Alison
Gopnik is a professor of psychology and affiliate professor of philosophy
at the University of California at Berkeley. She
was one of the founders of the study of “theory of mind”, illuminating how
children come to understand the minds of others, and she formulated the
“theory theory”, the idea that children’s learn in the same way that
scientists do.
author of “The Dream of
Reason: A History of Philosophy From the Greeks to the Renaissance.”
The youngest
children have a great capacity for empathy and altruism. There's a
recent study that shows even 14-month-olds will climb across a bunch
of cushions and go across a room to give you a pen if you drop one.
Alison Gopnik
02/24/10 - Empathic Civilization': Amazing Empathic
Babies
"Even the youngest babies imitate the facial expressions of other people
and take on their emotions -- a kind of empathy. This ability is NOT
just the result of the much-hyped "mirror neurons" since, for one thing,
mirror neurons have been found in monkeys who rarely imitate others. But
it does show that human babies, in particular, are tuned in to other
people in an especially close way. By 18 months, babies have gone beyond
empathy to genuine altruism, After all empathy just means I feel your
pain, altruism means I try to make you feel better even when I don't
feel that way myself. Betty Repacholi and I did an experiment with 14
and 18-month-olds. "
Psychology and Philosophy - Berkeley
"Until a few decades ago, children were thought to be blank slates whose
moral sense had yet to develop. Gopnik offers a very different image of
babies as empathetic, logical, and “the best learners in the universe.”"
What Babies Know and We Don’tMichael Greenberg
The Philosophical Baby: What Children’s Minds Tell Us About Truth, Love,
and the Meaning of Life by Alison Gopnik
"Thus attachment, empathy, and morality are inseparable, though none is
inevitable. Although empathy does seem to be innate, and spontaneous
acts of altruism on the part of babies are common (eighteen-month-olds
will instinctively try to help a stranger in need though they haven’t
been taught to do so), the flourishing of empathy is not guaranteed. It
can be enhanced or quashed as a result of specific relations and
experience."
