Neuroscience
I’ve had three of my own children and spent my professional life thinking about children. And yet I still find my relation to my children deeply puzzling. Our love for children is so unlike any other human emotion. I fell in love with my babies so quickly and profoundly, almost completely independently of their particular qualities. And yet 20 years later I was (more or less) happy to see them go – I had to be happy to see them go. We are totally devoted to them when they are little and yet the most we can expect in return when they grow up is that they regard us with bemused and tolerant affection. We are ambitious for them, we want them to thrive so badly. And yet we know that we have to grant them the autonomy to make their own mistakes. In no other human relation do we work so hard to accomplish such an ill-defined goal, which is precisely to create a being who will have goals that are not like ours.
Alison Gopnik is Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. She has published over 100 articles on children's learning and development and was the first to argue that children’s minds could help us understand deep philosophical questions. Her latest book is The Philosophical Baby.
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Return to menu for One Nagging Thing.
- Essi Viding: A "good Enough" Child-rearing Environment
In today’s world, young parents, like myself, are consistently bombarded with information about the "right way" to enrich our children’s lives. Books and TV programmes marketing the latest, typically entirely unproven "right way" have high visibility...
- David Buss: Overcoming Irrationality
One nagging thing that I still don’t understand about myself is why I often succumb to well-documented psychological biases, even though I’m acutely aware of these biases. One example is my failure at affective forecasting, such as believing that...
- Elizabeth Loftus: Nightmares
After struggling mightily, and not particularly successfully, to have a thought about this, I broached a Friday after-work happy hour group and asked them what they would say about themselves. To a person, each looked uncomfortable with the mere question....
- Robert Plomin: Nature, Nurture
After forty years doing research on nature and nurture in psychology, there are two crucial (not just nagging) things I want to understand. One is about nature and one is about nurture. About nature: Behavioural genetic research has shown that genetics...
- Paul Rozin: Time Management
I generally believe that we learn from experience. However, a recent study I did with Karlene Hanko repeats a finding from Kahneman and Snell, that people are very poor at predicting how their liking will change for a new product (in our case, two new...
Neuroscience
Alison Gopnik: Parenthood
I’ve had three of my own children and spent my professional life thinking about children. And yet I still find my relation to my children deeply puzzling. Our love for children is so unlike any other human emotion. I fell in love with my babies so quickly and profoundly, almost completely independently of their particular qualities. And yet 20 years later I was (more or less) happy to see them go – I had to be happy to see them go. We are totally devoted to them when they are little and yet the most we can expect in return when they grow up is that they regard us with bemused and tolerant affection. We are ambitious for them, we want them to thrive so badly. And yet we know that we have to grant them the autonomy to make their own mistakes. In no other human relation do we work so hard to accomplish such an ill-defined goal, which is precisely to create a being who will have goals that are not like ours.
Alison Gopnik is Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. She has published over 100 articles on children's learning and development and was the first to argue that children’s minds could help us understand deep philosophical questions. Her latest book is The Philosophical Baby.
--
Return to menu for One Nagging Thing.
- Essi Viding: A "good Enough" Child-rearing Environment
In today’s world, young parents, like myself, are consistently bombarded with information about the "right way" to enrich our children’s lives. Books and TV programmes marketing the latest, typically entirely unproven "right way" have high visibility...
- David Buss: Overcoming Irrationality
One nagging thing that I still don’t understand about myself is why I often succumb to well-documented psychological biases, even though I’m acutely aware of these biases. One example is my failure at affective forecasting, such as believing that...
- Elizabeth Loftus: Nightmares
After struggling mightily, and not particularly successfully, to have a thought about this, I broached a Friday after-work happy hour group and asked them what they would say about themselves. To a person, each looked uncomfortable with the mere question....
- Robert Plomin: Nature, Nurture
After forty years doing research on nature and nurture in psychology, there are two crucial (not just nagging) things I want to understand. One is about nature and one is about nurture. About nature: Behavioural genetic research has shown that genetics...
- Paul Rozin: Time Management
I generally believe that we learn from experience. However, a recent study I did with Karlene Hanko repeats a finding from Kahneman and Snell, that people are very poor at predicting how their liking will change for a new product (in our case, two new...