distinction: “In contrast to empathy, compassion does not mean sharing the suffering of the other: rather, it is characterized by feelings of warmth, concern and care for the other, as well as a strong motivation to improve the other’s well-being. Compassion is feeling for and not feeling with the other.” The”
― Paul Bloom, Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion – How Emotion Undermines Morality, Justice, and Good Policy

“It’s not that empathy itself automatically leads to kindness. Rather, empathy has to connect to kindness that already exists. Empathy makes good people better, then, because kind people don’t like suffering, and empathy makes this suffering salient. If you made a sadist more empathic, it would just lead to a happier sadist,”
― Paul Bloom, Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion – How Emotion Undermines Morality, Justice, and Good Policy

“effort becomes enjoyable when it’s seen as play, or as a game.”
― Paul Bloom, The Sweet Spot: The Pleasures of Suffering and the Search for Meaning

“When empathy makes us feel pain, the reaction is often a desire to escape. Jonathan Glover tells of a woman who lived near the death camps in Nazi Germany and who could easily see atrocities from her house, such as prisoners being shot and left to die. She wrote an angry letter: “One is often an unwilling witness to such outrages. I am anyway sickly and such a sight makes such a demand on my nerves that in the long run I cannot bear this. I request that it be arranged that such inhuman deeds be discontinued, or else be done where one does not see it.” She was definitely suffering from seeing the treatment of the prisoners, but it didn’t motivate her to want to save them: She would be satisfied if she could have this suffering continue out of her sight.”
― Paul Bloom, Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion – How Emotion Undermines Morality, Justice, and Good Policy

“It is fascinating to discover that individuals who are asked to assign a punishment to a criminal are influenced by factors that they are unaware of (like the presence of a flag in the room) or that they would consciously diavow (like the color of the criminal's skin). It is boring to find that individuals' proposed punishments are influenced by rational considerations such as the severity of the crime and the criminal's previous record. Interesting: we are more willing to help someonw if there is the smell of fresh bread in the air. Boring: we are more willing to help someone if he or she has been kind to us in the past. We sometimes forget that this bias in publication exists and take what is reported in scientific journals and the popular press as an accurate reflection of our best science of how the mind works. But this is like watching the nightly news and concluding that rape, robbery, and murder are part of any individual's everyday life - forgetting that the nightly news doesn't report the vast majority of cases where nothing of this sort happens at all.”
― Paul Bloom, Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil

“it’s not that certain cruel actions are committed because the perpetrators are self-consciously and deliberatively evil. Rather it is because they think they are doing good. They are fueled by a strong moral sense. As Pinker puts it: “The world has far too much morality. If you added up all the homicides committed in pursuit of self-help justice, the casualties of religious and revolutionary wars, the people executed for victimless crimes and misdemeanors, and the targets of ideological genocides, they would surely outnumber the fatalities from amoral predation and conquest.”
― Paul Bloom, Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion – How Emotion Undermines Morality, Justice, and Good Policy

“The Old Testament tells us to love our neighbors, the New Testament to love our enemies. The moral rationale seems to be: Love your neighbors and enemies; that way you won’t kill them. But frankly, I don’t love my neighbors, to say nothing of my enemies. Better, then, is the following idea: Don’t kill your neighbors or enemies, even if you don’t love them. . . . What really has expanded is not so much a circle of empathy as a circle of rights—a commitment that other living things, no matter how distant or dissimilar, be safe from harm and exploitation. And”
― Paul Bloom, Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion – How Emotion Undermines Morality, Justice, and Good Policy

“Are the religious individuals in a society more moral than the secular ones? Many researchers have looked into this, and the main finding is that there are few interesting findings. There are subtle effects here and there: some studies find, for instance, that the religious are slightly more prejudiced, but this effect is weak when one factors out other considerations, such as age and political attitudes, and exists only when religious belief is measured in certain ways. The only large effect is that religious Americans give more to charity (including nonreligious charities) than atheists do. This holds even when one controls for demographics (religious Americans are more likely than average to be older, female, southern, and African American). To explore why this relationship exists, the political scientists Robert Putnam and David Campbell asked people about life after death, the importance of God to morality, and various other facets of religious belief. It turns out that none of their answers to such questions were related to behaviors having to do with volunteering and charitable giving. Rather, participation in the religious community was everything. As Putnam and Campbell put it, “Once we know how observant a person is in terms of church attendance, nothing that we can discover about the content of her religious faith adds anything to our understanding or prediction of her good neighborliness.… In fact, the statistics suggest that even an atheist who happened to become involved in the social life of the congregation (perhaps through a spouse) is much more likely to volunteer in a soup kitchen than the most fervent believer who prays alone. It is religious belongingness that matters for neighborliness, not religious believing.” This importance of community, and the irrelevance of belief, extends as well to the nastier effects of religion. The psychologist Jeremy Ginges and his colleagues found a strong relationship between religiosity and support for suicide bombing among Palestinian Muslims, and, again, the key factor was religious community, not religious belief: mosque attendance predicted support for suicide attacks; frequency of prayer did not. Among Indonesian Muslims, Mexican Catholics, British Protestants, Russian Orthodox in Russia, Israeli Jews, and Indian Hindus, frequency of religious attendance (but again, not frequency of prayer) predicts responses to questions such as “I blame people of other religions for much of the trouble in this world.”
― Paul Bloom, Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil

“If you suffer for something that gives delight, soon the suffering itself can give joy.”
― Paul Bloom, The Sweet Spot: The Pleasures of Suffering and the Search for Meaning

“It is easy to see why so many people view empathy as a powerful force for goodness and moral change. It is easy to see why so many believe that the only problem with empathy is that too often we don’t have enough of it. I used to believe this as well. But now I don’t. Empathy has its merits. It can be a great source of pleasure, involved in art and fiction and sports, and it can be a valuable aspect of intimate relationships. And it can sometimes spark us to do good. But on the whole, it’s a poor moral guide. It grounds foolish judgments and often motivates indifference and cruelty. It can lead to irrational and unfair political decisions, it can corrode certain important relationships, such as between a doctor and a patient, and make us worse at being friends, parents, husbands, and wives.”
― Paul Bloom, Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion – How Emotion Undermines Morality, Justice, and Good Policy

“Some very common foods and drinks are aversive. Few people enjoy, at first, coffee, beer, tobacco, or chili pepper. Pleasure from pain is uniquely human. No other animal willingly eats such foods when there are alternatives. Philosophers have often looked for the defining feature of humans—language, rationality, culture, and so on. I'd stick with this: Man is the only animal that likes Tabasco sauce.”
― Paul Bloom, How Pleasure Works: The New Science of Why We Like What We Like

“Marsh recounts an anecdote about a psychopath who was being tested with a series of pictures and who failed over and over again to recognize fearful expressions, until finally she figured it out: “That’s the look people get right before I stab them.”
― Paul Bloom, Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil

“If you want to teach something quickly, reinforce it every time. But if you want it to stick once the teaching phase is over, reinforce it occasionally”
― Paul Bloom, Psych: The Story of the Human Mind

“Often people who commit terrible acts are empathic and caring in other parts of their lives. One manifestation of this, often pointed out by those who want to mock vegetarians, was the concern that many Nazis had for nonhuman animals. Hitler famously loved dogs and hated hunting, but this was nothing compared to Hermann Göring, who imposed rules restricting hunting, the shoeing of horses, and the boiling of lobsters and crabs—and mandated that those who violated these rules be sent to concentration camps!”
― Paul Bloom, Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion – How Emotion Undermines Morality, Justice, and Good Policy

“It might feel, at least to some of us, that our opinions about issues such as abortion and the death penalty are the products of careful deliberation and that our specific moral acts, such as deciding to give to charity or visit a friend in the hospital—or for that matter, deciding to shoplift or shout a racist insult out
of a car window—are grounded in conscious decision-making. But this is said to be mistaken. As Jonathan Haidt argues, we are not judges; we are lawyers, making up explanations after the deeds have been done. Reason is impotent. "We celebrate rationality," agrees de Waal, "but when push comes to shove we assign it little weight.”
― Paul Bloom, Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion

“The serial killer Gary Gilmore summed up the attitude of someone without moral feelings: “I was always capable of murder.… I can become totally devoid of feelings of others, unemotional. I know I’m doing something grossly fucking wrong. I can still go ahead and do it.”
― Paul Bloom, Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil

“Forgery is just the most dramatic example of the importance of origin. Arthur Koestler described a friend who owned a drawing that she first took to be a reproduction. When she later discovered that it was an original by Picasso, she displayed it more prominently, claimed that she saw it differently, and enjoyed it more. For her, its value went up.”
― Paul Bloom, Descartes' Baby: How the Science of Child Development Explains What Makes Us Human

“As the psychologist Steven Pinker puts it, “Exposure to worlds that can be seen only through the eyes of a foreigner, an explorer, or a historian can turn an unquestioned norm (‘That’s the way it’s done’) into an explicit observation (‘That’s what our tribe happens to do now’).” This is the point that Herodotus was making when he told the story of the Greeks and the Indians.”
― Paul Bloom, Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil

“Like most analyses, my conception of a meaningful activity is centered around significance and impact.”
― Paul Bloom, The Sweet Spot: The Pleasures of Suffering and the Search for Meaning

“A meaningful life, at least to some extent, has to do with what one does and how one affects people.”
― Paul Bloom, The Sweet Spot: The Pleasures of Suffering and the Search for Meaning

“Moral deliberation has to be somewhere in the brain, after all. It’s not going to be in the foot or the stomach, and it’s certainly not going to reside in some mysterious immaterial realm. So who cares about precisely where?”
― Paul Bloom, Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion

“Based on the ideas of the linguists Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf, this is the view that language doesn’t just change minds by transferring thoughts from one head to another; it configures how people make sense of the world, including about space, time, and causality.”
― Paul Bloom, Psych: The Story of the Human Mind

“Being a good person likely is more related to distanced feelings of compassion and kindness, along with intelligence, self-control, and a sense of justice. Being a bad person has more to do with a lack of regard for others and an inability to control one’s appetites.”
― Paul Bloom

“There is some truth to the aphorism of Anaïs Nin: “We don’t see the world as it is, we see it as we are.”
― Paul Bloom, Psych: The Story of the Human Mind

“pain can relieve anxiety by distracting you from your consciousness.”
― Paul Bloom, The Sweet Spot: The Pleasures of Suffering and the Search for Meaning