Q. What are the worst things that adults, including psychologists, have ever believed about children?

A. It’s a bit of a puzzle, because essentially everything that adults and especially psychologists believed about children has turned out to be wrong, and there wasn’t really a clear reason why they would have thought that. So the typical view about children, for instance, was that they were irrational, that they couldn’t think abstractly, that they were restricted to the immediate here and now. William James said they lived in a “blooming buzzing confusion.” John Locke said they were “blank slates.” And both Piaget, the great founder of cognitive development, and Freud said that they were amoral; they couldn’t take the perspective of other people; they were egocentric. You still hear people saying things like children can’t tell the difference between fantasy and reality. It’s funny that people, including scientific psychologists, just assumed the negative about children without very much evidence. You could have said, “Well, we don’t really know whether children are egocentric and can’t think abstractly; we have to find out,” but that wasn’t what happened. People assumed that, with all the things children couldn’t do, they were defective grown-ups; they were missing fundamental capacities. And again, even recently, I heard a neuroscientist comparing children and animals and people with brain damage as if they were some kind of natural grouping, and if you think about it for more than two minutes, you’ll say it doesn’t make any sense—there’s no reason why you would think that children and animals and patients would have the same features. But I think there was a kind of picture that the thirty-five-year-old European male scientist is the peak of cognitive capacity and everything else in the world— is just a falling off from that.

Q. It seems like psychologists have forgotten that they had been children themselves.

A. That’s the general way we’re being stupid. There are certainly reasons why we didn’t understand a lot about children, one of them is—especially if you’re talking about very young children, under the age of five—we don’t remember what it’s like to be young children. Babies can’t talk, and even toddlers are not very good at articulating what they think. If you ask a three-year-old what they think about something, you’re likely to get a beautiful stream-of-consciousness poem about ponies and birthdays; you won’t get something that sounds like a really coherent account. Of course, babies can’t talk at all. This is an issue that comes up with nonhuman animals as well—if you have a creature who can’t talk, or communicates in a way that’s very different from the way that you do, it’s hard to figure out what’s going on in their minds.

Although I think it’s interesting that some of the poets, like Wordsworth, for example, at least remembered enough to know what it would like to be four or five. I think they actually ended up with a better picture of what childhood was like than scientists. But another reason was that the people who actually knew babies the best, the ones who were actually spending time with them day by day, looking at what they did, were women. And mothers. And those were not the same people who were writing books of philosophy and psychology. So for a long time, mothers and other women were the people who really intimately knew how children work, who were really familiar with them, and intuitively mothers thought, “there’s more going on here than meets the eye.” But they were not the people who were writing the psychology and philosophy books, and the people who were writing the psychology and philosophy books were not taking care of children.

One of the really remarkable things I discovered is that Wordsworth, for example, was a babysitter. He made money, when he was young and just starting out as a poet, by being a kind of caregiver for the child of a rich guy. Darwin had a lot of interesting things to say about babies; he actually spent a lot of time observing his own children in a really careful way. Occasionally you get someone who was really paying attention to children, and almost always they saw that more was there. But that was still the exception. I think that combination of things was responsible for the low opinion of children: We can’t remember when we were children; children can’t talk the same way than adults can; and the people who knew the children the best were women, and they weren’t the ones writing the psychology and philosophy books. Moreover, anything associated with women was seen as being less important or less rational than the things that were associated with men. There was the common intuition that any subject that women spent a lot of time with was not going to be rational or intelligent or intellectual, that women’s worlds might include emotions but not ideas. The combination of those things meant that thinkers were not agnostic about what children were like, but formulated a specific view that scientifically turned out to be completely wrong.

Q. And it was even worse for babies. Some psychologists thought they were just digestive tracts, and baby could bear surgery without anesthesics because we thought they couldn’t suffer.

A. That’s right. There was the view, and I still hear this from philosophers, that babies weren’t conscious. Even when I started graduate school, which is now long ago but not that long ago, I can remember neuroscientists explaining to me that babies didn’t have a cortex, so they were basically like a vegetable; they had reflexes but they couldn’t have any higher intellectual functioning, and they couldn’t feel, they couldn’t actually have consciousness.

Q. What about our own stupidity? Do children perceive stupidity in adults?

A. I’m not sure how much the children see stupidity in adults, but one really interesting thing that’s come out of the work I’m most engaged in now is that when you ask what’s rational and stupid, the answer is that it all depends. Many times things that seem stupid are really useful. For example, not actually thinking, not actually taking in all the evidence and information and trying to learn and update what you think, that’s almost like a definition of stupidity. But if you have to make decisions really quickly or really efficiently, then you often can’t afford to take the time and energy to actually do all the computations you would need to do to really be smart. You end up with automatic, well-practiced routines that work pretty well most of the time. But they’re stupid in the sense that they’re not sensitive to evidence; they’re not something that you can revise, something that’s actually thoughtful. The interesting thing is that if you look at children, they’re actually relying much more on learning and much less on these automatic, well-practiced ways. In our latest studies, for example, when you give children a pattern of data that supports an unlikely hypothesis, the children are actually better than the adults at figuring out that unlikely hypothesis. The children are actually more likely to update their belief when they get new data. Adults are more likely to just rely on the things that they already heard, or the things that people have told them. It’s stupid in some ways, but, of course, in other ways it’s very practical, because if every time you have to make a decision you had to go back from scratch and think, “Do I believe it’s really true? Is it really accurate?” it would be hard to act. People in computer science talk about an explore/exploit trade off. The kind of intelligence you need to exploit and act quickly and efficiently is really different from the kind of intelligence you need to explore, learn, and create and formulate new hypotheses. A common intuition is that the “explore” intelligence is more like real intelligence—a lot of stupidity happens when we’re just mindlessly relying on things that we’ve already done. But if by intelligence, you mean adapting well to the world around you, then creatures like children, who are so amazingly good at learning, will require many people working hard to take care of them. You get this really interesting contrast: the children are unbelievably smart—if you think about something like learning language, they’re much smarter than adults—but if you’re thinking about something like tying your shoes or putting your jacket on to get to school in the morning, the children look more stupid than the adults.

Q. Can they acknowledge that their parents are stupid?

A. Interestingly, I think that’s not true. There’s a lot of work about children’s understanding of testimony, what children think about what other people around them say, and I think the evidence is the children who are three or four years old give adults the benefit of the doubt. They hear a grown-up say something, and they assume that what the grown-up is saying is true. But interestingly, even for a three- or four-year-old, if they hear a grown-up say something and it turns out not to be true several times in a row, then they won’t trust what that grown-up says in the future. They kind of give grown-ups the benefit of the doubt to begin with, because they assume they’re going to be smart and tell the truth, but if a grown-up does or says something that suggests that that’s not true, they’ll change their minds.

Q. But what about their parents precisely? Do they suffer if they realize their parents are not that smart, maybe in their teenage years?

A. My work is mostly with preschoolers, but I’ve started to do some work on adolescents, and there’s a lot of very, very interesting work going out now about adolescents and teenagers. The teenage years may be another period where there is this kind of creative intelligence, plasticity, learning and exploration. That teenage impulse to reject the things your parents have told you, to stop taking for granted what people around you know, might actually serve to support an evolutionary function, because it helps to allow teenage exploration in fields like social change.

Q. Can parenting lead to bullshit?

A. My view, as you know from my books, is that most of what is written about “parenting” is bullshit. I think this is another interesting example of the explore/exploit tension. If you look into science, for example, you might think that the places where you would first see science emerging would be medicine, because it’s really important for people to deal with sickness and to get better. But in fact, a lot of areas that have the most practical significance were actually the last places to be scientific and arguably still aren’t. The first great scientific theories are about things like the stars, which don’t have much practical significance. And I think, again, the trade off and the paradox is exactly that: when things are most urgent, you have the least resources to explore new possibilities. Parenting is a very good example of that. The “parenting” industry is one of these examples where people are driven by the question “What am I going to do right this minute?” and that’s a good recipe for generating a great deal of nonsense.

Q. What about screens? Do they make children dumber?

A. I think this is a very good question, and we won’t know the answer for years. My guess is that they will simply make children become smarter in different ways than they are now, because that’s what happened with all the other technological changes in the past. I think there’s a great deal of moral panic about screens that’s disproportionate to any actual knowledge that we have about their effects. In the past, what’s always happened is when there was a new technology, people panicked about it and thought that it was going to be destructive and make us stupid. We almost always said the same thing, that it’d make us less thoughtful; we would rely on the technology at the cost of our natural cognitive capacities. To some extent, that’s been true. The famous example is Socrates saying that reading was really a bad idea, because then you wouldn’t remember things anymore. And he’s right—we don’t remember all of Homer anymore. But the trade off is that one of the things that happens with cognitive technology is that, indeed, you rely on the technology to do certain kinds of cognitive things that you might have otherwise done, but you get benefits in being able to do other cognitive things. This time might be different from all the other times in the past, but I think it’s pretty unlikely. I think what will happen is children will adjust to the new technology, and it will make them smarter in some ways, but it’ll also make them lose some cognitive capacities that they have now, in the same way that having writing or printing, for instance, means that you don’t have tremendous feats of memorization. There might be a generation of children that assume if you need to know the answer to a question, you have it right next to you, so you don’t have to memorize it. But on the other hand, you’ll have a generation of children who will have all the information in the world at their fingertips all the time—it’s hard to believe that that wouldn’t have the potential to make you smarter.

Q. So we have to trust children?

A. Again, maybe this time it’s different, but the general evolutionary picture is that children make us smarter as a species. There’s a great puzzle about why children exist at all. We humans have a much longer childhood, a much longer period of immaturity than any other species. And there turns out to be this really interesting relationship you see over and over again in biology between how intelligent the adult of the species is—and particularly how much they rely on learning as opposed to relying on instinct—and how long a period of childhood they have. This is even true for butterflies; it’s true for birds like crows; it seems to be this very, very general principle. Children are sort of designed to be smart—at least, children are designed to learn, that’s really what they’re all about—and the basic evolutionary strategy is that we get this early protective period where we don’t actually have to do anything. All we have to do is learn and be smart. And then we can use all the things that we learned as children to do all the things that we need to do as grown-ups. So from that perspective, we can trust children in the sense that the whole design, the whole point of childhood, is to be smart in the sense of being really good at learning and exploring things. With each generation, the species gets a chance to reboot. The period of childhood is like a kind of a species-wide sabbatical when a new generation of humans can look at the new environment that they’re in and try to figure out what’s going on with this environment—how does it work, how shall I deal with it—without actually having to make decisions the next minute, as in “Let me quickly figure out how I should avoid starvation.”

Q. In your opinion, is an adult asshole someone who refuses to remember this part of childhood?

A. I think there are certainly good arguments for that. You may have seen a piece I wrote in The New York Times about Donald Trump, because people kept saying that Trump was like a four-year-old. It felt like a terrible insult to four-year-olds. You start out with this very wide, open mind—open to many, many different possibilities, open to a great deal of new information—and as you become an adult, you get this much narrower, goal-focused kind of approach to the world. If you think about the Buddhist tradition, for instance, they argue that as an adult, often you’re sort of stuck in your own mind with its goals and immediate desires and rumination, and you can’t get out and get in tune with the outside world. I think that’s very much a difference between adults and children, that kind of narrow focus on “Here are my needs and wants, and what can I do to get them fulfilled?” Traditionally, people had argued that children were egocentric in that way, but I think the evidence is that it’s grown-ups who are like that. And assholes in particular. One definition of assholes is that they’re people who are so narrowly focused on their own goals and the things that they want, they can’t be tuned in to anything that’s going on in the world outside them. I think that’s just the opposite of what children are like. Even people who aren’t assholes in general can become assholes when they are too caught up in their own egos. Hanging out with children or being more childlike might be a good cure. Donald Trump is just an example of the way that adults become so egocentric and so caught up in the things they want to do in a particular moment, they stop looking at the world outside them. That’s a very particular kind of adult stupidity, which I think is very different from the way children think.

Q. As an adult, he’s like all the bullshit psychologists used to say about children: they said children were egocentric, and so he is.

A. Exactly.

Interview by Jean-François Marmion.