Ebook Just Babies The Origins of Good and Evil Paul Bloom 9780307886859 Books

Product details Paperback 288 pages Publisher Broadway Books; Reprint edition (November 11, 2014) Language English ISBN-10 9780307886859

Just Babies The Origins of Good and Evil Paul Bloom 9780307886859 Books Reviews

• Paul Bloom is a psychologist who studies moral behavior in infants and young children. Much of the field consists in finding ways to tailor games developed for adults (the prisoner's dilemma, the trust game, the public goods game, the ultimatum and dictator games) for very young children. This research is ingenious and extremely interesting.
  
  Bloom argues that humans have an innate moral sense in the same way that we have innate predispositions for many other social behaviors, such as communicating with language, living in families, and cooperating effectively with strangers. The basic material in support of this idea comes from laboratory and field work with human groups (see my edited volume, Moral Sentiments and Material Interests, MIT Press, 2005 for description and bibliography). Bloom argues that even very young children have moral sensibilities, and that these grow with age not only because children are taught to be moral, but also through the maturation of the brain as a child grows into adulthood, and through the use of reason as an adult.
  
  Bloom depends on his authoritative knowledge about children to press his message, but in fact after the first two chapters, most of the experimental evidence involves adults, and he insightfully discusses may issues inspired by everyday social observation. I found his social analysis very well written and often insightful. Bloom never simply regurgitates the received wisdom on a topic, but constantly supplies his own interpretation, which is often superior.
  
  When I began studying social theory, the accepted wisdom was that we are born purely selfish, with morality being a convenient social veneer that hides are fundamentally sociopathic selves. The only reason people act morally, I learned, is because they are afraid of getting caught acting immorally. Moreover, I learned that every society has is own moral rules, and such rules have no communality across societies. The bulk of research in the past twenty years has shown that both of these notions are incorrect. There is a such thing as human morality, this morality has a common substrate across all societies, and we (sociopaths and other wrong-doers excepted) are predisposed by our nature as human beings to express and affirm these moral principles. Indeed, as Samuel Bowles and I show in our book A Cooperative Species (Princeton 2011), and Edward O. Wilson shows in his The Social Conquest of Earth (Norton, 2012), our success as a species depends integrally on our moral constitution. There is no better place to start in appreciating the psychological side of human morality than Paul Bloom's fine book.
• Just Babies The Origins of Good and Evil by Paul Bloom was recommended reading for a class on morality that I took a few months ago. The idea of studying babies to see how they react to determine just how much of morality is hardwired in us fascinated me. I read the book with intense interest, particularly the studies. I couldn't help but wonder if the researchers were reading into the babies' reactions to get the results they wanted, at least at times. Bloom writes an interesting and engaging book, but the skeptic in me kept showing up when he described how the studies were conducted. Just Babies is a fascinating read that feels like a starting point and left me with questions rather than answers, but maybe that was the point. Bloom explores many aspects of morality, moral philosophy, and moral psychology in conjunction with the studies conducted on babies. Just Babies struck me as more a book about whether or not babies differentiate between harmfulness and kindness than about the origins of good and evil.
• Since I studied children development and psychology, I thought I could learn something new from this book but I didnt. Not a bad book, but you can only read so many psychology books before having read 90% of any other psychology book.
  
  If you are not knowledgeable, this book is a nice pick. Very easy to understand and explain well every reference.
• I thought this book would be s psychological study about the development in babies and children of a sense of good and evil. That is only true for the beginning chapters. The rest of it is really a mixed bag of the author's rumination about moral philosophy and a theory of justice. Not particularly impressive, I must say.
• At beginning, it was definitely fantastic knowledge to learn. Somehow as it goes on it became distort...I felt like I am veering out into more of adult life rather than baby. Then at end, it just lack of good closure while already veered off the point. Wish it could be done better.
• This book is chock full of stories you'll want to tell your friends about. This book is definitely not just about babies but the little people are interesting. Are we moral from the beginning?
• Smart thinking for our times. A guide book for life and a great read for anyone trying to figure out why people do what they do. If you have any interest at all in the psychology of what people do this will really help explain a LOT!!!
• This is a cool book and fun to read. I felt there were some long bows drawn in some examples - drawing big inferences about a baby's sense of right and wrong from some very interesting experiments. However it is a highly engaging and interesting book and I am, after all, no anthropologist or psychologist, and I respect Paul Bloom as the expert.