Alison Gopnik: What do babies think?
http://www.ted.com "Babies and young children are like the R&D division of the human species," says psychologist Alison Gopnik. Her research explores the sophisticated intelligence-gathering and decision-making that babies are really doing when they play.
TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world's leading thinkers and doers give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes. Featured speakers have included Al Gore on climate change, Philippe Starck on design, Jill Bolte Taylor on observing her own stroke, Nicholas Negroponte on One Laptop per Child, Jane Goodall on chimpanzees, Bill Gates on malaria and mosquitoes, Pattie Maes on the "Sixth Sense" wearable tech, and "Lost" producer JJ Abrams on the allure of mystery. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design, and TEDTalks cover these topics as well as science, business, development and the arts. Closed captions and translated subtitles in a variety of languages are now available on TED.com, at http://www.ted.com/translate.
Install Tubelator On Chrome
Video Summary & Chapters
No chapters for this video generated yet.
Video Transcript
What is going on
in this baby's mind?
If you'd asked people this 30 years ago,
most people, including psychologists,
would have said that this baby was irrational,
illogical, egocentric --
that he couldn't take the perspective of another person
or understand cause and effect.
In the last 20 years,
developmental science has completely overturned that picture.
So in some ways,
we think that this baby's thinking
is like the thinking of the most brilliant scientists.
Let me give you just one example of this.
One thing that this baby could be thinking about,
that could be going on in his mind,
is trying to figure out
what's going on in the mind of that other baby.
After all, one of the things that's hardest for all of us to do
is to figure out what other people are thinking and feeling.
And maybe the hardest thing of all
is to figure out that what other people think and feel
isn't actually exactly like what we think and feel.
Anyone who's followed politics can testify
to how hard that is for some people to get.
We wanted to know
if babies and young children
could understand this really profound thing about other people.
Now the question is: How could we ask them?
Babies, after all, can't talk,
and if you ask a three year-old
to tell you what he thinks,
what you'll get is a beautiful stream of consciousness monologue
about ponies and birthdays and things like that.
So how do we actually ask them the question?
Well it turns out that the secret was broccoli.
What we did -- Betty Rapacholi, who was one of my students, and I --
was actually to give the babies two bowls of food:
one bowl of raw broccoli
and one bowl of delicious goldfish crackers.
Now all of the babies, even in Berkley,
like the crackers and don't like the raw broccoli.
(Laughter)
But then what Betty did
was to take a little taste of food from each bowl.
And she would act as if she liked it or she didn't.
So half the time, she acted
as if she liked the crackers and didn't like the broccoli --
just like a baby and any other sane person.
But half the time,
