Intro: This podcast was made on the lands of the Wurundjeri people,
Intro: the Woi Wurrung and the Bunurong. We'd like to pay
Intro: respects to their elders, past and present, and emerging.
Intro: From the Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences at the University
Intro: of Melbourne, this is PsychTalks.
Nick: From the University of Melbourne's School of Psychological Sciences, this
Nick: is PsychTalks.
Nick: We know we told you we'd finished for the season,
Nick: but when an opportunity like this comes along, you just
Nick: don't say no. This is a special bonus episode with
Nick: a remarkable guest. Today we're joined by one of the
Nick: world's most fascinating thinkers about how our minds grow, learn
Nick: and change. Professor Alison Gopnik from the University of California, Berkeley.
Nick: Alison's work has transformed our understanding of childhood learning, the
Nick: imagination and intelligence. She's the author of The Scientist in
Nick: the Crib, The Philosophical Baby, and The Gardener and The Carpenter.
Nick: And she's in Australia this week for the Pip Pattison
Nick: Oration at the University of Melbourne.
Nick: In her oration, Alison explores how different stages of life
Nick: shape different forms of intelligence and what that means for
Nick: how we think about learning, ageing, and even artificial intelligence.
Nick: We'll talk about curiosity, care, and what humans do best, exploring,
Nick: exploiting and empowering, and how those abilities evolve across the lifespan.
Nick: Alison argues that curiosity takes different forms as we grow
Nick: from exploring the world as children to exploiting what we've
Nick: learned as adults to empowering others later in life.
Nick: Alison, welcome to PsychTalks, and thank you so much for
Nick: being generous with your time, um, during your very busy
Nick: schedule down here. Before we get down to business, uh,
Nick: how are you enjoying Melbourne?
Alison: Oh, I love Melbourne. I was saying before, this is
Alison: one of my favourite, this is one of my favourite cities. I,
Alison: it combines two of the things from two other of
Alison: my favourite places, Oxford and California, in that you have beautiful, tall,
Alison: athletic people who are wry and ironic and pessimistic, which
Alison: I think is just sort of a perfect combination.
Nick: Terrific, I feel flattered.
Nick: Let me begin with a bit of uh your own history.
Nick: I'd forgotten that you did your doctoral work with Jerome
Nick: Bruner at Oxford, um, and he's one of my heroes
Nick: and has been for a long time, and I actually
Nick: had his autobiography In Search of Mind with me on
Nick: the plane when I flew to grad school in Philadelphia
Nick: a very long time ago. Uh, and I went
Nick: back to the book to see if you figured in it.
Nick: And sure enough, uh, here's what Bruner writes about you
Nick: in case you don't remember. He writes, "Alison Gopnik had
Nick: come to the group from McGill. Her letters of recommendation
Nick: urging us to take her in the department of Oxford
Nick: on the grounds that she had taken everything available at
Nick: McGill in linguistics, philosophy and psychology. She arrived an unreconstructed
Nick: Chomsky and departed a disciple of Vygotsky."
Nick: So you must have been quite a force of nature,
Nick: and it must have been quite a formative experience. Can
Nick: you say a bit about what it was like working
Nick: with Bruner and whether the subsequent shape of your career
Nick: was starting to form at that time?
Alison: Yeah, I think it was very much. I was, I
Alison: arrived actually being much more a philosopher than a psychologist.
Alison: I had done, uh, uh, as, as he mentioned, I'd
Alison: been at McGill and I'd taken all the classes in
Alison: all the areas, in all the disciplines, but I was
Alison: essentially a philosopher. And in fact, I was going to
Alison: go to MIT to work with Jerome Fodor, the famous, uh,
Alison: the famous kind of nativist philosopher, MIT philosopher.
Alison: Um, and then at the very last minute, I did
Alison: a sort of, you know, a grand tour after I'd
Alison: finished my, my, uh, after I'd finished my BA and
Alison: went to Oxford and it was so beautiful and it
Alison: was so much like all the children's books that I'd
Alison: been raised on that I thought I have to come
Alison: here for at least a bit of the time. Um.
Alison: So I decided what I would do is I would
Alison: work with Jerry in his developmental lab, and I would
Alison: also work in the philosophy department. So I was going
Alison: up back and forth between Logic Lane, which is where
Alison: the philosophy department was, and where people were talking about
Alison: things like, uh, reference and meaning, up to Summertown, which
Alison: is in the other end of Oxford, which is all
Alison: where all the women and children are sort of parked
Alison: out of, out of sight of the university.
Alison: And Jerry, at the time, it's funny because I think
Alison: about this now, and I realise, oh, he was at
Alison: the absolute technological cutting edge, because we had video recording devices,
Alison: which were, you know, giant, these giant reel-to-reel recorders that
Alison: weighed 40 pounds and a giant camera on a tripod,
Alison: and I would drag them out to look at these children.
Alison: Um, and I just recorded all the things that these
Alison: babies said for a year, uh, not a project I
Alison: would allow any of my students to do nowadays. Um,
Alison: and after that time, after about a year, as I
Alison: thought about going back to be a philosopher at MIT,
Alison: I realised that I could spend the rest of my
Alison: life either with this group of dedicated searchers after truth
Alison: who just wanted to
Alison: solve the biggest problems in the universe, or else with
Alison: a group of whiny, egocentric narcissists who needed to be
Alison: taken care of by women all the time. And since
Alison: the first group was the babies and the second group
Alison: was the philosophers, that I figured I'd better spend the
Alison: rest of my time with, uh, the rest of my
Alison: time with the babies.
Alison: But it was an absolutely formative, that was an absolutely
Alison: formative year, and, um, and Jerry had a group of
Alison: amazing graduate students. I think graduate school was kind of
Alison: like a secondary critical period for, uh, for academics who,
Alison: who went on to do a number of, you know,
Alison: went on to become distinguished psychologists, but of course we
Alison: were all just first year students then. And another thing
Alison: that I realised when I came back to Oxford, uh,
Alison: this year is that it was 1975, which was the
Alison: nicest summer that anyone had had in Oxford since the 1920s.
Alison: And when I was just back there in 2025, people
Alison: were saying, you know, it hasn't been this sunny since 1975. So,
Alison: it was this great summer of going punting and reading
Alison: Piaget and, uh, and talking and, um, and a, you know,
Alison: sort of ideal Oxford. The, the next year it rained
Alison: a lot, but, um,
Alison: And another thing is that this will speak to some
Alison: of the content of what I was saying in my,
Alison: in my talk. Oh, by the way, what makes it
Alison: an oration? I've been curious about that.
Nick: It's just a talk, but even better.
Alison: Oh, a talk, but even better. OK. I thought it
Alison: was kind of, I wasn't sure whether I should, you know,
Alison: wear a toga or something, it seemed - I didn't wear
Alison: a toga.
Alison: Um, but one of the things that I've been arguing
Alison: in my most recent work is thinking about the intelligence
Alison: of care, thinking about the way that we care for
Alison: other people and the very special characteristics that that has.
Alison: And Jerry was a really good example of a mentor
Alison: who got it right about how you should care for students.
Alison: So he's had this very long distinguished group of students,
Alison: but none of them were Brunarians. None of them just
Alison: did the same thing that he did. And I think
Alison: at the time, it was, could be a bit tense
Alison: because the students would go off and, you know, say,
Alison: oh well, that was a dumb idea of Jerry's, well,
Alison: I'm going to do something else. But in retrospect, it
Alison: means that he's had enormous, enormous influence. And if you
Alison: compare him with someone like, like Chomsky, who I would have,
Alison: you know, been
Alison: working with an MIT, um, who is much more, much
Alison: more carpenter-ish in his approach to, to students, wanted the
Alison: students to have particular views, his particular views. But then
Alison: that means that in the long run, you don't have
Alison: as much influence. So I think, I think academic mentorship
Alison: is another example where this intelligence of care, which Jerry
Alison: had to a tremendous degree, being able to respect what
Alison: his students were doing, being able to give them the
Alison: resources they needed like the big giant reel-to-reel recorders to
Alison: do their own work, um, and that ended, that's ended
Alison: up really being very productive over many generations.
Nick: So you were 'gardened' rather than 'carpented'.
Alison: Exactly, that's right.
Cassie: And we will come back to that in a moment,
Cassie: but before we get to some of that work, um,
Cassie: we thought we'd treat our listeners to some of the
Cassie: big ideas from one of your earlier books, and we
Cassie: found this great quote from the Philosophical Baby, and I'll,
Cassie: I'll read it out.
Cassie: I'm sure you know it, but to our listeners, you say,
Cassie: "children are the R&D department of the human species, the
Cassie: blue sky guys, the brainstormers. Adults are production and marketing.
Cassie: Children think up a million new ideas, mostly useless, and
Cassie: we take the 3 or 4 good ones and make
Cassie: them real."
Cassie: And then you also referred to the "useful uselessness of immaturity".
Cassie: So what do you think enables babies and children to
Cassie: be so imaginative and creative, and what's the use, or
Cassie: what can we learn from the way they approach that?
Alison: So one of the things that I've been arguing recently
Alison: is that rather than thinking as if there's a single mystical,
Alison: mysterious thing called intelligence, and then if we build a computer,
Alison: it will get more and more intelligent until it's super intelligent.
Alison: That's not really the picture that comes from cognitive science.
Alison: Instead we have a lot of different capacities that trade
Alison: off against each other, that are in tension with each other.
Alison: And one of the classic examples of this in computer
Alison: science is what's called the explore-exploit dilemma. And essentially the
Alison: idea is, you can't both be focused, go out into
Alison: the world, do things in an efficient, effective way, and
Alison: also explore all the possibilities that the world has to offer.
Alison: Figure out how the world around you works. Um, and
Alison: provably in computer science, you can't do both of those
Alison: at the same time.
Alison: Um, and the solution is to have, do one at
Alison: one time and do another later, and often it's start
Alison: out exploring and then exploiting.
Alison: And what I've argued most recently is that childhood is
Alison: really evolution's way of resolving that dilemma, because you have
Alison: this early period where all you have to do is explore, um,
Alison: go out, figure out how the world around you works. Um,
Alison: and in particular, a time in which you can figure
Alison: out new things about how the world around you works. Um,
Alison: and then you can take those things you discover and
Alison: put them to use to exploit later.
Alison: I think there's two things that are important about that.
Alison: One of them is that humans are actually adapted to
Alison: what people in AI call the non-stationary environment, environments that
Alison: change all the time. And there's very good evidence that
Alison: when we evolved, part of what happened was that each
Alison: generation was facing a slightly different environment, an environment that
Alison: worked in different ways, and children are the ones who
Alison: can actually be in that new environment.
Alison: It's sort of we're all, essentially we're all immigrants. That's
Alison: what we're, we're designed to be. We're designed to be immigrants,
Alison: we're designed to be in a new place, and the
Alison: children are the ones who get to really explore how
Alison: that new place works. But of course, they can only
Alison: do that because there are other people who are getting
Alison: resources that will take care of them during that time.
Cassie: And in fact, in the Philosophical Baby, you describe young
Cassie: children as being like scientists, forming theories about their world
Cassie: and the social world and running little experiments. Is that
Cassie: how you think of children, like little baby Einsteins?
Alison: Yeah, very much. So, and that's, you know, started out,
Alison: that's an idea that people have sort of vaguely said.
Alison: But back in the, back when I was starting with, uh,
Alison: with Jerry Bruner, in fact, um, a number of us
Alison: started arguing for what's come to be called the 'theory theory'.
Alison: The idea that quite literally and specifically, we could say
Alison: something about what it was that children were doing.
Alison: And in the 00s, we started actually getting, uh, computational
Alison: accounts of what the, at least in part, what the
Alison: scientists were doing and what the children were doing, and
Alison: to an amazing degree, but I must say, startling to
Alison: all of us, including me, even 2 and 4-year-olds were
Alison: solving problems, figuring out the world in, in ways that
Alison: were characterised by these, these sophisticated, um, Bayesian causal inference mechanisms,
Alison: for example, of the sort that you could use to
Alison: explain what was going on in science.
Alison: Um, so I think, I think the, the progress has
Alison: made it even clearer that children are indeed literally doing
Alison: the same things, performing the same computations that allow us to, uh,
Alison: allow us to do science. And of course that makes sense.
Alison: I mean, scientists are using the same brains that we
Alison: all have, there must be some way that they're solving
Alison: those problems.
Alison: And I think one of the other things that's interesting
Alison: is that many things that are bugs from the exploit
Alison: perspective are features from the explore perspective and vice versa.
Alison: So many things that traditionally made people think, oh, children
Alison: aren't as smart as adults, like, the fact that they're noisy,
Alison: both metaphorically and literally that they're, they seem to do
Alison: these random things, they're, you can't quite predict what they're
Alison: doing from one minute to the next.
Alison: They spend all this time playing instead of doing anything
Alison: terribly productive, they're kind of take impulsive, they take risks.
Alison: Those are all things that are not good if you're
Alison: trying to actually solve a problem or do something, but
Alison: they're very good if you're trying to just learn as
Alison: much as you can about what's going on around you.
Nick: So just like you liken babies, young children to scientists, uh,
Nick: in other work that you've published, you've likened scientists to babies,
Nick: and I assume that's not just tantrums about rejected manuscripts,
Nick: there's something deeper. Can you elaborate on that idea?
Alison: Well, the idea is that, again, as I said, I mean, look,
Alison: the scientists have the same brains that humans evolved in
Alison: the Pleistocene, right? And I think there's a pretty good
Alison: argument that what happens is that when you, uh, so
Alison: one way of resolving these explore-exploit conflicts is by having
Alison: a developmental period early on when you can explore.
Alison: But another way is by having a kind of division
Alison: of labour. So, when we put even grown-ups for some
Alison: period of time in the same kind of circumstances as children,
Alison: where there's nothing they absolutely immediately have to do, where
Alison: they have the resources that they need to be able
Alison: to solve problems, then you can see them implementing the
Alison: same kinds of capacities that you see in children, these
Alison: capacities for just figuring out the truth.
Alison: And, and I think all humans have done that to
Alison: some extent, but science gives us a way of institutionalising
Alison: that idea that some people are allowed to just go
Alison: out and explore and figure out the truth, and we've
Alison: discovered as evolution seems to, that that's actually a good
Alison: strategy in the long run for, for being successful and
Alison: getting what we want, but in the short run it's
Alison: just activating that kind of motivation.
Cassie: And to nurture that, going back to your most recent book,
Cassie: The Gardener and the Carpenter, you kind of say that
Cassie: rather than parents thinking about shaping a child into this
Cassie: desired product, which is the carpentry model, you argue that
Cassie: parenting should be more about creating a nurturing space and,
Cassie: and where children can develop like being a gardener, and
Cassie: I love this quote that you've got, and I'm sure
Cassie: a lot of parents can relate literally and metaphorical, metaphorically
Cassie: to this where you say "parenting involves a lot of
Cassie: exhausted digging and wallowing in manure."
Cassie: I have 3 children. They're kind of out of the
Cassie: manure phase, but you know, I, I think we can
Cassie: all relate to it.
Cassie: But for those parents who kind of might like the
Cassie: idea of the carpentry model of parenting, what can you
Cassie: tell them about why that is not the best way
Cassie: to kind of encourage the curiosity and, and creativity in
Cassie: their kids?
Alison: Well, again, I mean if you think about it, think
Alison: about that, that carpentry model is really a sort of
Alison: exploit model which suggests that you have a goal, you
Alison: have an outcome that you know about beforehand, and you'll
Alison: succeed if you bring about that goal.
Alison: So you know, if you are building a chair, you
Alison: have an idea of what the chair looks like, and
Alison: you're a good carpenter if you build that, that chair.
Alison: But if what you want is to introduce more variability
Alison: into the world, and there's a very close relationship between variability,
Alison: exploration and learning, especially, again, learning about a new environment,
Alison: then that's not a very good way of doing it.
Alison: I mean, almost by definition, right? If you, if you
Alison: know what the outcome is going to be, then you're
Alison: not going to be, it's not going to be something surprising,
Alison: it's not going to be something unusual, it's not going
Alison: to be something that's never been in the world before.
Alison: And if you think about what you do when you're gardening,
Alison: at least if you're the kind of messy cottage gardener
Alison: that I am, um, what happens is, and this is
Alison: something profoundly about what makes for a good garden, is not,
Alison: I'm going to shape each of these flowers to come
Alison: out a particular way, but I'm going to develop an
Alison: ecosystem that's robust enough, so that when there's a drought,
Alison: or when it's the coldest day in Melbourne in 8 years, um,
Alison: the garden's going to be able to survive.
Alison: And it does that because different plants will flourish in
Alison: different ways at different times. And I think it's the
Alison: same way with parents and children. What you really want
Alison: is to enable this wide variety of children with different
Alison: strengths and different, um, and different weaknesses. And your role
Alison: as a, a caregiver is to allow all of those,
Alison: you know, allow all of those different flowers to to, uh,
Alison: to bloom, that's, that's what your, you know, that's what
Alison: your role is.
Alison: A nd it, as, as you say in that quote,
Alison: it's not like that's, it's not like you just sit
Alison: back and it just happens by itself, it's, there's a
Alison: lot of, there's a lot of, uh, there's a lot
Alison: of manure involved, but, uh, but it's a very different picture,
Alison: it's a very different model.
Cassie: It's a really beautiful image though, and I think even
Cassie: if our listeners don't know all the details of your work,
Cassie: just kind of talking about that you're a gardener, not
Cassie: a carpenter is so powerful as a parent.
Alison: Well, I hope that that's true, and I hope that
Alison: it has the effect, it's, and I think it has
Alison: had the effect of empowering parents. But I have to
Alison: say I have often been, when the book came out,
Alison: I would be in, you know, this kind of a,
Alison: an interview and someone would say, so, you know, what
Alison: you're saying is you shouldn't have these specific goals, and
Alison: we think that's great. Now, could you just tell our listeners,
Alison: how do you go about being a gardener parent again? Like,
Alison: what should you do to make sure that...
Alison: um, it was sort of, it's a, it's very deep seated,
Alison: it's a very deep seated set of anxieties. But actually,
Alison: you know, it's funny, I, it's, the book is actually
Alison: probably being read now more than it was when it
Alison: first came out, and I think it was a bit
Alison: prescient in that the pressures on parents to
Alison: be carpenters to get their children out in a particular way,
Alison: and also the sense that people have of now saying, no,
Alison: that's not a good outcome. It's not letting us thrive,
Alison: it's not letting our children thrive, our children aren't developing
Alison: the ability to be resourceful, to be adults, to be
Alison: able to do all the things that they need to do.
Alison: I think that's actually just intensified in the 10 years since
Alison: the book.
Cassie: And I think added to that the pressures of social media
Cassie: and screen time. I'm not surprised that more parents are
Cassie: reading that.
Alison: And you know, one of the things that we know
Alison: about young people, that's a very strange, there's this very
Alison: strange profile now, which is in, in many respects, teenagers,
Alison: for example, are doing better. They're not getting into trouble,
Alison: crime is going down, um, there's fewer teenage pregnancies, there's
Alison: less drug use, but they're not also not going out
Alison: into the world and, and exploring and finding out about things, and,
Alison: and they're much more anxious.
Alison: And one of the things we know about anxiety, sort
Alison: of counterintuitively, is that being very, very protected from ever
Alison: seeing anything that's dangerous, actually makes you more anxious rather
Alison: than less anxious. So the, the, the therapy for anxiety
Alison: is to expose yourself to the thing that you're scared of.
Alison: And I think it's kind of like a whole generation
Alison: of children is being raised in a way that, that,
Alison: you know, um, a cognitive behavioural therapist would say, oh no,
Alison: that's a good recipe for making people anxious is to
Alison: tell them all the time how dangerous things are and
Alison: all the things that, yeah, all the things they can't do.
Nick: So we'll move on from the beautiful image of manure
Nick: and your past books towards what you spoke about uh
Nick: yesterday at the oration, um, Alison, and, and uh you've
Nick: already brought up this idea that there is no single
Nick: intelligence and you've talked about the um explore versus exploit uh,
Nick: distinction and, and how they are in some ways, uh, uh,
Nick: tradable off against one another.
Nick: And this idea that childhood is a stage of, uh,
Nick: rampant exploration is such an important idea, especially you're not
Nick: just saying, um, kids are aimlessly moving around and bumping
Nick: into stuff and causing mischief, but they're really adept at
Nick: figuring out how the world ticks, and you call this
Nick: causal learning, and now not all of our listeners will have, um,
Nick: backgrounds in academic psychology, so can you tell us a
Nick: bit about how kids accomplish causal learning?
Nick: And maybe along the way explain what a 'blicket' is.
Alison: Yes, so, um, uh, to go back to what you
Alison: were saying about the idea of the children being little scientists, um,
Alison: one of the next questions that we asked is, OK,
Alison: well what are scientists doing that lets them learn as
Alison: much as they do?
Alison: And at least one thing that they're definitely doing is
Alison: figuring out the causal structure of the world. That's a
Alison: really important part of science, and it's maybe the part
Alison: of science that makes it most useful in the long
Alison: run when we understand what causes what, that means you
Alison: can do something to the cause and bring about the effect. Um,
Alison: and we wanted to know when and how children were
Alison: doing this.
Alison: Now if you ask even adult scientists, and certainly ordinary adults,
Alison: something like, when you have conditional probabilities and a confounder
Alison: that you've controlled for, can you infer that there's actually
Alison: a causal chain? Right, that will not, it, it's one
Alison: of the good things about being a developmentalist is that
Alison: you don't actually ask three year olds dumb questions like that,
Alison: although sometimes psychologists ask grown-ups dumb questions like that. Um,
Alison: so we wanted to test how is it that children
Alison: are doing this, and the way we did it was
Alison: we built a number of machines, but one of them
Alison: that we used especially was called the blicket detector.
Alison: It's a little box, and it lights up and plays
Alison: music when you put some things on it and not
Alison: other things. So even with this very simple system, there's
Alison: lots of ways that it could work. It could be
Alison: that the red one is a blicket that makes it go.
Alison: Or it could be that you have to put on
Alison: two blickets simultaneously to make it go. Or it could
Alison: be that a blicket will keep it from going unless
Alison: you have another blicket. I mean, there's all sorts of
Alison: structure as to the way that it goes, it would work.
Alison: And what we would do is to show the children
Alison: the machine, show them some pattern of data about the machine.
Alison: Another thing is maybe, uh, in one experiment we did
Alison: actually with 2-year-olds, one block makes it go um 8
Alison: out of 12 times, and another block makes it go,
Alison: let me make sure I get the numbers right, you know,
Alison: makes it go 2 out of 3 times, and then
Alison: they had to, would have to do the probabilities to
Alison: figure out which was, which one was more likely.
Alison: And then we would just say, make the machine go,
Alison: or we would say, tell me which one is a blicket,
Alison: or tell me how it works. And using that technique,
Alison: the children turned out to be incredibly sophisticated, as sophisticated
Alison: as some of these very fancy computational AI causal inference, um,
Alison: programs were. But what we've been doing more recently, um,
Alison: you know, one of the things that we, we should
Alison: always listen to what children are telling you um, especially
Alison: as a developmental psychologist, and the main problem that we
Alison: had with the machine, which parents out there may already
Alison: have guessed, was the kids just wanted to play with it.
Alison: And we had to say to them, no, no, you
Alison: get to play with it at the end, just look
Alison: very carefully at this pattern of data that I'm giving
Alison: you in a very controlled way, and then you can,
Alison: then you can play with it when we're done.
Alison: And more recently I've been thinking, maybe that's telling us something.
Alison: I mean, after all, how is it that we manage
Alison: to find out as much as we do about the world?
Alison: We do experiments and scientists do experiments, and um, 2-year-olds
Alison: do experiments, but we call it getting into everything. Um,
Alison: and if you look carefully at a 2-year-old or a 3-year-old,
Alison: what you'll see is that they're just constantly, uh, constantly
Alison: doing experiments. They can do more experiments in 5 minutes
Alison: than we scientists can do in 5 years.
Alison: So then we wanted to try and figure out, is
Alison: there some way, again, formally computationally, that we could explain
Alison: or describe what's going on. And it's important to say
Alison: this is one of the big gaps in artificial, current
Alison: artificial intelligence systems like the large models, is that they
Alison: can summarise a lot of information that human beings have
Alison: put out on the web. But what they don't do
Alison: is go out and find something new. They don't do experiments.
Alison: They don't find something that's really different from all the
Alison: things that everybody else has said on the, um, has
Alison: said on the web. And little children are doing that
Alison: all the time.
Nick: In your talk, you link childhood exploration of this sort
Nick: to the sort of weirdness of the human life history,
Nick: specifically the extended period of dependency on carers and also
Nick: this um connection I hadn't heard before uh in terms
Nick: of the close spacing of human kids, which Cassie can
Nick: relate to with three, you know, lovely boys born 1
Nick: year apart.
Nick: Um, can you just explain that link between the human
Nick: life history and that proneness to explore among human babies?
Alison: So, a life history is things like how many young
Alison: you have, how long you live, how, how long a
Alison: period of fertility you have. It's all the, those kinds
Alison: of features of, of a, an animal. And humans have
Alison: this very bizarre life history because we have a very
Alison: long childhood, much longer than any of our close primate relatives, uh,
Alison: chimps are producing as much food as they're consuming by
Alison: the time they're 7.
Alison: And, you know, my 14-year-old grandson is definitely not doing that.
Alison: And forager, even in forager, um, cultures, uh, kids aren't
Alison: doing that until they're, say, 16 or 17. We also
Alison: have the children more often, so we have babies about
Alison: once every, every year or two, and, uh, um, chimps,
Alison: for example, are only having babies once every 5 years
Alison: or so, so we have a lot of these useless babies. Um,
Alison: and it's, that's really puzzling from an evolutionary perspective.
Alison: Another part of our life history is that we have
Alison: postmenopausal grandmothers, so we have women who are living for
Alison: another 20 years past their fertility, and it's not quite
Alison: as sharply defined in men, but you also have men
Alison: living another 20 years into their 70s or their 80s, um,
Alison: And so the question is why this strange life history?
Alison: And one of the things that you notice if you
Alison: go out and look at many different animals, is that
Alison: this combination of a very long childhood, lots of babies,
Alison: lots of investment from other people and taking care of those, uh,
Alison: from other animals and taking care of those babies, goes
Alison: with having a big brain, goes with being able to learn,
Alison: goes with being able to deal with many different kinds
Alison: of environments to make tools, things that we might anthropomorphically
Alison: think of as, as intelligence.
Alison: And we seem to be sort of on the end
Alison: of the distribution on all of those.
Nick: That's where the New Caledonian crow comes in, you said,
Nick: compared to the chicken.
Alison: That's right. So, the New Caledonian crows are famously intelligent, um,
Alison: use tools at a level that makes them look like primates,
Alison: can solve all sorts of complicated problems.
Alison: Um, and the fledglings are, are, they're fledglings until, uh,
Alison: for 2 years, which is a very long time in
Alison: the life of a bird. And there's some lovely studies
Alison: that were actually done, uh, in New Zealand, showing that
Alison: in that period, what they're doing is exploring. They're trying
Alison: things out, they're failing, they're putting things in at the
Alison: wrong end, putting the sticks in at the wrong end,
Alison: going to the wrong termite, um, nests, and then it's
Alison: in that period of exploration, and you know, the moms
Alison: are sort of tapping their feet and dropping another worm
Alison: into the baby crow's mouth.
Alison: Um, and that's the period when they learn all the
Alison: things that will enable them to thrive later on. The
Alison: other example, by the way, is the quokka. So, um,
Alison: quokkas are, are, have this very long period where the
Alison: baby's inside of the pouch, and both males and females
Alison: are involved in taking care of the baby.
Alison: And they have really big brains for a marsupial. Um, I,
Alison: I don't think anyone's quite figured out what they use
Alison: their brains for, but they definitely have
Cassie: Smiling and creating tourism.
Alison: Yeah, exactly, that's right. I was talking to someone at
Alison: the talk yesterday who was saying they have very complicated
Alison: social lives, and that's probably what they're using it for.
Cassie: I must just interject for a moment because my kids
Cassie: will listen to this and I don't want them to
Cassie: think that they're useless babies even though they were so
Cassie: close together, but.
Cassie: Um, related to that idea of learning how to impact
Cassie: your environment or to control your environment, you talked about
Cassie: empowerment or empowerment gain, this idea that we intrinsically want
Cassie: to learn how to,
Cassie: the, the, the relationship between our actions and our, their effects,
Cassie: and that that's intrinsically rewarding. Is that correct that we
Cassie: don't kind of need that external reward to learn how
Cassie: to control our environment?
Alison: Yeah, so as I said, one of the things that
Alison: I got interested in is what's driving children to be
Alison: so experimental, right? Like what's the motivation that's letting them
Alison: get into everything, um, I mean, that's using up a
Alison: lot of calories to, to actually do that, why, why
Alison: are they doing it?
Alison: And a very interesting idea comes out of um reinforcement learning,
Alison: which is one of the techniques that people have used
Alison: a lot in, in AI. The idea behind reinforcement learning is,
Alison: you do something, you're rewarded, you'll do it again. But
Alison: of course usually the rewards are, you know, cheese or
Alison: avoiding a shock or something like that. But an idea
Alison: that people have had more recently is maybe doing something
Alison: like being effective, making things happen in the environment, is
Alison: a reward in and of itself, or uh finding something new
Alison: is a reward in and of itself.
Alison: And this idea of empowerment is that part of what
Alison: you want to do is just be able to make
Alison: things happen in the world around you. Whether they're good
Alison: things or bad things. You just want to feel as
Alison: if you know how to consistently make things happen. And
Alison: I think when you start looking, especially at infants and
Alison: toddlers from this perspective, you see them doing this all
Alison: the time, you know,
Alison: And there are some lovely experiments actually back from the 70s,
Alison: where you could do something like uh, tie the baby's
Alison: foot to a mobile with a ribbon, so that when
Alison: the baby kicks, the mobile moves. And babies just think
Alison: this is the most wonderful thing in the world, and
Alison: they'll kick, and then they'll stop kicking, and then they'll
Alison: wave their hands, and I had a video, one of
Alison: the great things about being a developmental psychologist is you
Alison: get to show cute videos of kids in your talks. Um,
Alison: another nice thing about being, I have, I'm a grandmother
Alison: of two groups of 3, within a short period of time.
Alison: Um, uh, so I have this lovely video of my,
Alison: my grandson Kit, with a, playing with a xylophone. And
Alison: you can see him trying the stick end, and then
Alison: trying the mallet end, and then trying his fat little hand,
Alison: and seeing all these different ways that he could make noises,
Alison: even though of course the tones aren't doing him any good,
Alison: they're just cool. And he really likes the idea that
Alison: he can be very consistently bringing about a certain sound
Alison: by performing a certain action, and he's discovering that just
Alison: in the course of playing with the xylophone.
Alison: And if you think about all the best baby toys,
Alison: like a busy box, right? That's really an empowerment device.
Alison: Or Wired magazine talked about the, um, uh, once made
Alison: a list of the world's 10 best toys and the
Alison: top one was the stick. And again, if you know,
Alison: if you have 3 boys, you know about sticks, and
Alison: you may have had, so a stick is an amazing
Alison: empowerment device, right? When you've got a stick, you've got
Alison: this superpower. You can get things that are really far away,
Alison: you can poke things, you can move things back and forth, um.
Alison: And every, you know, whenever you go like for a
Alison: walk in the forest with a child, they'll get this
Alison: giant stick as big as them that they'll, they'll drag
Alison: behind them.
Cassie: My kids are 8,9 and 10, and a stick is
Cassie: probably still, yeah, good thing.
Alison: Um, actually there's a funny story. I, I, uh, was, um, uh,
Alison: I was on a podcast like this on an interview programme,
Alison: and my, my oldest grandson, who was then about 4,
Alison: was listening to it. I said, see, grandmom's on the radio, listen.
Alison: And grandmom on the radio said, you know, after all,
Alison: you wouldn't, a 4 year old isn't going to know
Alison: what to do when there's a mastodon, you know, when
Alison: there's a, a, a charging mastodon coming at them. And
Alison: he said, I'd know what to do. And I said, really?
Alison: And he said, thought about it for a minute, he said,
Alison: I'd use a stick, I'd use a stick. Um.
Alison: Uh, but of course, the problem is, and I don't
Alison: know if this has happened with your children, but it
Alison: has certainly happened with mine, that the stick can also
Alison: lead you to the emergency room, right?
Cassie: Absolutely!
Alison: You know, you end up doing stitches and, uh, uh,
Alison: so a stick is a really lovely example of the
Alison: sort of thing that children love, just because it lets
Alison: them do all sorts of new things in the world,
Alison: and in spite of the fact that it can be dangerous.
Nick: Towards the end of the talk, um, you introduced some
Nick: new work you've been doing on caregiving, and you did, uh, um,
Nick: allude to that a little bit earlier, and you describe
Nick: it as a very neglected topic, um, but one that's
Nick: especially important, especially among elders. Uh, and I think it's
Nick: intriguing conceptually that you talk about caring as an intelligence
Nick: or as a, um, set of capacities, because I think
Nick: very often in psychology we tend to think of it
Nick: as an emotional disposition or something like that.
Nick: Uh, can you expand on that idea of care, caring
Nick: or caregiving, uh, as an intelligence and maybe link it
Nick: to the orca example?
Alison: Yeah, yeah, right. Um, so think about that example of
Alison: the ER and the stick. Um, the disadvantage of exploration,
Alison: there's two disadvantages. One of them is you don't have
Alison: resources while you're just exploring, and the other one is
Alison: exploring be dangerous.
Alison: It can, it can actually have, have negative utilities as
Alison: well as positive ones. Um, and if you have a
Alison: 2 year old or a teenager, you know that those
Alison: creatures can actually be driven to prefer the, the disagreeable
Alison: outcomes as long as they're the ones who are in
Alison: control and bringing them about.
Alison: Um, so the thought is that in order to, for
Alison: this kind of exploration to happen, you have to have
Alison: something else, which is that you have to have another animal, a,
Alison: a creature who's actually taking care of you during that period. Um,
Alison: you know, when I was writing The Gardener and The Carpenter,
Alison: I started thinking about it, because obviously if you're thinking
Alison: about parents and being a parent, that involves caregiving. But
Alison: Margaret Levi, who's a political scientist, and I started doing
Alison: this project about it, and it's amazingly invisible in the
Alison: social sciences, in the sciences in general.
Alison: So, you know, in economics, caregiving never shows up in
Alison: the GDP, right? I mean, care workers do, but the
Alison: caregiving that we all do every day doesn't.
Alison: Um, and if you look at political science, nobody talks about -
Alison: moral philosophy, even though this is the thing that if
Alison: you ask people, is, you know, the hardest moral decisions,
Alison: the thing that gives their life meaning, the thing that
Alison: they're most invested in, it's invisible in moral philosophy and
Alison: moral psychology. Um, the intelligence part is, you know, there's
Alison: an affective element about how you feel when you're caring
Alison: for someone, but just think about how hard it is
Alison: to decide what to do to care for someone.
Alison: And part of the reason why it's so hard, uh,
Alison: I've argued, is that the basic cognitive structure of caregiving
Alison: is really different from the structure of all the other
Alison: kinds of activities that we're engaged in. So, usually, say
Alison: if we're in a social relationship with someone else, um,
Alison: we have a kind of reciprocity. They do something for you,
Alison: you do something for them, and there's whole fields of
Alison: economics and game theory and a formal philosophy that, that
Alison: describe these kind of complicated social contracts between, between one
Alison: person and another.
Alison: But that's not what caregiving's like, right? I mean, you
Alison: don't think the person you're caring for is going to reciprocate.
Alison: In fact, it's kind of striking that they don't reciprocate. Um,
Alison: and by the way, we have this beautiful experimental design
Alison: that we've just started. I didn't get a chance to
Alison: talk about it in the talk. Uh, my, my postdoc,
Alison: Melis Muradoglu has done this, where, what she's done is
Alison: show children little vignettes of aliens. So this is an
Alison: alien planet. Here's these little aliens. And in one vignette,
Alison: what happens is, one of the aliens gets cold, and
Alison: the other one gives him a sweater, and then the, the,
Alison: the second alien gives a blanket to the first one.
Alison: So it's sort of reciprocal.
Alison: In the other one, what happens is, the alien gets cold,
Alison: and the other alien gives him a sweater, and then
Alison: the other alien gives him a blanket, and he doesn't
Alison: do anything in return. And if you ask kids, which
Alison: of those is, are friends and which of those are
Alison: a mom and child, they say, oh, the mom and
Alison: child is when you just keep taking care of the,
Alison: you just keep taking care of the baby even when there's, they're, they're,
Alison: you're not getting any return. Um, uh.
Alison: And in fact, if you sort of, I mean, another
Alison: kind of structure you could have that we're familiar with
Alison: is a power relationship where one person has more resources,
Alison: so the second person subordinates their goals to the first person's.
Alison: But if you think about caring relationships, what happens is
Alison: you have two people, one of them has more resources
Alison: than the other.
Alison: And as a result, because they know that the other
Alison: person is needy, they go out of their way to
Alison: try to help that other person to accomplish their goals.
Alison: And if you've ever tried to do this, it's really tricky,
Alison: because what goals do you want them to accomplish? Do
Alison: you want them just to be better off, what, you know, uh, um,
Alison: economists would call their objective utilities? Well, sometimes you just
Alison: want to give them the sandwich that will, do you
Alison: want to give them what they want?
Alison: Do you want to let them watch Paw Patrol for,
Alison: for 2 hours, as in the case of my 4
Alison: year old? Well, sometimes you sort of do. Um, and
Alison: when you think beyond just caring for children, think about
Alison: the way that we extend our caregiving to elders, for example,
Alison: or to spouses or to students, as I was mentioning
Alison: with Jerry Bruner or, or to patients.
Alison: Um, what we really want is to give them resources
Alison: so they can be empowered, so, in this kind of
Alison: technical sense that I was talking about before, so that
Alison: they can actually go out and do things themselves. And
Alison: that's a really tricky thing to know how to do,
Alison: like how do you decide how much autonomy you should,
Alison: you should give a teenager, right?
Alison: When do you decide when your elderly father should stop driving,
Alison: those are really cognitively complicated, and it's because the structure
Alison: is really different from the kind of structure that we're, uh,
Alison: we're used to. So we're used to the idea that
Alison: what you do is you go out and do things
Alison: to try to maximise your own goals, but we're not
Alison: used to the idea that you're doing things to try
Alison: to get someone else who is needy and need, and,
Alison: and doesn't have resources to have resources.
Alison: And yet, I mean, not only is this true about,
Alison: not only is this true about our relationship to children
Alison: and elders and um children and, um, and students and,
Alison: and patients, but I think it's what religions talk about
Alison: when they talk about Caritas. It's something about the way
Alison: that we should be caring about the planet, or we
Alison: care about the natural world.
Alison: It's this combination of thinking, you know, the planet can't
Alison: really take care of itself, we have an obligation to,
Alison: to pursue its goals, even though exactly what its goals
Alison: are might be really hard to figure out.
Cassie: Just on that caregiving topic, as a, as a parent,
Cassie: I think you're always conflicted between how much to kind
Cassie: of protect your child and how much to push them
Cassie: out into the world, and I think we're seeing that
Cassie: at the moment with, you know, kids probably having too
Cassie: much screen time and not enough outside time and now
Cassie: seeing that, that push for what is sort of being
Cassie: called as free range kids to get them out again.
Cassie: What, what's your kind of view on this, you know,
Cassie: getting kids more outside and doing things in the free
Cassie: range kids movement?
Alison: Yeah, I think, I mean, as I say, I think
Alison: that was kind of what I was talking about in
Alison: The Gardener and the Carpenter, and I think it's just
Alison: gotten more intense over the last, over the last 10
Alison: years or so. Um, and there's good empirical evidence that,
Alison: for instance, just the range, literally the range that children have,
Alison: how far, how far away they go from home has
Alison: really narrowed dramatically.
Alison: And things like, you know, whether a 7 or 8-year-old
Alison: could walk to school by themselves in big parts of
Alison: the States. They won't, you won't let a 7-year-old, go
Alison: out on the street by themselves, or go to the
Alison: park by themselves, or go to the store by themselves.
Alison: And as I said before, that just seems to be
Alison: a recipe for having children who are not good at adulting, as, um,
Alison: as they say now, and who are suffering from anxiety.
Alison: So I think both of those, I, I think the, the,
Alison: the kind of free range children ideas is really, uh,
Alison: I mean it's ironic and very, uh, American maybe, that
Alison: it has to be like a formula that you are
Alison: going to tell your children to go by themselves to
Alison: the grocery store.
Alison: But that's better than, as opposed to, I, I was
Alison: just hearing a wonderful um talk at, so we've been
Alison: doing a series of workshops about caregiving to try to
Alison: fill in this terrible uh gap. We have a special
Alison: issue of the journal Daedalus, with philosophers and economists and
Alison: social scientists talking about caregiving. Um, but we just did
Alison: one with a bunch of anthropologists, and in forager cultures,
Alison: not only are the 4-year-olds going out into the jungle
Alison: to explore, but, you know, they're being taken care of
Alison: by the 7-year-olds, and they're taking care of the babies,
Alison: the infants.
Alison: So, moms are going out to forage and they're taking
Alison: their kids with them, and it's not just that they're
Alison: looking after the kids, the kids are looking after themselves
Alison: and looking after the other, the other kids, which means
Alison: that by the time you're an adult having children yourself,
Alison: you really know a lot about caregiving. You've developed this
Alison: kind of intelligence of caregiving, and I think one of the,
Alison: one of the great, you know, um, crises lacks in
Alison: our current culture, possibly partly responsible for the, the sort
Alison: of fertility crisis is that people don't, haven't learned about
Alison: taking care of other people.
Alison: And then of course, we have this other crisis, which
Alison: is that we have this ageing population. So, you know,
Alison: we've always had people in their 70s or 80s. Now
Alison: we have a very large population of people in their
Alison: 70s and 80s, and we tend to sort of segregate
Alison: them out into, into, away from the rest of the society.
Alison: This gets to the point about the orcas. So, um,
Alison: that care, I think there's good reason to, you know, again,
Alison: we all do all of this, but elders seem to
Alison: be particularly involved in care. And there's some evidence that
Alison: grandmothers keep those, you know, when you think about those,
Alison: those groups of babies, the infants and the toddler and
Alison: the preschooler, the grandmothers are the ones in forager cultures
Alison: who are really responsible for keeping the, the toddlers and
Alison: the preschoolers alive while the mom is nursing the new baby.
Alison: So the only other creature that we know of that has,
Alison: the other, only other mammal we know of that has
Alison: postmenopausal grandmothers is actually the orca, the killer whale. And
Alison: it turns out that in orca pods, those grandmothers, those
Alison: postmenopausal grandmothers, give information to the rest of the pod
Alison: about things like, oh, there was, there was krill here
Alison: 30 years ago, now we're getting short of food. Here's
Alison: the place to go to find out about the krill.
Alison: And they pass on information. They have kind of cultural transmission,
Alison: cultural learning about, here's the kind of things that you
Alison: do to, to eat. I, I like the idea as
Alison: a grandmother myself that the central thing that they do
Alison: is give recipes for, um, to the next generation. But
Alison: I think for humans, also, if you think about things
Alison: like stories, or you think about songs, or you think about,
Alison: you know, the big picture about how a culture, what's
Alison: important in a culture or not.
Alison: Those are things that characteristically elders are passing on to grandchildren.
Alison: The parents typically are so terribly involved in just trying
Alison: to put out fires, that they don't have as much
Alison: time to do that. But you know, at night when
Alison: you're around the fire, the grandmothers are the ones who are, uh,
Alison: giving the, telling the myths and singing the stories, and
Alison: the children are learning from them.
Alison: Grandmothers and the grandfathers, um, and the grandfathers as well.
Alison: And again, the fact that we segregate out the elders
Alison: and the children, you know, uh, um I think is
Alison: a terrible institutional failure and if we are pretty clear
Alison: that it would be better for both ageing people and
Alison: for children if they were interacting more.
Cassie: There's a, um, a show on the ABC here called
Cassie: Old People's Home for 3 [*4] Year Olds, where they
Cassie: basically take 3-year-olds into these kind of elder care homes
Cassie: and the relationships and the interactions are just beautiful and,
Cassie: It's funded from a, a, an educational grant, but they're
Cassie: just continuing it and you see these beautiful relationships come through.
Alison: I mean, one of the things that I've proposed is
Alison: that in America, for example, and this could be true
Alison: in Australia as well, you know, there, we never quite
Alison: have enough people for preschool, so you know, you want
Alison: to have universal preschool, but there's never quite enough teachers there,
Alison: and I proposed that we should just sort of have
Alison: a designated grandmom in every, in every classroom and that
Alison: it's not an ECE teacher, but just someone from the
Alison: community who's an older person who wants to make some
Alison: extra money and who wants to do something that has
Alison: to do with little kids, and that's exactly the circumstance
Alison: in which you can get these kind of close relationships
Alison: that enable care and also enable things like cultural transmission.
Nick: We probably should uh draw a close because you've been
Nick: very generous with your time. Thank you so much for
Nick: sharing your wisdom with us, Alison, and we hope you
Nick: have a great rest of your stay here in Australia.
Alison: Yes, well, as I say, very happy always to come
Alison: and visit here. I went to the um, the Fitzroy
Alison: Primary School Fete on the first day that I was here,
Alison: which is wonderful, that enough, but that, I mean, not to,
Alison: not to downgrade the wonders of talking to all the
Alison: brilliant people at Melbourne, but that by itself was uh
Alison: enough motivation to come back.
Cassie: We'll also make sure you get up to date with
Cassie: your Bluey episodes as a developmental psychologist.
Alison: I am for no other reason, I would be grateful
Alison: to the Australian nation for Bluey as a grandmother of
Alison: six as well.
Cassie: Thank you so much for your time. Thank you.
Nick: That was Professor Alison Gopnik from UC Berkeley joining us
Nick: for a special psych talks episode recorded during her visit
Nick: to Melbourne for the Pip Pattison Oration. You can find
Nick: Alison's books and talks online.
Nick: Psych Talks is produced by Mairead Murray, Gemma Papprill and
Nick: Celia Harvey with sound engineering by Jack Palmer. I'm Nick Haslam.
Nick: Thanks for listening to our special episode and if you
Nick: haven't already, follow or subscribe so you don't miss our
Nick: next episode. Until next time, take care.