Quotes from Paul Bloom

As Baumeister puts it, "If we as social scientists restrict our focus to actions that everyone including the perpetrator agrees are evil, we will have almost nothing to study." It is surprising to see how often the worst people in the world—rapists interviewed in prison, say—see themselves as the real victims. They are wrong to see themselves as innocents, but we are wrong as well to see them as different creatures from the rest of us.

The fifth chapter is about evil, looking skeptically at the view that lack of empathy makes people worse. The final chapter steps back to defend human rationality, arguing that we really do have the capacity to use reasoned deliberation to make it through the world. We live in an age of reason.

This might seem perverse. How can good lead to evil? One thing to keep in mind here is that we are interested in beliefs and motivations, not what's good in some objective sense. So the idea isn't that evil is good; rather, it's that evil is done by those who think they are doing good.

For just about any human capacity, you can assess the pros and cons. So let's give empathy the same scrutiny.

Empathy is the act of coming to experience the world as you think someone else does.

For every specific problem, lack of empathy is seen as the diagnosis and more empathy as the cure.

Boredom] is a canary in the coal mine of everyday existence, signaling whether we want and are able to cognitively engage with our current activity—and impelling us to action when we do not or cannot. How we respond to boredom matters: blindly stifling every flicker of boredom with enjoyable but empty distractions precludes deeper engagement with the messages boredom sends us about meaning, values, and goals.

One reason why doing nothing is so unpleasant is that our thoughts, unfettered by distraction, take us to uncomfortable places. Boredom is the opposite of BDSM: instead of escaping from the self, you're wallowing in it.

In contrast to empathy, compassion does not mean sharing the suffering of the other: rather, it is characterized by feelings of warmth, concern and care for the other, as well as a strong motivation to improve the other's well-being. Compassion is feeling for and not feeling with the other

If you can imagine an alternative world, then you can see things through someone else's eyes, even if their sense of reality doesn't match your own. This makes possible perspective-taking, empathy, and much else.

Less empathy, more kindness.

As the philosopher Pamela Hieronymi says, "A past wrong against you, standing in your history without apology, atonement, retribution, punishment, restitution, condemnation, or anything else that might recognize it as a wrong, makes a claim. It says, in effect, that you can be treated in this way, and that such treatment is acceptable

But in general, it's just false that negative emotional experiences have a purging effect.

Of all dead psychological theories, catharsis is the deadest.

There can be praise and exultation and even awe for the hero, as well as the vicarious pleasure of imagining oneself in the hero's role. It's interesting, though, that this seems to be a milder pleasure than comeuppance, perhaps because there isn't the same evolutionary need for us to scrutinize and praise and take delight in goodness as there is for us to focus on the bad.

As usual in psychology, the negative is more powerful than the positive.

This is why good-versus-evil clashes are so much more satisfying than fictions where there is good without evil.

Paul Rozin's discoveries that people often refuse to drink soup from a brand-new bedpan, eat fudge shaped like feces, or put an empty gun to their head and pull the trigger. As Tamar Gendler points out, the mind works on two tracks. We know, consciously, that the bedpan is clean, the fudge is fudge, the gun is empty, and yet we can't help blurring the imagined and reality; our minds scream, "Dangerous object! Stay away!

He seemed to get the most out of doctors who didn't feel as he did. Who were calm when he was anxious. Confident when he was uncertain." "His calmness didn't make me feel abandoned, it made me feel secure. I wanted to look at him and see the opposite of my fear, not it's echo." "I would prefer that those who care about me greet my panic with calm, and my gloom with good cheer.

the conclusion is even stronger—it's not merely that there exist some people who are both happy and have lives with meaning. It's that there is a correlation: happy people are more likely to say that their lives are meaningful, and people who say that their lives are meaningful are more likely to say that they're happy.

turns out that one can screw up being happy by trying to be happy—or at least by trying to be happy in the wrong way.

The problems we face as a society and as individuals are rarely due to lack of empathy. Actually, they are often due to too much of it.

the idea that you can't truly understand something without having experienced it yourself.

have no dramatic tension and would be boring. Finally, a focus on obstacles makes clear how the attraction of aversive fiction connects to what draws us in real life. In our actual lives, we seek out projects with difficulty and struggle, ones that involve surmounting obstacles. This is a large part of what gives life meaning.