Paul Bloom

Introduction

Paul Bloom (born December 24, 1963) is a Canadian-American psychologist who works on how children and adults understand the physical and social world, with a focus on language, morality, religion, fiction and art. He is the Brooks and Suzanne Ragen Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Cognitive Science at Yale University and Professor of Psychology at the University of Toronto, which he joined in 2021.

Bloom has a dual career that is unusually successful on both sides. As a researcher he is one of the figures who helped establish that very young infants show social preferences, and as a writer he has published a run of trade books — Descartes' Baby, How Pleasure Works, Just Babies, Against Empathy, The Sweet Spot, Psych — that carry contested findings into general debate. The tension between those two roles is where most of the criticism of him is aimed.

Early Life and Education

Bloom was born into a Jewish family in Montreal, Quebec. He took his B.A. in psychology at McGill University in 1985 with honours first class, then a Ph.D. in cognitive psychology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1990 under the supervision of Susan Carey, with a dissertation on semantic structure and language development.

That training placed him inside the rationalist wing of cognitive science. Bloom is a self-described rationalist and an atheist, and a recurring theme of his work is that human beings arrive equipped with structured expectations about the world — about objects, about minds, about moral agents — rather than learning everything from experience.

Academic and Professional Career

Bloom taught psychology and cognitive science at the University of Arizona from 1990 to 1999, then moved to Yale, where he spent two decades and held the Brooks and Suzanne Ragen chair. Since 2003 he has been co-editor-in-chief of Behavioral and Brain Sciences, the journal whose target-article-and-commentary format puts him at the centre of disciplinary argument. He moved to the University of Toronto in 2021.

His honours include the Stanton Prize from the Society for Philosophy and Psychology in 2002 — he served as that society's president in 2005–06 — the Lex Hixon Prize for teaching in the social sciences at Yale in 2004, election as a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science in 2006, and the one-million-dollar Klaus J. Jacobs Research Prize in 2017 for work on the development of morality. His introductory psychology course was one of the first chosen for Yale's Open Courses initiative in 2007, which made him known to a very large non-academic audience.

Major Contributions to Psychology

Word learning as theory-building

Bloom's early work argued against the idea that children learn word meanings by simple association. In How Children Learn the Meanings of Words he defended what came to be called the "smart word learning" view: children use their understanding of the speaker's intentions and of the syntactic context to constrain what a new word could mean, treating word learning as a kind of inference rather than as conditioning.

Essentialism and pleasure

In How Pleasure Works, Bloom argued that pleasure depends heavily on what we believe about the history and essence of a thing, not only on its sensory properties. A sweater once worn by John F. Kennedy, or an object owned by a celebrity, is enjoyed differently from an identical object with a different history; a chamber pot once used by a queen is fascinating and an identical unused one is not. The underlying psychological claim is that humans are intuitive essentialists, and that the perceived essence of an object is a genuine part of the experience of it.

The moral life of babies

With Kiley Hamlin and Karen Wynn, Bloom published work in 2007 reporting that preverbal infants — six and ten months old — preferred a puppet that helped another climb a hill over one that hindered it, and that infants' choices seemed sensitive to whether a third party helped or harmed someone they had previously seen as similar to themselves. The finding supported Bloom's position in Just Babies that humans are born with a rudimentary moral sense — a capacity for evaluating helpers and harmers, some responsiveness to fairness, and a limited, partial concern for others — which culture then shapes rather than creates from nothing.

Against empathy

Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion (2016) is his best-known and most disputed argument. Bloom defines empathy narrowly, as feeling what another person feels, and argues that it is a poor guide to moral action: it is biased toward the vivid and the nearby, it is innumerate — one identified victim draws more response than thousands of statistical ones — it can be parochial, it can be exhausted, and in some cases it makes people worse, because feeling another's distress can motivate avoidance rather than help. He recommends rational compassion instead: caring about others' welfare without matching their affect, and allocating help by reasoning about where it does most good.

Chosen suffering

The Sweet Spot (2021) examines why people voluntarily seek out experiences that are unpleasant — spicy food, sad films, physical exertion, horror — arguing that many pleasures are deliberately chosen sufferings, and that the search for meaning often requires difficulty. He went on to extend the argument to artificial intelligence. In recent essays and papers with Emily Zohar and Michael Inzlicht, he and his co-authors argue that AI companions and other "frictionless" systems are dangerous precisely because they succeed: what looks like help — removing effort, anticipation and difficulty — removes the conditions under which learning, relationships and moral development actually happen. It is the Sweet Spot thesis applied to a technology that was barely in public view when the book appeared.

A critic of his own field's methods

In 2024 Bloom published an essay whose title states its claim directly: "Much of developmental psychology is not worth doing." The target was the staple design of his own subfield — comparing different age groups to establish when children acquire an adult-like capacity — and the objection was that many such studies have no clear theoretical justification. His analogy was to an earlier phase of neuroscience, when the fascination of localising functions in the brain eventually gave way to questions worth answering. He advocated redirecting the field toward research on developmental mechanisms, and he acknowledged having produced the kind of work he was criticising.

The paper was unusually conspicuous for being a methodological argument in a sociology journal rather than a psychology one, and it originated as a post on Bloom's newsletter, Small Potatoes. That route — a claim sharpened for a general audience and then hardened into a scholarly paper — has itself become part of the discussion about what his recent career consists of.

Major Publications

  • How Children Learn the Meaning of Words (2000) — the case for inference-based word learning.
  • Descartes' Baby: How the Science of Child Development Explains What Makes Us Human (2004) — on intuitive dualism and its consequences.
  • How Pleasure Works: The New Science of Why We Like What We Like (2010) — essentialism and the experience of objects and art.
  • Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil (2013) — the argument for an innate moral foundation.
  • Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion (2016) — the book that made him a public figure beyond psychology.
  • The Sweet Spot: The Pleasures of Suffering and the Search for Meaning (2021) and Psych: The Story of the Human Mind (2023).

Impact and Legacy

Bloom has been among the most effective popularisers of developmental psychology of his generation, and his journal editorship, teaching prizes and million-dollar research prize reflect standing inside the field as well as outside it. His arguments have entered philosophy, economics and law, where debates about the role of empathy in ethics and policy have grown more prominent since 2016. He writes regularly for The New York Times, The Atlantic and The Guardian.

The case against him

A narrow definition doing a lot of work. The most common objection, made sharply by Jamil Zaki in The War for Kindness, is that Against Empathy attacks a definition rather than a phenomenon. Much of the scientific literature uses "empathy" broadly, to include concern for another's welfare and the motivation to help — which is very close to what Bloom calls compassion. Once empathy is defined narrowly as affect-matching, it is easy to show that it has biases; but the biases of one component of empathy are not evidence that the whole capacity is a poor moral guide. Critics also point to evidence that empathy can be extended and trained, which undercuts the implication that its limits are fixed.

Rational compassion may not supply motivation. A second objection is philosophical and older than the book: reason can rank outcomes but does not obviously generate the motive to act on them. If compassion is stripped of its affective component, what is left may be accurate and inert. Bloom's empirical examples of effective altruism show that reasoning helps, but not that reasoning alone moves people.

The infant findings are contested. The Hamlin, Wynn and Bloom 2007 result has proved difficult to reproduce at the original magnitude; independent replication attempts have returned smaller or null effects, and the robustness of the basic preference in preverbal infants is actively debated. This matters because Just Babies builds a large argument on that foundation, and because the popular version of the claim — babies are born moral — is stronger than the evidence in either direction.

Essentialism is itself unsettled. The argument of How Pleasure Works relies on psychological essentialism being a real and pervasive feature of human cognition. That is a live research programme with genuine support, but it is not settled, and the claim that perceived essence is a constituent of pleasure rather than one contributor among several goes beyond what the demonstrations establish.

Trade books flatten the disagreement. The structural criticism is that Bloom's popular writing presents findings he himself knows to be contested — innate moral sense, the perils of empathy, religion as a by-product — with a confidence appropriate to a review of a mature literature rather than to an active dispute. His 2005 Atlantic essay arguing that religion is an accidental by-product of other cognitive capacities is a good example: it is a serious hypothesis with real support, and also one that adaptationist critics reject, but a reader of the essay would not learn that. The same flattening appears in Psych, which tells a confident story of the human mind from a field that is not currently in a position to tell confident stories. What has changed since the book is that the habit is no longer confined to the trade writing. Bloom's own infant-morality findings are among those that proved difficult to reproduce, yet the 2007 original argued from a single experimental tradition rather than from a settled literature; "Much of developmental psychology is not worth doing" makes a similarly sweeping negative claim about a class of research, in a sociology journal rather than a psychology one, without offering the systematic corpus analysis that would establish how widespread the problem is. The criticism of his popular work — that a genuinely live dispute is reported with more confidence than it supports — applies in much the same terms to his most recent academic argument, and it is directed at his own colleagues rather than at his opponents.

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References

  • Bloom, P. (2000). How Children Learn the Meanings of Words. MIT Press.

Last updated: 2026-10-20

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