Almost nobody believes anymore that infants are insensate blobs. It seems both mad and evil to deny experience and feeling to a laughing, gurgling creature.
Paul BloomRead
Traditionally, psychology has been the study of two populations: university freshmen and white rats.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote humorously critiques the traditional focus of psychology on limited and unconventional subjects.
Paul Bloom highlights the irony in the study of psychology, pointing out that historically, research has been concentrated on university freshmen and white rats. This suggests a narrow understanding of human behavior and experience, indicating the need for broader and more diverse research subjects to truly understand the complexities of the human mind.
Themes
PsychologyResearchBehaviorHumorEducation
In practice
Example use cases
In a lecture on the evolution of psychology, this quote can illustrate how research subjects have evolved.
More from Paul Bloom
All quotes βMaybe 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 BloomRead
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 BloomRead
I want to convince you that humans are, to some extent, natural born essentialists. What I mean by this is we don't just respond to things as we see them or feel them or hear them. Rather, our response is conditioned on our beliefs, about what they really are, what they came from, what they're made of, what their hidden nature is.
Paul BloomRead
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 BloomRead
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 BloomRead
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