Big Think Interview with Alison Gopnik | Big Think

Big Think Interview with Alison Gopnik

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A conversation with the Professor of Psychology and Affiliate Professor of Philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley.

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Alison Gopnik:

Alison Gopnik is a professor of psychology and affiliate professor of philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley. She received her BA from McGill University and her PhD. from Oxford University. She is an internationally recognized leader in the study of children’s learning and development and was the first to argue that children’s minds could help us understand deep philosophical questions. She is a columnist (every other week) for The Wall Street Journal. She is the author of over 100 journal articles and several books including “Words, thoughts and theories” (coauthored with Andrew Meltzoff), MIT Press, 1997, and the bestselling and critically acclaimed popular books The Scientist in the Crib (coauthored with Andrew Meltzoff and Patricia Kuhl) William Morrow, 1999, and The Philosophical Baby: What children’s minds tell us about love, truth and the meaning of life, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2009. She has also written widely about cognitive science and psychology for Science, The Times Literary Supplement, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, New Scientist and Slate, among others. And she has frequently appeared on TV and radio including “The Charlie Rose Show” and “The Colbert Report." She has three sons and lives in Berkeley, California with her husband Alvy Ray Smith.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Question: What is your earliest childhood memory?

Alison Gopnik: Well, that's a good question. It's probably sometime when I was about two. I grew up in this crazy Bohemian family in Philadelphia and we actually lived in a public housing project. So definitely one of my earliest memories is having my crazy Bohemian mother making strudel on the table in this public housing project and having all of the children running around naked underneath the table, eating the scraps from the strudel. So that was a fairly typical scene in our household growing up.

Question: How specifically do you study babies’ thoughts?

Alison Gopnik: Right. Well that's a good question. I think part of the reason why people got it so wrong about babies for so long was because as adults when we want to find out what someone's thinking, we ask them and get them to tell us. And that's something that babies and even young children are very bad at doing. So to figure out what babies and young children think, we have to figure out ways to ask them in their language and not ours. So, for infants, that means actually looking at what they do—what actions they perform, rather than what they say. And even for the three and four year olds that I study a lot it means getting them to say choose between two alternatives or actually do something rather than you ask a three year old, "What are you thinking?" and you get this beautiful stream of consciousness monologue about their birthday party and horses and all sorts of things.

So what we have to do is really rely on actions rather than words; get them to produce actions and also give them information about the problem we are presenting in terms of real physical objects in their immediate environment. So, for example, we've been doing very exciting work about babies and young children's understanding of statistics. Any grown-up that has taken a statistics class will tell you, grown-ups are terrible [at statistics]. In fact, Danny Kahneman got the Nobel Prize for showing how bad grown-ups at explicitly thinking about probabilities but when we take three year olds, unfortunately, we would never do anything as lunatic as ask them about probabilities, but if we actually give them a real machine that operates according to probabilistic principles and just get them to operate the machine then you suddenly realize, "Oh, wait a minute. They actually are implicitly understanding all of the things like conditional probability."

Question: Can babies’ minds teach us about mental disorders such as schizophrenia?

Alison Gopnik: It's always a very big leap to go from any kind of science to clinical cases because clinical cases are so complicated, but I do think there may be some evidence now that there is a kind of continuum between schizophrenia and, ....

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