The TED Interview
How empathy gets in the way of a better world with Paul Bloom
April 4, 2024
[00:00:00] Chris Anderson:
Hello everyone, this is Chris Anderson. So, in this season of the TED Interview, as I think you know, we're focusing on generosity and especially the many wild and wonderful ways of making it infectious. To make sense of any of this, ultimately, it has to start with human psychology. Human minds are so weird.
I mean, they really are. We’re these weird, evolved apes that have strange feelings inside us that allow us to do so many things, including it turns out being kind to other people. But, how did that get there and how does it connect to everything else that's in our minds and what gets in the way of it? How do we do it better?
There's no one better to answer these questions than our guest today who is psychologist, Paul Bloom. He's professor of psychology at the University of Toronto. He's written seven powerful books, including most recently Psych: The Story of The Human Mind. But, I think the book that probably applies most to what we'll be talking with him about today is the provocatively titled, Against Empathy. Is Paul Bloom really against empathy? Well, I think we should find out.
Here I am with Paul Bloom, and what's struck me about Paul, as you will know if you've listened to any of his TED talks, is that he's an amazing storyteller, so I feel very honored to have you here on this pod.
[00:02:59] Paul Bloom:
Thanks, Chris. I'm, I'm delighted to get the chance to talk with you. What you said about me as a storyteller puts a tremendous amount of pressure on me, and I feel like I'm gonna disappoint everybody.
[00:03:08] Chris Anderson:
Your latest book is, is incredibly ambitious. I mean, Psych: The Story of The Human Mind. I mean, I'm interested in generosity obviously, but it all starts with understanding the human mind more broadly. So I, I, I wonder whether you could describe the story of the human mind.
[00:03:23] Paul Bloom:
Yeah. The, the, the book Psych is me stepping away from my particular research programs and research interests to tell the entire story of psychology as best I can.
And, I'm positive about psychology. I spent a lot of time talking about our theories, our accomplishments, some of it connecting to moral psychology and issues of happiness and kindness, the sort of thing your book focuses on. Some of it on issues like perception and child development and memory and rationality.
I'm also honest about my field, which has had its, uh, its ups and downs as, as you know, um, we've been in, in various crises, like a crisis in that we have studied a far to an hour slice of a human population. But, I've devoted my whole life to psychology. I find it a fascinating field. So, it was fun to write about.
[00:04:08] Chris Anderson:
To understand the mind, you had to think about how we evolved. You had to think about the fact that we're, actually, biological animals and that some things that we feel and think might be related to that. How should we think about the fact that we evolved?
[00:04:26] Paul Bloom:
I, I think it is an important lens. I think more generally, you know, we're historical creatures and when you, I try to explain what's going on, with myself or with you, if anybody else, there is our history as individuals, our lives. There's our cultural history, the society we were raised in, the, the, the language we speak, the rules, you know, that we've been conditioned to obey, but there's our evolutionary history.
And, somebody, I'm blanking out who, some biologist said, nothing makes sense except in light of evolution.
And, this is true for people as well. You look at our, our sexual desire, the foods we eat, how we socialize, who we befriend, how our memory works, how our vision works, and nothing makes sense unless you do appreciate that we're evolved creatures and so much does make sense when you appreciate a commonality we have of other animals when you appreciate the sort of adaptive problems our minds have evolved to solve.
And, this is why we like to eat food instead of rocks. It's why we like to, it's like, you know, it's why we use language instead of communicate through dance. So, evolution is, is critical for all of this.
[00:05:30] Chris Anderson:
And maybe also why we like to eat a lot of food.
[00:05:33] Paul Bloom:
Yes, so one theme, which a lot of people picked up upon, I think is exactly right, is the mismatch between the environment in which we evolved and our current environment.
We evolved in a situation, we're basically starving to death in any bit of food, any bit of fat or meat would be is, is, is scrumptious to us.
And, now we live in a world with unlimited ribs and Snickers bars and everything, at least for the affluent class, and so we have obesity problems. We evolved in a world where we knew people face to face. We had friends, we had family, we had relationships with small groups. And, now we live in a world, we interact with millions and billions of people, and it's something our minds haven't evolved for and often leads us into, into serious trouble.
So, a lot of what we cope with as modern humans is dealing with a mismatch between the situation our minds have evolved to cope with and the world right now.
And, this could take us some places that evolution would've never anticipated. I mean, the, the theme of your book is one example of this. One thing I appreciate is that you don't dismiss biology. You're very conscious of our status as evolved creatures. You're sensitive to the, to the research and the developmental findings, but you don't simply say, well do what's natural and it's gonna solve all the problem, just do what's natural, because what you say is we have to discipline ourselves. We have to use our reason and our rationality to bring us to places we wouldn't have otherwise gotten.
And, I think in general, most successful programs of human change don't dismiss biology.
They often go beyond it, but they, sort of, build from it. They build from natural tendencies that we have, expand them, and develop them.
[00:07:11] Chris Anderson:
Well, indeed, I mean, I guess the, the fairly simple model that I use a lot, uh, in the book was kind of anchored in my understanding of, of Danny Kahneman's book, Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow, you know, system one, system two, form of thinking, an instinctive self, and then a reflective self.
And, I would love to hear from you as a psychologist, how you think of that model, whether you think that's a, a useful model, whether it's true, and how we might incorporate that in our daily lives.
[00:07:41] Paul Bloom:
I do think it's true, and I think one crude, but maybe correct way to think about it is the instinctive self is the self that we've evolved, that we share with other creatures, and it does pretty good.
It does pretty good in, in the real world.
One thing I argue in psych is that we are subject to all sorts of reasoning, illusions, and fallacies, but for the most part we do extremely well. We're very powerful reasoners, but not always. And, this is where, what, what Danny calls system two comes in, which is system two is deliberative, slow, thoughtful reasoning.
And, this is nurtured by culture, by education. It's not shared with other creatures and it allows us to sort of take steps we wouldn't have otherwise taken. So, I'm very interested in human morality and, and I'm interested in the idea that a lot of morality is innate, is hardwired. And, I'd call it system one.
So, you know, system one tells me that the lives of people in my town, my village, my community, are worth a lot more than strangers. But, I could think, and I could think about insights from religion. I could read my Peter Singer and my great philosophers and sort say, well, maybe I should do it a different way.
Maybe I should expand my morality. Maybe though it doesn't feel this way, the life of a stranger in Africa is worth just as much as the life of my son, or life of my neighbor in Toronto.
[00:09:06] Chris Anderson:
I mean, Paul, how, how did you get interested in empathy in the first place, and can you, actually, explain how you see its relationship to generosity?
[00:09:15] Paul Bloom:
I was interested in morality in how we do good, including how we're generous and help people and be kind to people. So, I began to explore how different mental capacities might give rise to this kindness and the role of our emotions and our reasoning and our imagination and our relationships, and I originally argued against disgust.
I talked a lot about emotion, disgust and argued it's very corrosive and everybody agreed with me. And, I said, “Well, what else could I explore?” And, then empathy seemed that everybody loves empathy. Putting yourself in the shoes of other people, feeling what they feel, that has to be a force for good. And, as I thought about it more and more, I became skeptical.
Now, compassion is good. Love is good. Even some degree of empathy can be powerfully helpful, but if it's unsupported by reason and rationality, it falls apart and it's just too biased and unsustainable.
[00:10:13] Chris Anderson:
But, before you, you tell me against empathy, talk a bit about just the miracle of empathy because here we are, you know, evolved animals.
We, we emerged from a, from a bloody fight for survival, and, somehow, we have, inside us, these feelings that are so strong that on occasion they can persuade someone to risk their life for another person. Why on Earth would evolution do that?
[00:10:40] Paul Bloom:
Yeah. So, my book Against Empathy has a subtitle, The Case for Rational Compassion, and I'm bringing this up because there's a distinction I wanna make in, in response to what you're saying, there's a very general puzzle, which is we care for one another.
We have compassion, love, kindness, generosity, and that's the fact of humans, is a fact of other creatures. And, there was a time pre-Darwin that this was thought of as magic, that this had to be God. Either you reject the idea of innate kindness altogether, nature, red and tooth and claw, or you accept it and say this is some sort of defined miracle.
And, one of Darwin's great accomplishments was the theory of natural selection, which allowed us to explain in a natural way how you could be kind to one another, how kindness and the corresponding emotions, love, compassion, so on.
[00:11:30] Chris Anderson:
Could, can you, can you, can you make that explanation?
[00:11:33] Paul Bloom:
Yeah.
[00:11:34] Chris Anderson:
Because I think it's still puzzling for a lot of people.
It was certainly puzzling for me in my early twenties, you know, coming outta…
[00:11:39] Paul Bloom:
Yeah.
[00:11:39] Chris Anderson:
…philosophy school. I just, I still couldn't understand how someone could justify the, the energy and the cost and the risk and the hassle of being kind and generous without religious justification for it.
[00:11:53] Paul Bloom:
The way it's, I think, best explained in terms of evolutionary theory falls into two categories of explanations, and one is kin selection, which is we share our genes with other individuals.
I share my genes with my sons, with my brother and my sister, and to a lesser extent with my cousins and my nephews and my nieces. And, a cold-blooded process of natural selection, as Richard Dawkins brilliantly pointed out, will guide a creature not only to protect its own body, but to protect the bodies of other creatures that house those genes.
And, so there's, sort of, this splendid irony. When Richard Dawkins talked about the selfish gene, he wasn't making a point that people are selfish. He was making a point that this solely mechanistic process causes us to care for other people. Selfishness is, is biologically anomalous and biologically ridiculous from the standpoint of a cold-blooded genetic point of view.
[00:12:50] Chris Anderson:
And, just to, just to build on that point, 'cause I think a lot of people are still puzzled by how that kinship could happen, but if you imagine a creature that didn't care for its offspring, and then one where there's a random gene mutation that causes to care a bit for, its, its offspring, so, long as those genes that care a bit more for its offspring don't dramatically impair the survival interest of the parent, they will result in an increased chance of survival of the child. And, therefore, the genes will have a better shot at surviving in the, in, in the long term.
[00:13:28] Paul Bloom:
That's right. And, it leads to physical adaptation, which is that female mammals feed their babies, but at least the psychological adaptations in, in all of us. You take two creatures and one creature when they see, uh, babies, one, eat them, get some protein, it's delicious.
The other creature loves the babies and would take huge sacrifices and protect the babies. Well, unless the sacrifice was so extreme and even then it's, it's biologically advantageous. And, so none of this is to deny that the love we have towards our children and towards our family is very real. But, the reason why this very real love comes to exist is the forces of kin selection, is the fact that it's biologically advantageous to, to help those out who share your genes.
So, of the two theories, that's the first one, and that extends the family.
[00:14:21] Chris Anderson:
There's a problem almost with all these, uh, evolutionary or psychological explanations for that matter, when, when you say, well, this is how you might think of love from a biological point of view, and it seems to kill the, the romance and the magic and the spirituality and the soulfulness of it in a nanosecond, do you have any tips to people for how you might get that back?
[00:14:42] Paul Bloom:
Oh, I, I have a feeling it's kind of a philosopher's concern. Well, if you tell me about biology, I'm not gonna love my kids anymore. I mean, I don't think there's anybody in the world who stopped loving their kids when they read Richard Dawkins.
[00:14:54] Chris Anderson:
No, but you might go through a moment of sort of, oh.
[00:14:57] Paul Bloom:
Yes.
[00:14:58] Chris Anderson:
That doesn't seem as special.
And I, I mean, to me the antidote is almost to double down on just how crazily amazing nature is. Like, the fact that a swirling mix of hormones, chemicals, genes, development can produce something as beautiful and magical as love. It's just, like you can feel miserable about that or you can just drop your jaw in and say, wow, what, what an amazing universe to be in.
And I, I, to me that's the psychological shift to, to embrace is just, just welcome it.
[00:15:29] Paul Bloom:
That's a nice way to put it. And, I, I, I'd respond that way to evolution and I'd also respond that way to, to neuroscience. So, you can imagine somebody saying, wait, all of my consciousness and everything, that's just my physical brain doing something nobody could understand and yeah, but in some way shouldn't that be marvelous? Shouldn't that be awesome?
And, and you know, if you're religious, you could take the next step and say, isn't it really something that we live in a universe where these blind mechanistic forces give rise to, you know, to cathedrals and great discoveries and romance and, and, and love for, for one's children.
[00:16:03] Chris Anderson:
Okay, so back to empathy. You talked about one, one of the strands that gets you there, which is kin selection. What's, what's the other?
[00:16:09] Paul Bloom:
The second is known as reciprocal altruism, which is a fancy term, but it just, it basically is the benefit we get under some circumstances from helping another, even if the other isn't related to us.
So, suppose I help you gather food and I, I, I help you hunt or build shelter, or watch your kids, and because of that, you benefit. You benefit from my help. Now, if the story ended there, it would be an evolutionary dead end. I'm just wasting a lot of effort and not getting anything. But, suppose it works out that then when I need your help, you help me and now we together can do things like say, hunt big game or build something or that we couldn't do by ourselves.
And, so we both benefit. Now, kin selection is everywhere in biology. Reciprocal altruism is more rare because we have to be able to coordinate our behaviors. We have to be able to remember that you helped me in the future. We have to have emotions, not only such as love, compassion, gratitude, but also anger, resentment. And, in fact, evolutionary theorists have pointed out that without anger and resentment and those negative emotions, the good stuff could never evolve because if we didn't have those things, we'd be too open to exploitation.
There'd be no benefit to helping. Benefit to helping is beneficial from an evolutionary point of view only insofar as you can somehow punish or at least exclude those who don't help. And, through that process is another way in which creatures who aren't related to one another, which is most of us, can join and coordinate and help one another.
[00:17:46] Chris Anderson:
Paul, one thing that's really hit me in writing this book and thinking about generosity is the remarkable asymmetry that is between giver and receiver in terms of cost and benefit.
Like, there are so many situations where the cost to the giver can be far less than the benefit to the receiver.
[00:18:05] Paul Bloom:
Yeah, and, and I think asymmetry is, is a deep insight. Sharing food is a great example of this where you know, if I have more food than I could eat, it doesn't cost me much to give you some. Now, it might cost me a little bit if only because if we were truly competitors, I might prefer that you die and you know, leave more resources to me.
But, if I could have even a thought that you'll help me in the future return to favor save my life, then it's tremendously beneficial. I should add, by the way that we talked about these two main mechanisms, there are other, other evolutionary theories for kindness.
One is reputation. So, imagine we're in a broad community, and this is something you talk about in your book a fair bit, and you help people and suppose you help people, you don't even get anything back from them.
Maybe you're helping babies or maybe you're helping people far away who can't reciprocate in any way. But, still, I see you doing this and I say, that's a nice guy. That's a guy I wanna deal with and maybe I'm in a position to, to work with you on something where, where we get mutual benefit.
So, there's, there's a lot of interest by psychologists in how important reputation is for us and the force it could be for moral good.
[00:19:10] Chris Anderson:
I guess if, if being generous helps you get the best mate in the community that's going to lock it into our future genes.
[00:19:18] Paul Bloom:
Yes.
[00:19:19] Chris Anderson:
You wrote a whole book explaining how the most basic instincts about, I would say generosity, but which you refer to as empathy can go wrong. So, talk about why it goes wrong.
[00:19:31] Paul Bloom:
So, I'll make the point more generally connecting it to generosity and compassion more generally. And, it goes back to the system one, system two we were talking about where there's sort of an instinctive, stupid kindness you could say. And, it's the part which evolves through natural selection and it's, it's very good in sort of the environment in which we evolved, but it's bias in all sorts of ways.
You don't need a psychologist to tell you this, but there's a lot of evidence suggesting that we are most kind to those who look like us, who speak our language, who are related to us, and our empathy in this way can lead to a very narrow, very, very parochial, sort of, help. Sometimes the help could be shortsighted.
There are cases I talk about in my book where people put tremendous resources to helping people and the resources go to waste, or, actually, often have paradoxical effects where they make things worse. And, so what I argue we should do instead is instead of drawing on a system one reasoning, be a bit more system two.
Since we do wanna make the world a better place, we want to help people, we want to do good, we should think our way through it, and often try to override these mises. And, this brings us to effective altruism. It brings us to charity that works for people in faraway lands. And, so the point in my book, often people read the title and say, man, you're against kindness.
And, you know, who's some sort of psychopath. And, no, I'm in favor of kindness, but, but I think kindness has to be intelligently driven.
[00:21:18] Chris Anderson:
What you were arguing in the book was that we need the power of reason to make our compassion effective. And, so it seemed like you were giving actually a very powerful psychological and philosophical underpinning for effective altruism, which has been, been a very powerful movement and has run into trouble.
What do you make of what's happened to EA? Do you think that there's still something important there that we need to look to the good side of?
[00:21:46] Paul Bloom:
Oh, I think there's a lot important to EA and I hope people aren't talking about it in the past tense. Now, it's gone through some rough times, some scandals, of course, but the core idea of EA is that we should use our reason and rationality to decide how to be a good person, for instance, what charities we should give to, who we should help.
And, as people like Scott Alexander have pointed out the track record of this is off the charts. They have helped so many people. They have improved so many lives. So, I'm a big fan and, and, and I hope that these sometimes very real problems and real critiques that have emerged don't derail that program.
[00:22:25] Chris Anderson:
So, there's a close connection between what you call rational compassion. Basically, the, the remedy to just a, a blind reliance on empathy is to use the power of reason that that argues for a form of effective altruism. You, you actually plan what you want, your compassion to do and the importance of that should not be knocked off its hook by, you know, a scandal that happened to one individual or, or whatever. The, the basic underlying idea is important.
I mean, is there anything else that can go wrong if you go all rational and forget some other things that, that people think of as important to morality? Are there other moral guardrails that we need to hold onto while we try and do these mental calculations about what is good.
[00:23:11] Paul Bloom:
There's a hard problem there, uh, which, which I, I've, I've wrestled with and I appreciate, which is I, the, the subtitle again is The Case for Rational Compassion, and you need some sort of push.
If you just, you're purely rational being, you're not gonna do any good 'cause, why would you care? And, point made by David Hume without some sort of emotion pushing reason is, is, is impotent doesn't do anything for you. Now, I think what you're, kind of, alluding to, and many people will say this, is if you get too much caught up in your head, too rational, too focused on ideas, you miss the guidance of your gut feeling.
Maybe you do some monstrous things because you just talked yourself into them and that can happen. I think the best cure for it isn't to sort of listen to our hearts because often we listen to our hearts, we end up doing terrible things. We listen to our prejudices and our, our biases and the worst part of ourselves, but rather bring more people into the conversation.
I think the best effective altruist are those who talk to other people who also celebrate the spirit of the intellect, but, you know, but have different viewpoints, different backgrounds, and that could sort of serve as a break against Thanos type crazy moral plans that end up going horribly awry.
[00:24:16] Chris Anderson:
Yeah, that totally resonates with me, that somehow it, it needs to be powered by our hearts, but, but shaped by our reason.
What I've noticed about you, Paul, is that you are very, very good at winning the attention battle. I mean, trying to talk about interesting things scientifically and so forth. You know, a lot of scientific language doesn't grab people's attention and you know, that I think Against Empathy is a brilliant title for a book, even though you are clearly not against kindness, but the core of our moral instincts almost is directed at in-groups. You know, that human psychology have this sort of in-group, out-group factor and we can be the most amazing people in the world to in-group and actually pretty savage to out-groups. We can go to war with them. We can loathe them. We can think they're subhuman, et cetera, et cetera.
So, how redeemable is that? I think I've read of, of some experiments where that gap between in-group and out-group is actually, it's, it's not frozen. Like, it's not actually locked in. You can kind of hack your mind to think very differently about who is your ingroup? Talk about that.
[00:25:35] Paul Bloom:
So, I have a lot of respect and, and really I not facetiously for, for effective altruists who, sort of, try to think really hard and ask a question, what's the best way to save the world, to make a difference and then act on that. But, those people, I think are always gonna be a fairly small minority. And, I think for the rest of us, we do better through stories, through acts of their imagination. Narratives play a big role, exploiting our own emotions to try to direct our own gut feelings in favor of people.
And, this is one way my, my mind has changed a little bit since I wrote that book over 10 years ago, which is I was then saying, just think your way through it. And, I become more sympathetic by talking to people that the idea of trying to expand your compassion feelings is right, but the mechanism to do it need not be fully intellectual, other, other techniques and other means will do as well, maybe better.
[00:26:31] Chris Anderson:
I mean, how, what, what, what are some of the things that you think are, actually, effective in shifting or expanding the scope of our in-group?
[00:26:40] Paul Bloom:
The contact hypothesis, which I think is one part of social psychologists, has not been refuted that people still believe.
And, the idea is that when you find yourself in contact with people from other groups in a situation where you're working together for a common cause, so you're on a sports team, now you're in the military, this will dissolve boundaries and it'll make you less racist, less ethnically based, more sympathetic to the out-group.
So, that's one sort of thing. A second sort of thing is the power of narratives, of stories where reading stories about people in faraway lands and, sort of, expanding your sympathy, realizing, wow, they're kind of like me, can also dissolve the boundaries.
And, then to get as boring as possible, things like routines where you don't decide whether to give to charity each month, but it's automatically deducted from your bank account. The sort of procedural nudge like techniques that Cass Sunstein, Richard Thaler, talk about. I think also play a role in, and once we decide the right thing to do, we could use these techniques to, to kind of bring, bring that out.
[00:27:44] Chris Anderson:
Now, you had the question for me, having read the book, I want to learn from you. Tell me.
[00:27:48] Paul Bloom:
So, I was gonna push you on this a little bit where you argue two things in the book. One is we should ground our generosity in, in our biological natures, but other one is we need to extend it and be imaginative and, and so on. And, there's gonna be a tension in, but it's, it's good because they're both right and, and they both push against each other.
But, there's one point I'm wondering about where we're talking right now, you and me. If we were saying that if we were to do things right, we would dissolve the boundaries. We would be just as kind to the out-group as the in-group, and we should aspire to that and work to that. And, I sort of agree with it, but I don't go that far.
And, here's my limit. My limit is that not only do I care more about my family, my sons, the people I love than I do about strangers, I think I'm right to, I don't view this as a glitch in the system. I don't think, oh, if only I could reread your book a few times and get those techniques, that'll get rid of this nasty habit.
I do have some in-group biases to some extent, towards my country, my tribe. Do you wanna go with the full Peter Singer utilitarian and say, well, I should just outgrow it, or do you think that there's some moral point that I have?
[00:28:59] Chris Anderson:
So, this is such an interesting conversation. It's a conversation that feels very uncomfortable.
I mean, the absolute fact is that if I was in a situation where I had to make a choice between my kids and strangers, I would go with the kids every time. And uh.
[00:29:14] Paul Bloom:
And, not only that, but you don't think there's anything wrong with that? I certainly don't.
[00:29:19] Chris Anderson:
No. No. I think in practice you want moral principles that biological humans…
[00:29:25] Paul Bloom:
Yeah.
[00:29:25] Chris Anderson:
…can adopt with joy and no biological human is going to adopt seriously a principle that says if it comes to it and there are three children on the other side of the world and you have two kids, and you could sacrifice the interest of your two kids for those three kids in the other side of the world, therefore you should.
People aren't going to be comfortable with that, and so we shouldn't push it. But, at the same time, I think it's worth seeing how far we can go to take into account the needs of anyone capable of feeling something.
[00:29:57] Paul Bloom:
No, it makes a lot of sense. I there, there, there's a way I like to think of, of the moral problem, which I think is actually one of the hardest moral problems there is, which is you have a hundred points and you could allocate them and some you could allocate to yourself.
If you gave yourself zero, you'd die 'cause you wouldn't eat, you wouldn't take care of yourself. Some you could allocate to your family and some you could allocate to strangers. And, the question is, what's the proper allocation? And, nobody would say there should be zero in any of those boxes. If there's a child drowning, as I'm rushing home from work to play with my kid, I should take the time and save this child, even though it would inconvenience my child.
It's not, the stranger's not zero. So, you have to figure out the allocation problem, and that's sort of a great problem of moral philosophy and moral psychology. But, part of your point is you don't need to solve the problem to be a good person, for instance. You don't have to give yourself the absolute bare minimum.
You don't have to give your family a bare minimum. You probably do have to allocate more to strangers than you otherwise would, but it will leave plenty into other boxes.
[00:30:59] Chris Anderson:
That's I, I think that's a really interesting way of framing it. And, I think that would make for an uncomfortable, but a but a powerful discussion for any, any group of people to have.
[00:31:10] Paul Bloom:
I, I had a question on a small point, you just kind of dropped in middle of a book, it was quite controversial. You spoke up quite severely against anonymity on social media. You, you carved out an exception for totalitarian regimes, but you said in general it's a bad idea and your argument is good.
Having your name out there, your reputation at stake helps civil behavior. It helps, it helps kindness. It, it diminishes cruelty and bullying. As somebody who's been on social media and has, you know, encountered anonymous trolls, I really get it, but I'm curious what you think of the case for anonymity which is put aside, totalitarian regimes. A lot of people's lives are, are fragile. Their jobs are fragile. Their relationships are fragile and if they couldn't be anonymous, they wouldn't be able to speak their mind. And, while sometimes speaking your mind is pretty awful, sometimes it could be really good.
And I'm worried that getting rid of anonymity would actually diminish the intellectual excitement and intellectual possibilities of things like social media.
[00:32:09] Chris Anderson:
I mean, I, I accept the power of that and I think there is a case for that. I think my, my argument against it was, apart from the fact that it will reduce the amount of toxicity online, was that I worry that humans are not capable of finding the motivation to use their reason to shape their better instinct, to find their better angels, if you like, without an element of fear.
Now, this sounds horribly wrong to modern ears. It sounds horribly wrong, but it is a fact that certainly every religion and every parent has, to some extent, use the tool of fear to try to shape behavior. You know, Santa Claus won't bring you your presence if you are a bad person. You know, Jesus is watching you.
What I say in the book is there is a case to adopt the mantra of act as if everyone is watching you, because they may well be and there is discomfort in that. But, Mr. psychologist, professor, sir, do you think that humans are capable of being their best selves without any element of fear playing into it?
[00:33:21] Paul Bloom:
I agree with you that fear could play a valuable role or forget about fear, things like shame, self-respect. You know, I, I do behave better when everybody's watching. Maybe even 'cause I'm not afraid of 'em, but because I don't wanna look like an idiot, I don't wanna embarrass myself. I want, I want them to think well of me, reputation.
I think without some sensitivity to reputation, we'd be lost. And, anonymity shields you from reputational costs. The problem is, and I, we don't need to go back and forth there, but the problem is that the fear in the case of social media is fear of the mob. So, it's not fear of, of a wise and thoughtful audience pushing back on you when you say something’s cruel or stupid, but sometimes it's just a mob.
[00:34:07] Chris Anderson:
I think we're agreed on that. I think the phenomenon of mob behavior online is genuinely terrifying. And, and, and we have to figure a way of damping that outta the system somehow.
So, tell me this as a psychologist again. What would your advice be to social media platforms? How, how do you see it? And, is there anything that they can and should do?
[00:34:29] Paul Bloom:
I'm, I'm interested in some proposals that John Haidt has made, and what I like about these proposals is they don't speak to content, so he allows, and I think for a good reason, keeps free speech going.
But, mechanisms like retweeting and liking, you could use the algorithm to dissuade mobbing in ways if done properly, that would liberate people to still speak their mind about any topic without, without punishment of a lot of freedom.
The problem with this, and I'm sure John knows this, is that it would make social media a little bit less fun for people, and so it would make it less profitable. And, so there's a tension there.
[00:35:05] Chris Anderson:
So many of us, I think, wrestle in our lives with, with trying to find our better selves through whatever we're we're looking at, whether it's being more generous or just, you know, managing our own lives for the better, being productive, avoiding procrastination, avoiding overeating or like all, all these things.
How can we do better? What's like a, a practical, usable life hack that you can give us to gain power over our instinctive selves?
[00:35:36] Paul Bloom:
Oh gosh, if, if I knew my life would be in a lot better shape. I will say something very general, which I do really strongly believe, which is the answer isn't listen to your heart.
Your hearts evolve through natural selection and will take you in places, which, some of which are terrible. The, the answer is to sort of think hard and talk to people and try to reflect, read books like the book we're discussing right now and, and talk to people and try to put a little bit more weight on your self-control, your intellect, your discipline, and a little bit less in your gut feelings.
[00:36:09] Chris Anderson:
Is it true that generosity is a muscle and that as you use it in some ways, it gets stronger and it becomes slightly easier to almost make it a habit.
[00:36:19] Paul Bloom:
I would think that if there's one great psychological law, it's that the more you do something, the easier it gets to do it, the more it's part of your routine. It becomes effortless.
Your book has at points, many specific recommendations. Doing any of them is a lot of work the first time, but a bit less work the second time, and easier the third time. And, so yeah, I think setting up routine and consistency is a way to turn this into part of one's life.
[00:36:46] Chris Anderson:
I could talk with you for hours.
I love the work you've done. Thank you for what you're doing and for spending so much time here and sharing this, this wisdom. It's been absolutely fantastic.
[00:36:54] Paul Bloom:
I'm grateful to be part of it.
[00:36:56] Chris Anderson:
That means a lot. Till next time. Paul Bloom, thank you.
[00:37:02] Paul Bloom:
Thank you.
[00:35:39] Chris Anderson:
Okay, that's all for today. If you'd like to dig deeper into this conversation, I'd love you to check out my book, Infectious Generosity. I've made it easy to do this, thanks to a donor. We're giving away free copies of both the digital book and the audio book. You just have to go to ted.com/generosity, and the combination of the book and these podcast episodes, I really think it's a unique way of digging so deep into this topic, which I consider, as I may have mentioned, the most important single idea. It just connects so much of what we all care about.
Okay, so next week we're speaking with Daryl Davis, a courageous musician whose generosity takes a very different form. He more than anyone I know has shown what it takes to exercise the gift of bridging, of somehow finding common ground with people who seem like your enemies.
The TED Interview is part of the Ted Audio Collective, a collection of podcasts dedicated to sparking curiosity and sharing ideas that matter. This episode was produced by Jess Shane. Our show is mixed by Sarah Bruguiere. Our team includes Constanza Gallardo, Grace Rubenstein, Banban Cheng, Michelle Quint, Roxanne Hai Lash, Daniella Balarezo.
If you like this show, please do us a huge favor and leave us a review. This helps others find us. We will read every review. Okay. Thanks so much for listening. This is Chris Anderson. I will catch you next time.