Nature vs. Nurture (with Paul Bloom)

May 26 2025

How much of our success or failure is written in our genes? How much is under our control? Is it nature or nurture or is that dichotomy too simplistic? Hear EconTalk's Russ Roberts and psychologist Paul Bloom discuss why the nature vs. nurture question is actually worth taking seriously and how by understanding it we can help ourselves and others.

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Time	Podcast Episode Highlights
0:37	Intro. [Recording date: April 29, 2025.] Russ Roberts: Today is April 29th, 2025, and my guest is psychologist Paul Bloom of the University of Toronto. His Substack is called Small Potatoes. This is Paul's seventh appearance on the program. He was last here in April of 2024, talking about seeking immortality. Paul, welcome back to EconTalk. Paul Bloom: It's always great to talk to you, Russ.
00:57	Russ Roberts: In a recent essay on your Substack, Small Potatoes, that we'll link to, you asked Claude [an AI--artificial intelligence--bot/agent created by Anthropic--Econlib Ed.]: 'What do you think of the question: Is it nature or is it nurture?' And Claude responded, 'The nature versus nurture question is one of those deceptively simple dichotomies that doesn't hold up well under scrutiny. It's like asking whether a rectangle's area is determined by its length or its width.' And then Claude goes on to say, 'It's all complicated. These two things are always both in play.' And you responded--in your essay, not to Claude--'Claude has provided an accurate distillation of the consensus in my field. It probably assumed I would agree with this consensus. I don't.' Before we get to why you don't, let's talk about the intellectual battle lines that are drawn in this debate: the nativists versus the empiricists. What are they about? Paul Bloom: So, traditionally, there's been this great intellectual battle--and maybe the great intellectual battle--in philosophy and psychology, between the nativists starting with Plato, continuing, I guess, most famously to Noam Chomsky of our modern time, who argue that a tremendous amount of what we are--how we think, what we desire--is constrained by our biological natures. We're born that way. And, that's one side of the debate. That's the side of the debate--I went to graduate school at MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology]. My advisors were Susan Carey and Steven Pinker. And I was very much steeped in that intellectual tradition. On the opposite side, the side, which has actually, honestly, always been more popular, is the idea that human nature is infinitely malleable. You know, the idea of the British empiricists, like John Locke, David Hume, who would argue that all we have in our heads is the capacity to form associations, and there's nothing fixed about human nature. And, this continues to [inaudible 00:02:58] to B.F. Skinner in modern times. Many people who do neural network modeling believe the idea of human nature is a fiction. We are merely the sort of sum of the inputs we received. So that's the traditional debate. And, I've always had one side of the debate. I've always been a nativist. I've argued that evolutionary theory, that developmental psychology, consideration of the world we live in--all support the idea of a human nature. But I've always thought that as a really good debate. I could be wrong. It was just a sign that you're in a good debate. More and more, I've been hearing people say, 'Oh. No, no, no, no, no. That's a very simplistic way of thinking about it. Nature and nurture blur together. Everything is an interaction.' And my desire to say, 'No, no, no. This is a good fight. This is a good disagreement,' motivated me to write the Substack post to argue, and no, actually, it's a damn good question, 'Is it nature? Is it nurture?' Russ Roberts: So, before we go on, I do want to tell my, it's one of my all time favorite jokes. I think I've told it once on the program--maybe to you, Paul--I apologize. Paul Bloom: Maybe. Russ Roberts: I heard it in a talk by Joseph Telushkin. It goes like this: 'The kid in high school comes home with his report card. His dad is looking over his shoulder as he looks at his grades. And they're horrible. They're all Ds and Fs. And the kid looks back over his shoulder at his dad and says, 'What do you think, Dad? Nature or nurture?' Paul Bloom: You didn't tell that to me. I like that. Russ Roberts: It's profound. It's a very--it's a serious joke. Paul Bloom: And all I will say is--to do the terrible thing and analyze a joke--is he is is asking a good question-- Russ Roberts: Absolutely-- Paul Bloom: The kid could just say, 'Dad, if I was raised in another family, do you think I'd be this dumb? What if I was adopted? Maybe. How do you think that'd affect me?' It's a really good question. Russ Roberts: My colleague at the University of Rochester, Walter Oi, my former colleague and he's gone--I'm no longer at Rochester, and he's no longer with us. But Walter used to say, 'The two most important choices you make in life are your spouse and your parents.' What he meant, of course, that you don't choose your parents, but who you get stuck with as your parents, for better or for worse, makes a huge difference. So he was, in that sense, very much, at least in some sense of nature--maybe he meant nurture also, right? How they raised you, and so it's hard to say. Paul Bloom: People in the behavioral genetics field say parents have this enormous influence on their kids. Unfortunately, most of it is in the moment of conception.
5:37	Russ Roberts: And that's a very, very deep question. I've had Bryan Caplan on the program, who argues that our influence on our kids as parents--as opposed to passing on our genes--that our influence is very limited, that there's not a lot of evidence that we make a difference. I disagree with him, but the basic thrust of that is healthy to consider, because we so desperately want to believe that how we parent our kids makes all the difference. We probably overrate it. Paul Bloom: I think we do. I think that, in some way, I would be in favor of a little bit of a backlash against the behavioral geneticists--because I would argue the Caplan view a lot, and gradually, friends and family have pushed me away and pointed out ways in which parents do affect their kids, maybe in ways that psychologists don't typically study. A relative of mine, this girl, is very into Italian sports cars, and her father's very into Italian sports cars. Well, I don't think that's conveyed by the genes, and I don't think it's an accident. And then, sometimes nature and nurture conspire together. So a family friend of mine is a butcher, and his sons are butchers. I know more than one father-daughter combination where both are professional philosophers at Ivy League universities. Russ Roberts: Yeah. Again, maybe a little of both. But, the point is, is that you think it's a legitimate question. You think this idea, this modern consensus that it all blurs together is the wrong way to think about it. Why? Paul Bloom: So, here's a case where it's not a legitimate question, and I want to sort of be clear about this: and it's your joke case. It's the case we're talking about now, which is: how do people differ from one another? Anybody who has thought of this deeply will say, 'Look, there are very few cases where it's all nature.' Eye color, maybe, is a case where it's just all nature. But there's not many cases like that. For things like--and there are very few cases where it's all nurture, too. So, whether you win a lottery is random. But most things are a combination. When we talk about intelligence, personality, whether you become a criminal, whether you get divorced, whether you have a happy marriage, anybody who thinks about decisions, it's going to be a combination of your genes--it'll set you up, your temperament and so on--and your experience and what happens to you in your life. All the data shows it's a mix. And then there's an enormous amount of debate--I think good debate--over what percentage is one, what percentage is the other? Can you think of it in terms of percentage? How do genes affect things? And so on. So, I'm not against that. If somebody said, '[inaudible 00:08:25] differences; it's going to be a mixed thing,' that's right. But I'm more interested in universals. And, this comes up so often when you have conversations with people, when you talk about history, when you talk about politics. Sooner or later, somebody--often you--says, 'It's part of our nature.' You might say something part of our nature to be suspicious of people in other groups. As part of our nature, you have said many times to feel an affinity for those close to us, particularly our children. And, I think you're right. I don't think that claim that you make--I'm getting you on my side by saying 'you'; whether you know it or not, you're on my side here--I don't think those claims that you make are vacuous or old-fashioned or have been superseded by our science. I think they're actually true. I think some things are our nature; and then some things plainly are not. Some things are products of culture or accident. and I think it's a wonderful, important project to try to pull those apart.
9:25	Russ Roberts: So, that's an intellectual exercise--not exercise, but I would call it an intellectual agenda for, say, the field of psychology or evolutionary behavioral psychology, whatever flavor you're going to look at. I think the challenge here is that--and this is how I take your essay, and tell me if I'm right--we sort of assume it's 50/50, a mix. Just to tell another one of my favorite jokes--this was allegedly a true story--a group of football players are coming home on an airplane, and they're bored. And one circulates among his teammates, he says, 'Everybody put a dollar'--it probably was $20--'Put $20 in this hat and write your name on it, and I'll reach in and I'll pull out one of the $20 bills. And if it's the one with your name on it, you get all the money in the hat.' 100 players, $2000 bucks possible winnings. And one of the players, trying to decide whether to play, says, 'Well, what are the odds that I'm going to win?' And the guy running the game says, 'Well, they're 50/50. You either win or you lose.' Of course, they're not 50/50. They're 1 out of 100. But, it's a mix, so there's, I think, a tendency when we say, 'Well, they both matter, so it's 50/50.' And I think that's what's wildly wrong. In particular, when we think about the challenges we face as individuals--forget about parenting, forget about public policy; we'll come back to that--but when we think about our own shortcomings and what we can overcome and what we can't overcome, you mentioned temperament. Some people, I think--I'd be curious whether you agree--seem to have a happy disposition. Sometimes it feels like, in some children, from birth. Now, it doesn't mean you can't be happier. It doesn't mean you can't make yourself happier at some point, or you can't make your less-happy children happier. But, temperament may be mostly genetic. I don't know. Paul Bloom: I don't know either, but it's at least partially genetic. And, you and I could go over the papers together, but [?]we don't need to. We've seen cheerful kids who are always cracking up, goofy, and happy, and then grumpy kids who are always, like--or anxious kids, extroverted kids, introverted kids. And, we see the same thing in adults. And you know what? Happy parents tend to give you happy kids. Now, again, we get it with just the standard problem, is that: when you're not looking at cases of, say, adoption, you never know whether maybe the kid got happy because being with happy people makes you happy. Or they modeled themselves out. Or whether it's just the genes. But, yeah: I think there's some things that are very hard to deny. And that temperament is, in some way, something you start off with is fairly undeniable. Then, there's an interesting discussion: If you are, by nature, a dour person, how happy can you get? And, I think the answer is it has to be part of the way people can change. People can--introverts can become more sociable. Sad people can get more happy. But it is harder for them. Russ Roberts: So, I think the question that psychology might help us with is asking: Maybe you can't; and maybe facing that reality is better than being deluded into thinking you can. So, I think that's another place where this really matters. I think people desperately want to believe that they can change themselves. I know I do. I like to think that, and yet maybe I'd be happier knowing this is who I am. You know? Paul Bloom: A student sent me an email. I taught a freshman seminar on rationality, and a student sent me a wonderful email, saying he learned from the seminar that some things are affected by the genes in different ways. And his question for me was this: Suppose I'm by nature good at some things and bad at other things. Is the lesson of psychology, you should sort of say, 'Focus on what you're good at. Build up on those and ignore your weaknesses'? That was a great question. But I thought about it: it can't be that simple, right? Like, if you're going to university and you're really bad at studying, you should try to get better at studying. You're not going to get very far. If you're very bad at dealing with people, you got to work on that. On the other hand, if I'm really bad at music or I'm really unathletic, it's not obvious that I should put my energies in improving, as opposed to focusing on the small areas I'm good at and trying to build on those. And I think this is a question which, by the way, psychologists have absolutely no answer to, but what does one do with one's strengths and weaknesses? Does one work on one's strengths, one's weaknesses? I don't know. Probably should better to ask a coach or figure out what to do. Russ Roberts: There's a very powerful Somerset Maugham short story called "The Alien Corn," which is about a young man who desperately wants to be a great pianist, a great musician, and finds out whether he is or not. And it's a pretty good story. I recommend it. Paul Bloom: I have a joke for you, Russ. Russ Roberts: Please. Paul Bloom: This guy goes to a tailor, and he gets a suit put on; and it is awful. It's really too long on one arm and too short--I know you've heard this--too short on another arm-- Russ Roberts: 'Course I have. Paul Bloom: He says, 'This is terrible.' He says, 'No, no, no, no, no, no. Pull in your left arm like this.' Nobody can see me doing it. 'Pull in your left arm like this. Turn your neck like this. Now it fits.' So he leaves the tailor shop, and he's stumbling around in this funny posture. And somebody runs up to him and says, 'My God. What a beautiful suit. Who is your tailor?' The guy says, 'Are you impressed with the suit?' The guy says, 'He must be a genius to fit a cripple like you.' And I feel I am the man, in my own life, I am the man in the suit, where I'm really bad at so many things and good at a small number of things, and I have successfully managed to tailor my life, that my contorted shape fits in the contours of my life. I'm a university professor and a writer, which are capacities that you could be bad at all sorts of things and be good at those things. Anyway. If I had to give it-- Russ Roberts: Yeah. If you look at it-- Paul Bloom: Go on. Russ Roberts: No. Go ahead. Paul Bloom: If I had to give advice, that joke is my advice. Nature has given you an ill-fitting suit. Maybe your best to kind of find a way to fit into it. I don't know. Russ Roberts: That's really quite beautiful. Paul Bloom: That's the right way to look at the metaphor. Russ Roberts: I was going to say, a different era, you'd be starving to death probably, but fortunately, you're born in a time where your limited skills-- Paul Bloom: Yes. Russ Roberts: I feel this way about myself all the time, so the metaphor really speaks to me. I just want to add: In the version I've heard of the joke, the guy walks out of the tailor shop, and two friends across the street see him and say, 'Oh my gosh. What happened to Paul? Yeah, he looks terrible. But, what a nice suit he's wearing.' I like yours, too. They're both great. Paul Bloom: My wife and I watch "End of the World"--TV series, like, zombie series--watching "The Last of Us," and I often wonder what I would do in a post-apocalyptic world. And, to go back to your point, I'd be going through the small thing and say, 'Well, I can't hunt. I can't build things. But do you need a research psychologist? Like, this is a small community where they benefit from that. Not really experimental, but more theoretical. I'll use some writing.' I don't know. They would, like, just send me back to be eaten by the zombies. Russ Roberts: Yeah. No, that's--an economist would say, 'Well, in that time, you'd spend less time investing in psychology and research skills.'
18:00	Russ Roberts: But this brings me to my next point--where we continue to cut up--which is: it's hard to argue there's a more nurturing viewpoint than the 10,000-hours hypothesis. Now, let's not debate whether this is what Malcolm Gladwell really wrote; and there's been lots of back and forth about it. But there are people who believe that if you set your mind to something, you can achieve greatness. You can make the Olympic team. Obviously, there's certain limitations. I'm 5'6. I'm not going to make the Olympic basketball team. But, music was a good example. Art is a good example. You can take art lessons, and you can improve it. If you spent 10,000 hours, you'd improve a lot. Could you become a successful artist? I don't think so, but many people do. And I think it's deeply comforting to believe that, unlike your story of overcoming your limitations and crafting a way to wear the suit that gives it a decent appearance, a lot of people like the idea that anything is possible. Paul Bloom: Yeah. I bet it depends on the domain a bit. I'm not going to become the world champion heavyweight boxer no matter how much I train. But, it also is true and maybe obvious that the more you work on something, the better you get. I actually read a recent post by Bryan Caplan, who talked about the non-effects of parenting. And, Caplan says something interesting, which is, 'Maybe we don't work hard enough at it. What if you spend 10 hours a day with your kid, totally obsessed with focusing on some magic[?]? Maybe we just give up too soon. Maybe if you spent all your time at something, you would get better at it.' I guess the question is-- Russ Roberts: That's a ridiculous idea. I love Bryan, but the idea that more time would make me a better parent, I think, is a misreading of the thing. But go ahead. I'm sorry. I apologize for interrupting. Paul Bloom: I guess the question that is the best use of your time. Like, so I like to work on my writing because I think--I try to be a good writer, and I would think time spent in that will make me a better writer. Will I ever be a fantastic writer? Probably not, but I could get better and better. Russ Roberts: Agreed. Paul Bloom: Then, there's things like program. I'm kind of a crap programmer. Whenever I try, it's just slow, and I fall behind other people. If I spent all that time on it, an enormous amount of time, I will be like a so-so programmer, a better-than-average programmer. So, I think to some extent you have to sort of patch up parts of you that need to be patched up, that are just essential to being an adult and so on. If somebody said to me, 'I don't want to put energy into being a good father, because I'm not so good to start with. It's such a waste of time,' I'd say, 'No, no. You have to be a good father. You have to put in the time to do that.' But, if somebody said, 'I tried playing musical instruments, and I'm bored with it and I don't like it. Now I'm going to spend 10 hours a day doing it,' I'd say, 'Are you sure you want to do that? You're not going to be that good.' And I think part of the problem with the whole 10,000-hours thing, is that it is true that the people who are fantastic at something, do spend an enormous amount of time training, but I think people get the causality a bit mixed up. It's not that training is sufficient[?]. It's that: if you love something, you enjoy doing it, and then the enjoy doing it makes you better, which makes you love it more, and so on. Russ Roberts: Yeah. I think people with great gifts--it's not just enjoy it. The slope of the curve is steeper for a lot of people. I remember the first time I went to a gym as an adult, and I saw a lot of people that looked a lot like me--meaning flabby, soft, not sculpted. But, 'Wait a minute. I saw in the ad'--and then I want to go up to them and say, 'How long have you been coming here? Because, if it's a long time, that's data for me.' and seriously, part of the reason I don't go to the gym every day is that for whatever reason, the slope of my curve is pretty flat. I'm not saying I can't get stronger and I can't improve, but my genetic gifts there are very limited and I think it's relevant. Paul Bloom: And that's a great example. The people who spend a lot of time in the gym, probably there's a correlation to being very fit, because they enjoy it enough that everyone else drops out before. Russ Roberts: Exactly. Paul Bloom: And so, there's sort of a virtuous cycle between doing something and being good at it. And then something really interesting happens, where some special people just arise above the rest of us. It could be something like music or art or bodybuilding, but it could also be something like, 'Well, you are really good at interviewing, and synthesizing, and talking about things,' because you are putting in hours. But it's not like you were assigned by a psychologist and experiments. Russ Roberts: Exactly. Paul Bloom: You had to do a podcast for, what, 20 years? Russ Roberts: Yeah, roughly. Paul Bloom: That would be torture for many people. But you love it, so you're good at it, and because you're good at it, you do it more, and so on and so on. Russ Roberts: Yeah. Actually, the truth is, is that I'm ashamed at how little time I spend trying to become a better interviewer. And every once in a while, I think, 'Is there a more systematic way I could do this than just doing it a lot?' But, it's not my full-time job. It's a side gig, so that's the way it is. Thanks. Paul Bloom: In some way, university president, you'd think that is a big deal and everything. But I don't know, 100 years from now, when I ask our AI [artificial intelligence] masters, 'Who is Russ Roberts? What did he do?' maybe university president will come second. Russ Roberts: No, they're going to definitely get it wrong. They'll talk-- Paul Bloom: They'll hallucinate. Russ Roberts: 'He was a modest kayak competitor in the 2016 Olympics.' It'll be that kind of thing. Paul Bloom: They'll take our discussion and say, 'He was a serious gym buff. Spent a lot of time in the gym.' Russ Roberts: Exactly. Paul Bloom: And have some memory of that. Russ Roberts: Exactly. We don't talk about that enough, by the way, the way that AI ignores, at least for now, probably struggles to deal with sarcasm and humor and takes it as factual. I haven't thought about that. It's a really interesting idea. I think we need to do more of this kind of conversation, Paul. Paul Bloom: To throw it off track. Russ Roberts: Yeah, and seed my future reputation with false achievements.
25:10	Russ Roberts: I want to ask a different question, get a little serious for a minute. Not too serious, but a little serious. When I was reading your essay, the thing that came to mind was the seriousness of the conversation over time between scholars in this area. The famous joke, which I think is kind of silly, but people love to make it, which is: Why are academics so petty? And the answer is: Because the stakes are so small. And I've never found that. I don't think it's particularly true. I don't think it's interesting. I don't even get it, actually. It doesn't even make sense. Paul Bloom: Even the word 'academic' is sometimes used as a synonym for useless, of no importance. 'Oh, it's just academic.' Russ Roberts: Yeah, exactly. Paul Bloom: And, I find it very offensive. Russ Roberts: Okay. Well, I won't say it. I won't use that. But, here's the case. This is not about the stakes being small. I would argue the stakes are quite large; and the intellectual debate over nature versus nurture strikes me as remarkably intense for its importance in almost any practical sense. And I'm curious--I have a hypothesis--I'm curious to hear what your thoughts are. Why do we care so much? Why do people--in your example, the nativists versus the empiricists, the people who think it's all nature versus all nurture--why are they so passionate about this disagreement, when, in fact, 99.9% of the time it's not really important and we all would go about our lives, anyway? Paul Bloom: I think it's a good question. I think the answer is: In general, I think we all carry within ourselves a theory of human nature. And, some of us do this for a living, but everyone carries within it. When somebody says to you, sincerely, that children have to learn to hate, maybe they're right, maybe they're wrong. But, it's a theory. It's a theory of human nature. When somebody says, 'There are no differences between groups and abilities, intellectual abilities. That's a horrible, racist thing to say that,, that's a theory of human nature. When somebody says different human groups have different capacities and potential, that's a theory of human nature. So, that's one part of the answer. But the bigger part of the answer is that it matters so much. It matters. It matters for politics, for instance. So, if your theory is that we are infinitely malleable, then if you create the proper state, you could have a world without prejudice, without hatred, without sexism, without envy, without cruelty, and so on. All you have to do is have the right education in place. On the other hand, if you believe that we have innate constraints that are universal, then you fall into, I think, what Thomas Sowell called the Tragic View or the Constrained View of human nature, which says that there's a limit to how much you could solve these problems. People are going to hate, people are going to feel envy, people are going to feel jealousy, people are going to be competitive, people are going to feel more connected to those they love than to strangers. That despite all the indoctrination in the world, they're still going to love their children. Maybe they're still going to be religious. That leads you to think about a different state, a different way of doing things. It tempers your utopian dreams, and it leads to a different set of policies you endorse. I think this, 'Which side is right?' matters a lot.
28:48	Russ Roberts: Well, that was my answer. I'm looking at my notes, and I've got Thomas Sowell's Conflict of Visions in the next paragraph. Which is an extraordinary book, by the way, and I strongly recommend it. And, exactly as you said: He says there's two visions of human nature, and they are extremely important for how you view the role of government and public policy: the utopian view that anything is possible versus the constrained view--I don't remember the terminology he uses, but the 'constrained view' is I think is the right phrase--that we're basically not malleable. Used that phrase, used malleable before. So, we're not malleable. So I think it does matter a lot. And, I'm struck, when you said children are taught to hate or not taught to--children are taught to hate. They don't hate as part of their nature. Many people take one side or the other on that. They have no evidence on it. They hold that view overwhelming--well, excuse me: that isn't fair. Their evidence is casual, I would say--their own experiences in life, either with their children, other children, themselves. But the thing that's crazy is that they feel strongly about it. They have no formal evidence on it; and I think they take the view that they want to believe is true, overwhelmingly. It's a form of comfort. Paul Bloom: That's right. That's right. The way I'm framing it, which I think is the way it should be, is the facts should come first, the way the world really is. And the politics should then fit the contours of the facts. But this [?], itself, shows an alarming ignorance of human nature if I think that people think this way. Rather: You have your political goals, you have your social goals, you have the way you want the world to be, and then you say, 'Well, the facts must fit that.' Russ Roberts: Yeah. So, if I can probe--and perhaps you'll be uncomfortable with this, so we'll edit this out. Paul Bloom: We will edit it out. Russ Roberts: You'll edit it out if this is really off-limits, Paul. But I'm going to guess that, on average, you would describe yourself as left of center. Paul Bloom: Yeah. Russ Roberts: I think you would call yourself a center-left person. Is that fair? Paul Bloom: Yes, that's fair. Russ Roberts: And, I would describe myself as a center-right person. Sometimes I'm more classically liberal--classical liberal--than conservative, but in this conversation about nature versus nurture, I would call myself on the right and I would call yourself on the left, recognizing that it's kind of a crude, crude simplification, of course. Because, there's no metric, and I don't want to overstate. But, that makes me, on average, in some dimension, a nature person, and it makes you, on average, a nurture person. Is that fair? Would you describe yourself as a nurture person, or is your view on this debate consistent with your own political views? That's what I'm asking, perhaps unfairly. Paul Bloom: No, that's not unfair at all. I'm very much of a human nature person. I agree with Chomsky, and Plato before him, that a lot of our natures have been wired up, that humans are not just a product of their culture. We start off with certain things, and some of them are very sweet and some of them aren't sweet at all, and that a proper politics should respect that. I'm not sure the extent to which this clashes with my sort of left-leaning political views, and in some way, it may not be--I mean, I'm not sure. Noam Chomsky, who is extremely a man of the left, an anarchist, is also the foremost proponent of built-in innate structure, and he argued that a blank slate is a dictator's dream and was very concerned with the repressive governments of fascists. You could just as well add communists to the list of people who tried to mold people into what they are not. I struggle with the question of how to mesh my politics with my theory of human nature. I would worry, but I'll have to accept the possibility that my theory of human nature ends up kind of following the dictates of my politics, rather than the other way around. But I think, to some extent, here's one way in which I think makes me more sort of a Democrat than a Republican in my theory of human nature, which is: I recognize that often the state has to have a role in kind of squashing or redirecting our worst instincts. So, in my younger days, I was more of a libertarian, but I began being concerned with what you guys call externalities and the fact that people are actually imperfect, and maybe at times you need other people to tamper them down. Kind of a rambly answer. How does it sound?
34:14	Russ Roberts: No, I don't think so. I'm going to try to adapt it to my own situation and my own consistencies or inconsistencies. I think the danger--obviously there's a danger that you delude yourself, and you think that your worldview of politics stems from facts, like you said, when in fact it's the other way around. But, I think that the more challenging question is, the real dangerous delusion is to say, 'Well, human nature is pretty fixed, and therefore there's no role for government in making the world better,' because it's always going to face the unintended consequences of what Adam Smith talked about when he wrote about the man of system. Smith says, 'The man of system tries to,' and by that he meant the utopian, the person who had a communist ideal or some other--he didn't have communism in his day, but he was worried about the overconfident leader who felt he could rearrange society. The metaphor that Smith uses is that he would try to adjust the positions of the pieces on the chessboard without any regard to their motion that they are endowed with. I didn't say that very well, and I apologize to my Smith buddies that I don't know it by heart, but I don't. And I'm not going to bother looking it up, but we'll put a link to the actual quote. It's a beautiful quote. Look it up. But, in the Smith vision, the reason that visionaries are dangerous is, because they want to ignore human nature and the constraints of human nature, they actually lead to disaster. They lead to authoritarianism, to tyranny, to dystopia. The utopian ideal doesn't just fail: it leads to a dystopian result. I think if you're a libertarian or a conservative of a certain kind, you're comforted by that, and you say, 'Well, we don't have to do anything, because it's just too hard and it leads to counterproductive results.' And I think that's cheating. I think a more honest view is that there probably are things that government can do, and sometimes governments do, that make the world a better place. You just don't want to step off the rails too far into utopianism and into illusion, but that doesn't mean that you can't help people and make them better off, and that might be a good idea. What do you think? Paul Bloom: Yeah. I like that. I mean, two things. One thing is one of the many things we have in common is our love of Adam Smith. I mean, you've written a book on him. I'm less enamored of him, but I often reread The Theory of Moral Sentiments, and there's so much rich stuff there, this deep understanding of human nature, I think. And then the second thing is that you can[?] believe that there's a human nature driving us in certain ways; but also, there's a certain duality. And I don't mean this in a religious or spiritual sense, but just as a matter of fact, we're able to reflect on our natures. I think only humans could do this. We could reflect on our natures and say: It's human nature for me to care so much more about--maybe people who look like me than people who don't look like me, and that's just the way we're wired up. But it's wrong. It's wrong. It's human nature for me to value my kids a million times more than I value your kids, but maybe it shouldn't be a million. It should be a thousand. So then, you have to, in some sense, fight back against human nature; and that's, I think, one of the purposes of societies. You have laws--and this is a very crude way of putting it--but you have laws in recognition of the fact that people want to break them. And you don't just say, 'Well, people want to break it: people want to steal and torture and kill. Might as well let them. That's their nature.' You say, 'No, no. We don't want that, so we'll get men with guns. We'll stop you from doing that.' And that's the beginning of government. And this could apply in all sorts of levels. We don't normally care about the distant future because we're short-sighted creatures, so let's have the government have advertisement saying: Care more about climate change. Let's have climate taxes, and so on. And for any of these, you could disagree, but the detail--say, the government's pushing too far, the government's pushing too little--but I don't think there's anything incompatible with saying we have a strong human nature, but also in some ways we should fight against it.
39:08	Russ Roberts: In fact I'd argue that--well, I think about this question a lot because of the economists' reliance on incentives. And we treat incentives the way nativists talk about human nature: 'You just set them right, and then you control them'; or in the nativist example, you can't: it's what they are. It is what it is. And so if I want it to be something different, I just change the incentives, and they'll behave differently. Many incentives, of course, do have an impact on our behavior. That's the essence of the economist's view of the world. But if that's your only view of the world, you've got a very narrow and, I think, tragic view, because a lot of life is about rejecting incentives that push you in one direction or another toward various cases of negligence, malfeasance. So, it's easy to comfort yourself and say, 'Well, of course I did that. That's what the incentives told me to do.' It's a terrible, terrible way to live. It may be the way many people do live under certain types of incentives. They are influenced by them. But I don't think we want to assume that our incentives are our destiny, the way you might assume our human nature is our destiny. It's depressing. Paul Bloom: I've seen the same point, but maybe put it in a different way. You asked before, 'What is a proper--why does it matter that we have a proper understanding of human nature?' And, I think an understanding of incentives is one answer to that. There's a stereotype of economists--which I think is probably wrong. You can tell me this is very unfair--that you guys tend to think that the big incentives are money, that we just throw money at people and, 'Give them money for this. Take away money for that. That'll do it.' But, if you think about how people work and how you, yourself, respond in the world--and I assume economists know this--it's not just money. It's: We do things to be loved, to be respected, to make sure that the right thing is done, to make justice done. We do things to appease God in our view. We do things because we want to be transcendent. We do things, because we hate people and want them to suffer. There's all sorts of incentives that go wired up as[?] because of our natures. And, anybody who wants to mold other people in the most benign way--everything, everybody from a president to a university president, to a friend, to a husband or wife--has to be sensitive. If one partner tells another, 'I wish you'd clean up after cooking,' they're not going to say, 'If you clean up after cooking, I'll give you $80.' This is crazy. You'd say, 'You got to clean up after cooking because you're being a jerk.' Well, I don't want to be a jerk. Nobody wants to be a jerk. Or you're acting like you don't love me. So, an appreciation of human nature, I think, is essential for dealing with people. Russ Roberts: That's funny you use those examples. I recently gave a talk on just this question. Well, it was not just this question. The question is whether it's worth reading The Theory of Moral Sentiments. And if you're, say, in the world of commerce, and I said, 'Well, if you're dealing with human beings, which you usually do in commerce, unless you're sitting in a room somewhere, developing an app that doesn't need to understand anything about how actual human beings behave, if you're doing anything in business, usually dealing with other people,' and it's helpful to understand exactly what you just said, that not all incentives are monetary. People have a desperate urge, as Adam Smith, himself, pointed out, to be respected and loved and--' Paul Bloom: Lovable, I think, was the term, right? Russ Roberts: No. Loved. Loved and lovely. Paul Bloom: Loved. Just loved, okay, Russ Roberts: Loved and lovely. Paul Bloom: Lovely, yes. Russ Roberts: Just for the people with the Adam Smith drinking game, it's: "Man naturally desires not only to be loved, but to be lovely." And that's, like you say, I think if you don't understand that--and understand it doesn't mean hearing it and going, 'That sounds true to me'--but understanding it by engaging with that idea and how you interact with others, how you watch others interact with yourself and with others, you're missing part of the great panorama of life, and you're not as good a friend, you're not as good a spouse, you're not as good an employee, employer, manager, and so on. Paul Bloom: And, it scales up. There's a paper I wrote--one of my favorite papers, and actually, the first author is Christina Starmans, who is now my wife--and it was about the claim that people want equality. And we argued that this is mistaken. We just got tons of evidence from developmental psychology research, from social studies--and people don't want equality. What people want is fairness. So, if you get paid more than me, I'm not necessarily horrified at this. I'm not angry about this, so long as I believe that you did more work, you are more deserving, and so on. When you give people societies, you say, 'What do you think of this society?' the equal society comes out at the bottom. What people want is a society where--often with a safety net, often with all sorts of things; it gets complicated--but they want something which is fair. I had this colleague at Yale, Tom Tyler, who studied what people want in a workplace. And again, they want to be paid nicely. That's true. But they also want to be respected; and they want to, again, feel like they're being treated fairly. And so I think this is really important stuff to know. [More to come, 44:49]

Time

Podcast Episode Highlights

0:37

Intro. [Recording date: April 29, 2025.]

Russ Roberts: Today is April 29th, 2025, and my guest is psychologist Paul Bloom of the University of Toronto. His Substack is called Small Potatoes. This is Paul's seventh appearance on the program. He was last here in April of 2024, talking about seeking immortality. Paul, welcome back to EconTalk.

Paul Bloom: It's always great to talk to you, Russ.

00:57

Russ Roberts: In a recent essay on your Substack, Small Potatoes, that we'll link to, you asked Claude [an AI--artificial intelligence--bot/agent created by Anthropic--Econlib Ed.]: 'What do you think of the question: Is it nature or is it nurture?'

And Claude responded, 'The nature versus nurture question is one of those deceptively simple dichotomies that doesn't hold up well under scrutiny. It's like asking whether a rectangle's area is determined by its length or its width.' And then Claude goes on to say, 'It's all complicated. These two things are always both in play.'

And you responded--in your essay, not to Claude--'Claude has provided an accurate distillation of the consensus in my field. It probably assumed I would agree with this consensus. I don't.'

Before we get to why you don't, let's talk about the intellectual battle lines that are drawn in this debate: the nativists versus the empiricists. What are they about?

Paul Bloom: So, traditionally, there's been this great intellectual battle--and maybe the great intellectual battle--in philosophy and psychology, between the nativists starting with Plato, continuing, I guess, most famously to Noam Chomsky of our modern time, who argue that a tremendous amount of what we are--how we think, what we desire--is constrained by our biological natures. We're born that way.

And, that's one side of the debate. That's the side of the debate--I went to graduate school at MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology]. My advisors were Susan Carey and Steven Pinker. And I was very much steeped in that intellectual tradition.

On the opposite side, the side, which has actually, honestly, always been more popular, is the idea that human nature is infinitely malleable. You know, the idea of the British empiricists, like John Locke, David Hume, who would argue that all we have in our heads is the capacity to form associations, and there's nothing fixed about human nature.

And, this continues to [inaudible 00:02:58] to B.F. Skinner in modern times. Many people who do neural network modeling believe the idea of human nature is a fiction. We are merely the sort of sum of the inputs we received.

So that's the traditional debate.

And, I've always had one side of the debate. I've always been a nativist. I've argued that evolutionary theory, that developmental psychology, consideration of the world we live in--all support the idea of a human nature. But I've always thought that as a really good debate. I could be wrong. It was just a sign that you're in a good debate.

More and more, I've been hearing people say, 'Oh. No, no, no, no, no. That's a very simplistic way of thinking about it. Nature and nurture blur together. Everything is an interaction.' And my desire to say, 'No, no, no. This is a good fight. This is a good disagreement,' motivated me to write the Substack post to argue, and no, actually, it's a damn good question, 'Is it nature? Is it nurture?'

Russ Roberts: So, before we go on, I do want to tell my, it's one of my all time favorite jokes. I think I've told it once on the program--maybe to you, Paul--I apologize.

Paul Bloom: Maybe.

Russ Roberts: I heard it in a talk by Joseph Telushkin. It goes like this: 'The kid in high school comes home with his report card. His dad is looking over his shoulder as he looks at his grades. And they're horrible. They're all Ds and Fs. And the kid looks back over his shoulder at his dad and says, 'What do you think, Dad? Nature or nurture?'

Paul Bloom: You didn't tell that to me. I like that.

Russ Roberts: It's profound. It's a very--it's a serious joke.

Paul Bloom: And all I will say is--to do the terrible thing and analyze a joke--is he is is asking a good question--

Russ Roberts: Absolutely--

Paul Bloom: The kid could just say, 'Dad, if I was raised in another family, do you think I'd be this dumb? What if I was adopted? Maybe. How do you think that'd affect me?' It's a really good question.

Russ Roberts: My colleague at the University of Rochester, Walter Oi, my former colleague and he's gone--I'm no longer at Rochester, and he's no longer with us. But Walter used to say, 'The two most important choices you make in life are your spouse and your parents.'

What he meant, of course, that you don't choose your parents, but who you get stuck with as your parents, for better or for worse, makes a huge difference. So he was, in that sense, very much, at least in some sense of nature--maybe he meant nurture also, right? How they raised you, and so it's hard to say.

Paul Bloom: People in the behavioral genetics field say parents have this enormous influence on their kids. Unfortunately, most of it is in the moment of conception.

5:37

Russ Roberts: And that's a very, very deep question. I've had Bryan Caplan on the program, who argues that our influence on our kids as parents--as opposed to passing on our genes--that our influence is very limited, that there's not a lot of evidence that we make a difference. I disagree with him, but the basic thrust of that is healthy to consider, because we so desperately want to believe that how we parent our kids makes all the difference. We probably overrate it.

Paul Bloom: I think we do. I think that, in some way, I would be in favor of a little bit of a backlash against the behavioral geneticists--because I would argue the Caplan view a lot, and gradually, friends and family have pushed me away and pointed out ways in which parents do affect their kids, maybe in ways that psychologists don't typically study.

A relative of mine, this girl, is very into Italian sports cars, and her father's very into Italian sports cars. Well, I don't think that's conveyed by the genes, and I don't think it's an accident. And then, sometimes nature and nurture conspire together. So a family friend of mine is a butcher, and his sons are butchers. I know more than one father-daughter combination where both are professional philosophers at Ivy League universities.

Russ Roberts: Yeah. Again, maybe a little of both. But, the point is, is that you think it's a legitimate question. You think this idea, this modern consensus that it all blurs together is the wrong way to think about it. Why?

Paul Bloom: So, here's a case where it's not a legitimate question, and I want to sort of be clear about this: and it's your joke case. It's the case we're talking about now, which is: how do people differ from one another? Anybody who has thought of this deeply will say, 'Look, there are very few cases where it's all nature.' Eye color, maybe, is a case where it's just all nature. But there's not many cases like that. For things like--and there are very few cases where it's all nurture, too. So, whether you win a lottery is random.

But most things are a combination.

When we talk about intelligence, personality, whether you become a criminal, whether you get divorced, whether you have a happy marriage, anybody who thinks about decisions, it's going to be a combination of your genes--it'll set you up, your temperament and so on--and your experience and what happens to you in your life. All the data shows it's a mix.

And then there's an enormous amount of debate--I think good debate--over what percentage is one, what percentage is the other? Can you think of it in terms of percentage? How do genes affect things? And so on. So, I'm not against that. If somebody said, '[inaudible 00:08:25] differences; it's going to be a mixed thing,' that's right.

But I'm more interested in universals.

And, this comes up so often when you have conversations with people, when you talk about history, when you talk about politics. Sooner or later, somebody--often you--says, 'It's part of our nature.' You might say something part of our nature to be suspicious of people in other groups. As part of our nature, you have said many times to feel an affinity for those close to us, particularly our children. And, I think you're right.

I don't think that claim that you make--I'm getting you on my side by saying 'you'; whether you know it or not, you're on my side here--I don't think those claims that you make are vacuous or old-fashioned or have been superseded by our science. I think they're actually true. I think some things are our nature; and then some things plainly are not. Some things are products of culture or accident. and I think it's a wonderful, important project to try to pull those apart.

9:25

Russ Roberts: So, that's an intellectual exercise--not exercise, but I would call it an intellectual agenda for, say, the field of psychology or evolutionary behavioral psychology, whatever flavor you're going to look at. I think the challenge here is that--and this is how I take your essay, and tell me if I'm right--we sort of assume it's 50/50, a mix.

Just to tell another one of my favorite jokes--this was allegedly a true story--a group of football players are coming home on an airplane, and they're bored. And one circulates among his teammates, he says, 'Everybody put a dollar'--it probably was $20--'Put $20 in this hat and write your name on it, and I'll reach in and I'll pull out one of the $20 bills. And if it's the one with your name on it, you get all the money in the hat.' 100 players, $2000 bucks possible winnings.

And one of the players, trying to decide whether to play, says, 'Well, what are the odds that I'm going to win?'

And the guy running the game says, 'Well, they're 50/50. You either win or you lose.'

Of course, they're not 50/50. They're 1 out of 100. But, it's a mix, so there's, I think, a tendency when we say, 'Well, they both matter, so it's 50/50.' And I think that's what's wildly wrong.

In particular, when we think about the challenges we face as individuals--forget about parenting, forget about public policy; we'll come back to that--but when we think about our own shortcomings and what we can overcome and what we can't overcome, you mentioned temperament. Some people, I think--I'd be curious whether you agree--seem to have a happy disposition. Sometimes it feels like, in some children, from birth. Now, it doesn't mean you can't be happier. It doesn't mean you can't make yourself happier at some point, or you can't make your less-happy children happier. But, temperament may be mostly genetic. I don't know.

Paul Bloom: I don't know either, but it's at least partially genetic. And, you and I could go over the papers together, but [?]we don't need to. We've seen cheerful kids who are always cracking up, goofy, and happy, and then grumpy kids who are always, like--or anxious kids, extroverted kids, introverted kids. And, we see the same thing in adults. And you know what? Happy parents tend to give you happy kids.

Now, again, we get it with just the standard problem, is that: when you're not looking at cases of, say, adoption, you never know whether maybe the kid got happy because being with happy people makes you happy. Or they modeled themselves out. Or whether it's just the genes.

But, yeah: I think there's some things that are very hard to deny. And that temperament is, in some way, something you start off with is fairly undeniable.

Then, there's an interesting discussion: If you are, by nature, a dour person, how happy can you get? And, I think the answer is it has to be part of the way people can change. People can--introverts can become more sociable. Sad people can get more happy. But it is harder for them.

Russ Roberts: So, I think the question that psychology might help us with is asking: Maybe you can't; and maybe facing that reality is better than being deluded into thinking you can. So, I think that's another place where this really matters. I think people desperately want to believe that they can change themselves. I know I do. I like to think that, and yet maybe I'd be happier knowing this is who I am. You know?

Paul Bloom: A student sent me an email. I taught a freshman seminar on rationality, and a student sent me a wonderful email, saying he learned from the seminar that some things are affected by the genes in different ways. And his question for me was this: Suppose I'm by nature good at some things and bad at other things. Is the lesson of psychology, you should sort of say, 'Focus on what you're good at. Build up on those and ignore your weaknesses'? That was a great question. But I thought about it: it can't be that simple, right?

Like, if you're going to university and you're really bad at studying, you should try to get better at studying. You're not going to get very far. If you're very bad at dealing with people, you got to work on that.

On the other hand, if I'm really bad at music or I'm really unathletic, it's not obvious that I should put my energies in improving, as opposed to focusing on the small areas I'm good at and trying to build on those.

And I think this is a question which, by the way, psychologists have absolutely no answer to, but what does one do with one's strengths and weaknesses? Does one work on one's strengths, one's weaknesses? I don't know. Probably should better to ask a coach or figure out what to do.

Russ Roberts: There's a very powerful Somerset Maugham short story called "The Alien Corn," which is about a young man who desperately wants to be a great pianist, a great musician, and finds out whether he is or not. And it's a pretty good story. I recommend it.

Paul Bloom: I have a joke for you, Russ.

Russ Roberts: Please.

Paul Bloom: This guy goes to a tailor, and he gets a suit put on; and it is awful. It's really too long on one arm and too short--I know you've heard this--too short on another arm--

Russ Roberts: 'Course I have.

Paul Bloom: He says, 'This is terrible.'

He says, 'No, no, no, no, no, no. Pull in your left arm like this.' Nobody can see me doing it. 'Pull in your left arm like this. Turn your neck like this. Now it fits.' So he leaves the tailor shop, and he's stumbling around in this funny posture.

And somebody runs up to him and says, 'My God. What a beautiful suit. Who is your tailor?'

The guy says, 'Are you impressed with the suit?'

The guy says, 'He must be a genius to fit a cripple like you.'

And I feel I am the man, in my own life, I am the man in the suit, where I'm really bad at so many things and good at a small number of things, and I have successfully managed to tailor my life, that my contorted shape fits in the contours of my life. I'm a university professor and a writer, which are capacities that you could be bad at all sorts of things and be good at those things. Anyway. If I had to give it--

Russ Roberts: Yeah. If you look at it--

Paul Bloom: Go on.

Russ Roberts: No. Go ahead.

Paul Bloom: If I had to give advice, that joke is my advice. Nature has given you an ill-fitting suit. Maybe your best to kind of find a way to fit into it. I don't know.

Russ Roberts: That's really quite beautiful.

Paul Bloom: That's the right way to look at the metaphor.

Russ Roberts: I was going to say, a different era, you'd be starving to death probably, but fortunately, you're born in a time where your limited skills--

Paul Bloom: Yes.

Russ Roberts: I feel this way about myself all the time, so the metaphor really speaks to me. I just want to add: In the version I've heard of the joke, the guy walks out of the tailor shop, and two friends across the street see him and say, 'Oh my gosh. What happened to Paul? Yeah, he looks terrible. But, what a nice suit he's wearing.' I like yours, too. They're both great.

Paul Bloom: My wife and I watch "End of the World"--TV series, like, zombie series--watching "The Last of Us," and I often wonder what I would do in a post-apocalyptic world. And, to go back to your point, I'd be going through the small thing and say, 'Well, I can't hunt. I can't build things. But do you need a research psychologist? Like, this is a small community where they benefit from that. Not really experimental, but more theoretical. I'll use some writing.' I don't know. They would, like, just send me back to be eaten by the zombies.

Russ Roberts: Yeah. No, that's--an economist would say, 'Well, in that time, you'd spend less time investing in psychology and research skills.'

18:00

Russ Roberts: But this brings me to my next point--where we continue to cut up--which is: it's hard to argue there's a more nurturing viewpoint than the 10,000-hours hypothesis. Now, let's not debate whether this is what Malcolm Gladwell really wrote; and there's been lots of back and forth about it. But there are people who believe that if you set your mind to something, you can achieve greatness. You can make the Olympic team. Obviously, there's certain limitations. I'm 5'6. I'm not going to make the Olympic basketball team. But, music was a good example. Art is a good example. You can take art lessons, and you can improve it. If you spent 10,000 hours, you'd improve a lot. Could you become a successful artist? I don't think so, but many people do. And I think it's deeply comforting to believe that, unlike your story of overcoming your limitations and crafting a way to wear the suit that gives it a decent appearance, a lot of people like the idea that anything is possible.

Paul Bloom: Yeah. I bet it depends on the domain a bit. I'm not going to become the world champion heavyweight boxer no matter how much I train. But, it also is true and maybe obvious that the more you work on something, the better you get.

I actually read a recent post by Bryan Caplan, who talked about the non-effects of parenting. And, Caplan says something interesting, which is, 'Maybe we don't work hard enough at it. What if you spend 10 hours a day with your kid, totally obsessed with focusing on some magic[?]? Maybe we just give up too soon. Maybe if you spent all your time at something, you would get better at it.' I guess the question is--

Russ Roberts: That's a ridiculous idea. I love Bryan, but the idea that more time would make me a better parent, I think, is a misreading of the thing. But go ahead. I'm sorry. I apologize for interrupting.

Paul Bloom: I guess the question that is the best use of your time. Like, so I like to work on my writing because I think--I try to be a good writer, and I would think time spent in that will make me a better writer. Will I ever be a fantastic writer? Probably not, but I could get better and better.

Russ Roberts: Agreed.

Paul Bloom: Then, there's things like program. I'm kind of a crap programmer. Whenever I try, it's just slow, and I fall behind other people. If I spent all that time on it, an enormous amount of time, I will be like a so-so programmer, a better-than-average programmer. So, I think to some extent you have to sort of patch up parts of you that need to be patched up, that are just essential to being an adult and so on.

If somebody said to me, 'I don't want to put energy into being a good father, because I'm not so good to start with. It's such a waste of time,' I'd say, 'No, no. You have to be a good father. You have to put in the time to do that.'

But, if somebody said, 'I tried playing musical instruments, and I'm bored with it and I don't like it. Now I'm going to spend 10 hours a day doing it,' I'd say, 'Are you sure you want to do that? You're not going to be that good.'

And I think part of the problem with the whole 10,000-hours thing, is that it is true that the people who are fantastic at something, do spend an enormous amount of time training, but I think people get the causality a bit mixed up. It's not that training is sufficient[?]. It's that: if you love something, you enjoy doing it, and then the enjoy doing it makes you better, which makes you love it more, and so on.

Russ Roberts: Yeah. I think people with great gifts--it's not just enjoy it. The slope of the curve is steeper for a lot of people.

I remember the first time I went to a gym as an adult, and I saw a lot of people that looked a lot like me--meaning flabby, soft, not sculpted. But, 'Wait a minute. I saw in the ad'--and then I want to go up to them and say, 'How long have you been coming here? Because, if it's a long time, that's data for me.' and seriously, part of the reason I don't go to the gym every day is that for whatever reason, the slope of my curve is pretty flat. I'm not saying I can't get stronger and I can't improve, but my genetic gifts there are very limited and I think it's relevant.

Paul Bloom: And that's a great example. The people who spend a lot of time in the gym, probably there's a correlation to being very fit, because they enjoy it enough that everyone else drops out before.

Russ Roberts: Exactly.

Paul Bloom: And so, there's sort of a virtuous cycle between doing something and being good at it.

And then something really interesting happens, where some special people just arise above the rest of us. It could be something like music or art or bodybuilding, but it could also be something like, 'Well, you are really good at interviewing, and synthesizing, and talking about things,' because you are putting in hours. But it's not like you were assigned by a psychologist and experiments.

Russ Roberts: Exactly.

Paul Bloom: You had to do a podcast for, what, 20 years?

Russ Roberts: Yeah, roughly.

Paul Bloom: That would be torture for many people. But you love it, so you're good at it, and because you're good at it, you do it more, and so on and so on.

Russ Roberts: Yeah. Actually, the truth is, is that I'm ashamed at how little time I spend trying to become a better interviewer. And every once in a while, I think, 'Is there a more systematic way I could do this than just doing it a lot?' But, it's not my full-time job. It's a side gig, so that's the way it is. Thanks.

Paul Bloom: In some way, university president, you'd think that is a big deal and everything. But I don't know, 100 years from now, when I ask our AI [artificial intelligence] masters, 'Who is Russ Roberts? What did he do?' maybe university president will come second.

Russ Roberts: No, they're going to definitely get it wrong. They'll talk--

Paul Bloom: They'll hallucinate.

Russ Roberts: 'He was a modest kayak competitor in the 2016 Olympics.' It'll be that kind of thing.

Paul Bloom: They'll take our discussion and say, 'He was a serious gym buff. Spent a lot of time in the gym.'

Russ Roberts: Exactly.

Paul Bloom: And have some memory of that.

Russ Roberts: Exactly. We don't talk about that enough, by the way, the way that AI ignores, at least for now, probably struggles to deal with sarcasm and humor and takes it as factual. I haven't thought about that. It's a really interesting idea. I think we need to do more of this kind of conversation, Paul.

Paul Bloom: To throw it off track.

Russ Roberts: Yeah, and seed my future reputation with false achievements.

25:10

Russ Roberts: I want to ask a different question, get a little serious for a minute. Not too serious, but a little serious.

When I was reading your essay, the thing that came to mind was the seriousness of the conversation over time between scholars in this area. The famous joke, which I think is kind of silly, but people love to make it, which is: Why are academics so petty? And the answer is: Because the stakes are so small. And I've never found that. I don't think it's particularly true. I don't think it's interesting. I don't even get it, actually. It doesn't even make sense.

Paul Bloom: Even the word 'academic' is sometimes used as a synonym for useless, of no importance. 'Oh, it's just academic.'

Russ Roberts: Yeah, exactly.

Paul Bloom: And, I find it very offensive.

Russ Roberts: Okay. Well, I won't say it. I won't use that.

But, here's the case. This is not about the stakes being small. I would argue the stakes are quite large; and the intellectual debate over nature versus nurture strikes me as remarkably intense for its importance in almost any practical sense. And I'm curious--I have a hypothesis--I'm curious to hear what your thoughts are. Why do we care so much? Why do people--in your example, the nativists versus the empiricists, the people who think it's all nature versus all nurture--why are they so passionate about this disagreement, when, in fact, 99.9% of the time it's not really important and we all would go about our lives, anyway?

Paul Bloom: I think it's a good question. I think the answer is: In general, I think we all carry within ourselves a theory of human nature. And, some of us do this for a living, but everyone carries within it. When somebody says to you, sincerely, that children have to learn to hate, maybe they're right, maybe they're wrong. But, it's a theory. It's a theory of human nature. When somebody says, 'There are no differences between groups and abilities, intellectual abilities. That's a horrible, racist thing to say that,, that's a theory of human nature. When somebody says different human groups have different capacities and potential, that's a theory of human nature. So, that's one part of the answer.

But the bigger part of the answer is that it matters so much. It matters.

It matters for politics, for instance. So, if your theory is that we are infinitely malleable, then if you create the proper state, you could have a world without prejudice, without hatred, without sexism, without envy, without cruelty, and so on. All you have to do is have the right education in place.

On the other hand, if you believe that we have innate constraints that are universal, then you fall into, I think, what Thomas Sowell called the Tragic View or the Constrained View of human nature, which says that there's a limit to how much you could solve these problems. People are going to hate, people are going to feel envy, people are going to feel jealousy, people are going to be competitive, people are going to feel more connected to those they love than to strangers. That despite all the indoctrination in the world, they're still going to love their children. Maybe they're still going to be religious. That leads you to think about a different state, a different way of doing things. It tempers your utopian dreams, and it leads to a different set of policies you endorse. I think this, 'Which side is right?' matters a lot.

28:48

Russ Roberts: Well, that was my answer. I'm looking at my notes, and I've got Thomas Sowell's Conflict of Visions in the next paragraph. Which is an extraordinary book, by the way, and I strongly recommend it. And, exactly as you said: He says there's two visions of human nature, and they are extremely important for how you view the role of government and public policy: the utopian view that anything is possible versus the constrained view--I don't remember the terminology he uses, but the 'constrained view' is I think is the right phrase--that we're basically not malleable. Used that phrase, used malleable before. So, we're not malleable.

So I think it does matter a lot.

And, I'm struck, when you said children are taught to hate or not taught to--children are taught to hate. They don't hate as part of their nature. Many people take one side or the other on that. They have no evidence on it. They hold that view overwhelming--well, excuse me: that isn't fair. Their evidence is casual, I would say--their own experiences in life, either with their children, other children, themselves. But the thing that's crazy is that they feel strongly about it. They have no formal evidence on it; and I think they take the view that they want to believe is true, overwhelmingly. It's a form of comfort.

Paul Bloom: That's right. That's right. The way I'm framing it, which I think is the way it should be, is the facts should come first, the way the world really is. And the politics should then fit the contours of the facts. But this [?], itself, shows an alarming ignorance of human nature if I think that people think this way. Rather: You have your political goals, you have your social goals, you have the way you want the world to be, and then you say, 'Well, the facts must fit that.'

Russ Roberts: Yeah. So, if I can probe--and perhaps you'll be uncomfortable with this, so we'll edit this out.

Paul Bloom: We will edit it out.

Russ Roberts: You'll edit it out if this is really off-limits, Paul. But I'm going to guess that, on average, you would describe yourself as left of center.

Paul Bloom: Yeah.

Russ Roberts: I think you would call yourself a center-left person. Is that fair?

Paul Bloom: Yes, that's fair.

Russ Roberts: And, I would describe myself as a center-right person. Sometimes I'm more classically liberal--classical liberal--than conservative, but in this conversation about nature versus nurture, I would call myself on the right and I would call yourself on the left, recognizing that it's kind of a crude, crude simplification, of course. Because, there's no metric, and I don't want to overstate. But, that makes me, on average, in some dimension, a nature person, and it makes you, on average, a nurture person. Is that fair? Would you describe yourself as a nurture person, or is your view on this debate consistent with your own political views? That's what I'm asking, perhaps unfairly.

Paul Bloom: No, that's not unfair at all. I'm very much of a human nature person. I agree with Chomsky, and Plato before him, that a lot of our natures have been wired up, that humans are not just a product of their culture. We start off with certain things, and some of them are very sweet and some of them aren't sweet at all, and that a proper politics should respect that.

I'm not sure the extent to which this clashes with my sort of left-leaning political views, and in some way, it may not be--I mean, I'm not sure. Noam Chomsky, who is extremely a man of the left, an anarchist, is also the foremost proponent of built-in innate structure, and he argued that a blank slate is a dictator's dream and was very concerned with the repressive governments of fascists. You could just as well add communists to the list of people who tried to mold people into what they are not.

I struggle with the question of how to mesh my politics with my theory of human nature. I would worry, but I'll have to accept the possibility that my theory of human nature ends up kind of following the dictates of my politics, rather than the other way around.

But I think, to some extent, here's one way in which I think makes me more sort of a Democrat than a Republican in my theory of human nature, which is: I recognize that often the state has to have a role in kind of squashing or redirecting our worst instincts.

So, in my younger days, I was more of a libertarian, but I began being concerned with what you guys call externalities and the fact that people are actually imperfect, and maybe at times you need other people to tamper them down. Kind of a rambly answer. How does it sound?

34:14

Russ Roberts: No, I don't think so. I'm going to try to adapt it to my own situation and my own consistencies or inconsistencies. I think the danger--obviously there's a danger that you delude yourself, and you think that your worldview of politics stems from facts, like you said, when in fact it's the other way around. But, I think that the more challenging question is, the real dangerous delusion is to say, 'Well, human nature is pretty fixed, and therefore there's no role for government in making the world better,' because it's always going to face the unintended consequences of what Adam Smith talked about when he wrote about the man of system. Smith says, 'The man of system tries to,' and by that he meant the utopian, the person who had a communist ideal or some other--he didn't have communism in his day, but he was worried about the overconfident leader who felt he could rearrange society. The metaphor that Smith uses is that he would try to adjust the positions of the pieces on the chessboard without any regard to their motion that they are endowed with.

I didn't say that very well, and I apologize to my Smith buddies that I don't know it by heart, but I don't. And I'm not going to bother looking it up, but we'll put a link to the actual quote. It's a beautiful quote. Look it up. But, in the Smith vision, the reason that visionaries are dangerous is, because they want to ignore human nature and the constraints of human nature, they actually lead to disaster. They lead to authoritarianism, to tyranny, to dystopia. The utopian ideal doesn't just fail: it leads to a dystopian result.

I think if you're a libertarian or a conservative of a certain kind, you're comforted by that, and you say, 'Well, we don't have to do anything, because it's just too hard and it leads to counterproductive results.' And I think that's cheating. I think a more honest view is that there probably are things that government can do, and sometimes governments do, that make the world a better place. You just don't want to step off the rails too far into utopianism and into illusion, but that doesn't mean that you can't help people and make them better off, and that might be a good idea. What do you think?

Paul Bloom: Yeah. I like that. I mean, two things. One thing is one of the many things we have in common is our love of Adam Smith. I mean, you've written a book on him. I'm less enamored of him, but I often reread The Theory of Moral Sentiments, and there's so much rich stuff there, this deep understanding of human nature, I think.

And then the second thing is that you can[?] believe that there's a human nature driving us in certain ways; but also, there's a certain duality. And I don't mean this in a religious or spiritual sense, but just as a matter of fact, we're able to reflect on our natures. I think only humans could do this. We could reflect on our natures and say: It's human nature for me to care so much more about--maybe people who look like me than people who don't look like me, and that's just the way we're wired up. But it's wrong. It's wrong. It's human nature for me to value my kids a million times more than I value your kids, but maybe it shouldn't be a million. It should be a thousand.

So then, you have to, in some sense, fight back against human nature; and that's, I think, one of the purposes of societies. You have laws--and this is a very crude way of putting it--but you have laws in recognition of the fact that people want to break them. And you don't just say, 'Well, people want to break it: people want to steal and torture and kill. Might as well let them. That's their nature.' You say, 'No, no. We don't want that, so we'll get men with guns. We'll stop you from doing that.' And that's the beginning of government.

And this could apply in all sorts of levels. We don't normally care about the distant future because we're short-sighted creatures, so let's have the government have advertisement saying: Care more about climate change. Let's have climate taxes, and so on. And for any of these, you could disagree, but the detail--say, the government's pushing too far, the government's pushing too little--but I don't think there's anything incompatible with saying we have a strong human nature, but also in some ways we should fight against it.

39:08

Russ Roberts: In fact I'd argue that--well, I think about this question a lot because of the economists' reliance on incentives. And we treat incentives the way nativists talk about human nature: 'You just set them right, and then you control them'; or in the nativist example, you can't: it's what they are. It is what it is. And so if I want it to be something different, I just change the incentives, and they'll behave differently.

Many incentives, of course, do have an impact on our behavior. That's the essence of the economist's view of the world. But if that's your only view of the world, you've got a very narrow and, I think, tragic view, because a lot of life is about rejecting incentives that push you in one direction or another toward various cases of negligence, malfeasance. So, it's easy to comfort yourself and say, 'Well, of course I did that. That's what the incentives told me to do.' It's a terrible, terrible way to live. It may be the way many people do live under certain types of incentives. They are influenced by them. But I don't think we want to assume that our incentives are our destiny, the way you might assume our human nature is our destiny. It's depressing.

Paul Bloom: I've seen the same point, but maybe put it in a different way. You asked before, 'What is a proper--why does it matter that we have a proper understanding of human nature?' And, I think an understanding of incentives is one answer to that.

There's a stereotype of economists--which I think is probably wrong. You can tell me this is very unfair--that you guys tend to think that the big incentives are money, that we just throw money at people and, 'Give them money for this. Take away money for that. That'll do it.' But, if you think about how people work and how you, yourself, respond in the world--and I assume economists know this--it's not just money. It's: We do things to be loved, to be respected, to make sure that the right thing is done, to make justice done. We do things to appease God in our view. We do things because we want to be transcendent. We do things, because we hate people and want them to suffer.

There's all sorts of incentives that go wired up as[?] because of our natures. And, anybody who wants to mold other people in the most benign way--everything, everybody from a president to a university president, to a friend, to a husband or wife--has to be sensitive. If one partner tells another, 'I wish you'd clean up after cooking,' they're not going to say, 'If you clean up after cooking, I'll give you $80.' This is crazy. You'd say, 'You got to clean up after cooking because you're being a jerk.' Well, I don't want to be a jerk. Nobody wants to be a jerk. Or you're acting like you don't love me.

So, an appreciation of human nature, I think, is essential for dealing with people.

Russ Roberts: That's funny you use those examples. I recently gave a talk on just this question. Well, it was not just this question. The question is whether it's worth reading The Theory of Moral Sentiments. And if you're, say, in the world of commerce, and I said, 'Well, if you're dealing with human beings, which you usually do in commerce, unless you're sitting in a room somewhere, developing an app that doesn't need to understand anything about how actual human beings behave, if you're doing anything in business, usually dealing with other people,' and it's helpful to understand exactly what you just said, that not all incentives are monetary. People have a desperate urge, as Adam Smith, himself, pointed out, to be respected and loved and--'

Paul Bloom: Lovable, I think, was the term, right?

Russ Roberts: No. Loved. Loved and lovely.

Paul Bloom: Loved. Just loved, okay,

Russ Roberts: Loved and lovely.

Paul Bloom: Lovely, yes.

Russ Roberts: Just for the people with the Adam Smith drinking game, it's: "Man naturally desires not only to be loved, but to be lovely." And that's, like you say, I think if you don't understand that--and understand it doesn't mean hearing it and going, 'That sounds true to me'--but understanding it by engaging with that idea and how you interact with others, how you watch others interact with yourself and with others, you're missing part of the great panorama of life, and you're not as good a friend, you're not as good a spouse, you're not as good an employee, employer, manager, and so on.

Paul Bloom: And, it scales up. There's a paper I wrote--one of my favorite papers, and actually, the first author is Christina Starmans, who is now my wife--and it was about the claim that people want equality. And we argued that this is mistaken. We just got tons of evidence from developmental psychology research, from social studies--and people don't want equality. What people want is fairness. So, if you get paid more than me, I'm not necessarily horrified at this. I'm not angry about this, so long as I believe that you did more work, you are more deserving, and so on.

When you give people societies, you say, 'What do you think of this society?' the equal society comes out at the bottom. What people want is a society where--often with a safety net, often with all sorts of things; it gets complicated--but they want something which is fair. I had this colleague at Yale, Tom Tyler, who studied what people want in a workplace. And again, they want to be paid nicely. That's true. But they also want to be respected; and they want to, again, feel like they're being treated fairly. And so I think this is really important stuff to know. [More to come, 44:49]

Nature vs. Nurture (with Paul Bloom)

Bryan Caplan on Parenting

Leon Kass on Human Flourishing, Living Well, and Aristotle

READER COMMENTS

Anthony Gill

May 26 2025 at 3:49pm

Ajit Kirpekar

May 27 2025 at 10:06am

Eric Goetz

May 27 2025 at 10:17am

Raymond Watkin

May 27 2025 at 10:43am

Greg McIsaac

May 27 2025 at 9:21pm

ToSummarise

May 27 2025 at 9:23pm

LEAVE A COMMENT

Nature vs. Nurture (with Paul Bloom)

Bryan Caplan on Parenting

Leon Kass on Human Flourishing, Living Well, and Aristotle

READER COMMENTS

Anthony Gill

May 26 2025 at 3:49pm

Ajit Kirpekar

May 27 2025 at 10:06am

Eric Goetz

May 27 2025 at 10:17am

Raymond Watkin

May 27 2025 at 10:43am

Greg McIsaac

May 27 2025 at 9:21pm

ToSummarise

May 27 2025 at 9:23pm

LEAVE A COMMENT

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