S4E9 Do we ever stop being curious?

Transcript

Intro: This podcast was made on the lands of the Wurundjeri people, the Woi Wurrung and the Bunurong. We'd like to pay respects to their elders, past and present, and emerging. From the Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences at the University of Melbourne, this is PsychTalks.

Nick: We know we told you we'd finished for the season, but when an opportunity like this comes along, you just don't say no. This is a special bonus episode with a remarkable guest. Today we're joined by one of the world's most fascinating thinkers about how our minds grow, learn and change. Professor Alison Gopnik from the University of California, Berkeley.

Alison's work has transformed our understanding of childhood learning, the imagination and intelligence. She's the author of The Scientist in the Crib, The Philosophical Baby, and The Gardener and The Carpenter. And she's in Australia this week for the Pip Pattison Oration at the University of Melbourne. In her oration, Alison explores how different stages of life shape different forms of intelligence and what that means for how we think about learning, ageing, and even artificial intelligence.

We'll talk about curiosity, care, and what humans do best, exploring, exploiting and empowering, and how those abilities evolve across the lifespan. Alison argues that curiosity takes different forms as we grow from exploring the world as children to exploiting what we've learned as adults to empowering others later in life.

Alison, welcome to PsychTalks, and thank you so much for being generous with your time, um, during your very busy schedule down here. Before we get down to business, uh, how are you enjoying Melbourne?

Alison: Oh, I love Melbourne. I was saying before, this is one of my favourite, this is one of my favourite cities. I, it combines two of the things from two other of my favourite places, Oxford and California, in that you have beautiful, tall, athletic people who are wry and ironic and pessimistic, which I think is just sort of a perfect combination.

Nick: Terrific, I feel flattered.

Let me begin with a bit of uh your own history. I'd forgotten that you did your doctoral work with Jerome Bruner at Oxford, and he's one of my heroes and has been for a long time, and I actually had his autobiography In Search of Mind with me on the plane when I flew to grad school in Philadelphia a very long time ago. Uh, and I went back to the book to see if you figured in it. And sure enough, uh, here's what Bruner writes about you in case you don't remember.

He writes, "Alison Gopnik had come to the group from McGill. Her letters of recommendation urging us to take her in the department of Oxford on the grounds that she had taken everything available at McGill in linguistics, philosophy and psychology. She arrived an unreconstructed Chomsky and departed a disciple of Vygotsky."

So you must have been quite a force of nature, and it must have been quite a formative experience. Can you say a bit about what it was like working with Bruner and whether the subsequent shape of your career was starting to form at that time?

Alison: Yeah, I think it was very much. I was, I arrived actually being much more a philosopher than a psychologist. I had done, as he mentioned, I'd been at McGill and I'd taken all the classes in all the areas, in all the disciplines, but I was essentially a philosopher. And in fact, I was going to go to MIT to work with Jerome Fodor, the famous kind of nativist philosopher, MIT philosopher.

And then at the very last minute, I did a sort of, you know, a grand tour  after I'd finished my BA and went to Oxford and it was so beautiful and it was so much like all the children's books that I'd been raised on that I thought I have to come here for at least a bit of the time.

So I decided what I would do is I would work with Jerry in his developmental lab, and I would also work in the philosophy department. So I was going up back and forth between Logic Lane, which is where the philosophy department was, and where people were talking about things like, uh, reference and meaning, up to Summertown, which is in the other end of Oxford, which is all where all the women and children are sort of parked out of sight of the university.

And Jerry, at the time, it's funny because I think about this now, and I realise, oh, he was at the absolute technological cutting edge, because we had video recording devices, which were, you know, giant, these giant reel-to-reel recorders that weighed 40 pounds and a giant camera on a tripod, and I would drag them out to look at these children. And I just recorded all the things that these babies said for a year, uh, not a project I would allow any of my students to do nowadays.

And after that time, after about a year, as I thought about going back to be a philosopher at MIT, I realised that I could spend the rest of my life either with this group of dedicated searchers after truth who just wanted to solve the biggest problems in the universe, or else with a group of whiny, egocentric narcissists who needed to be taken care of by women all the time. And since the first group was the babies and the second group was the philosophers, that I figured I'd better spend the rest of my time with, uh, the rest of my time with the babies.

But it was an absolutely formative, that was an absolutely formative year, and, um, and Jerry had a group of amazing graduate students. I think graduate school was kind of like a secondary critical period for, uh, for academics who, who went on to do a number of, you know, went on to become distinguished psychologists, but of course we were all just first year students then. And another thing that I realised when I came back to Oxford, uh, this year is that it was 1975, which was the nicest summer that anyone had had in Oxford since the 1920s. And when I was just back there in 2025, people were saying, you know, it hasn't been this sunny since 1975. So, it was this great summer of going punting and reading Piaget and, uh, and talking and, um, and a, you know, sort of ideal Oxford. The next year it rained a lot.

And another thing is that this will speak to some of the content of what I was saying in my, in my talk. Oh, by the way, what makes it an oration? I've been curious about that.

Nick: It's just a talk, but even better.

Alison: Oh, a talk, but even better. OK. I thought it was kind of, I wasn't sure whether I should, you know, wear a toga or something, it seemed – I didn't wear a toga.

But one of the things that I've been arguing in my most recent work is thinking about the intelligence of care, thinking about the way that we care for other people and the very special characteristics that that has. And Jerry was a really good example of a mentor who got it right about how you should care for students.

So he's had this very long distinguished group of students, but none of them were Brunarians; none of them just did the same thing that he did. And I think at the time, it was, could be a bit tense because the students would go off and, you know, say, oh well, that was a dumb idea of Jerry's, well, I'm going to do something else. But in retrospect, it means that he's had enormous, enormous influence. And if you compare him with someone like, like Chomsky, who I would have, you know, been working with an MIT, um, who is much more, much more carpenter-ish in his approach to, to students, wanted the students to have particular views, his particular views.

But then that means that in the long run, you don't have as much influence. So I think, I think academic mentorship is another example where this intelligence of care, which Jerry had to a tremendous degree, being able to respect what his students were doing, being able to give them the resources they needed like the big giant reel-to-reel recorders to do their own work, um, and that ended, that's ended up really being very productive over many generations.

Nick: So you were 'gardened' rather than 'carpentered'.

Alison: Exactly, that's right.

Cassie: And we will come back to that in a moment, but before we get to some of that work, um, we thought we'd treat our listeners to some of the big ideas from one of your earlier books, and we found this great quote from The Philosophical Baby, and I'll, I'll read it out.

I'm sure you know it, but to our listeners, you say, "Children are the R&D department of the human species, the blue-sky guys, the brainstormers. Adults are production and marketing. Children think up a million new ideas, mostly useless, and we take the 3 or 4 good ones and make them real."

And then you also referred to the "useful uselessness of immaturity".

So what do you think enables babies and children to be so imaginative and creative, and what's the use, or what can we learn from the way they approach that?

Alison: So one of the things that I've been arguing recently is that rather than thinking as if there's a single mystical, mysterious thing called intelligence, and then if we build a computer, it will get more and more intelligent until it's super intelligent. That's not really the picture that comes from cognitive science. Instead we have a lot of different capacities that trade off against each other, that are in tension with each other.

And one of the classic examples of this in computer science is what's called the explore-exploit dilemma. And essentially the idea is, you can't both be focused, go out into the world, do things in an efficient, effective way, and also explore all the possibilities that the world has to offer. Figure out how the world around you works. Um, and provably in computer science, you can't do both of those at the same time. And the solution is to have, do one at one time and do another later, and often it's start out exploring and then exploiting.

And what I've argued most recently is that childhood is really evolution's way of resolving that dilemma, because you have this early period where all you have to do is explore, um, go out, figure out how the world around you works. Um, and in particular, a time in which you can figure out new things about how the world around you works. Um, and then you can take those things you discover and put them to use to exploit later.

I think there's two things that are important about that. One of them is that humans are actually adapted to what people in AI call the non-stationary environment, environments that change all the time. And there's very good evidence that when we evolved, part of what happened was that each generation was facing a slightly different environment, an environment that worked in different ways, and children are the ones who can actually be in that new environment.

It's sort of we're all, essentially we're all immigrants. That's what we're, we're designed to be. We're designed to be immigrants, we're designed to be in a new place, and the children are the ones who get to really explore how that new place works. But of course, they can only do that because there are other people who are getting resources that will take care of them during that time.

Cassie: And in fact, in The Philosophical Baby, you describe young children as being like scientists, forming theories about their world and the social world and running little experiments. Is that how you think of children, like little baby Einsteins?

Alison: Yeah, very much. So, and that's, you know, started out, that's an idea that people have sort of vaguely said. But back in the, back when I was starting with, uh, with Jerry Bruner, in fact, um, a number of us started arguing for what's come to be called the 'theory theory'. The idea that quite literally and specifically, we could say something about what it was that children were doing.

And in the 00s, we started actually getting, uh, computational accounts of what the, at least in part, what the scientists were doing and what the children were doing, and to an amazing degree. But I must say, startling to all of us, including me, even 2 and 4-year-olds were solving problems, figuring out the world in ways that were characterised by these sophisticated Bayesian causal inference mechanisms, for example, of the sort that you could use to explain what was going on in science.

So I think the progress has made it even clearer that children are indeed literally doing the same things, performing the same computations that allow us to, uh, allow us to do science. And of course that makes sense. I mean, scientists are using the same brains that we all have, there must be some way that they're solving those problems.

And I think one of the other things that's interesting is that many things that are bugs from the exploit perspective are features from the explore perspective and vice versa. So many things that traditionally made people think, oh, children aren't as smart as adults, like, the fact that they're noisy, both metaphorically and literally that they seem to do these random things, you can't quite predict what they're doing from one minute to the next.

They spend all this time playing instead of doing anything terribly productive, they're kind of impulsive, they take risks. Those are all things that are not good if you're trying to actually solve a problem or do something, but they're very good if you're trying to just learn as much as you can about what's going on around you.

Nick: So just like you liken babies, young children to scientists, uh, in other work that you've published, you've likened scientists to babies, and I assume that's not just tantrums about rejected manuscripts, there's something deeper. Can you elaborate on that idea?

Alison: Well, the idea is that, again, as I said, I mean, look, the scientists have the same brains that humans evolved in the Pleistocene, right? And I think there's a pretty good argument that what happens is that when you, uh, so one way of resolving these explore-exploit conflicts is by having a developmental period early on when you can explore.

But another way is by having a kind of division of labour. So, when we put even grown-ups for some period of time in the same kind of circumstances as children, where there's nothing they absolutely immediately have to do, where they have the resources that they need to be able to solve problems, then you can see them implementing the same kinds of capacities that you see in children, these capacities for just figuring out the truth.

And, and I think all humans have done that to some extent, but science gives us a way of institutionalising that idea that some people are allowed to just go out and explore and figure out the truth, and we've discovered as evolution seems to, that that's actually a good strategy in the long run for, for being successful and getting what we want, but in the short run it's just activating that kind of motivation.

Cassie: And to nurture that, going back to your most recent book, The Gardener and the Carpenter, you kind of say that rather than parents thinking about shaping a child into this desired product, which is the carpentry model, you argue that parenting should be more about creating a nurturing space and, and where children can develop like being a gardener, and I love this quote that you've got, and I'm sure a lot of parents can relate literally and metaphorically to this where you say "parenting involves a lot of exhausted digging and wallowing in manure."

I have 3 children. They're kind of out of the manure phase, but you know, I, I think we can all relate to it.

But for those parents who kind of might like the idea of the carpentry model of parenting, what can you tell them about why that is not the best way to kind of encourage the curiosity and, and creativity in their kids?

Alison: Well, again, I mean if you think about it, think about that, that carpentry model is really a sort of exploit model which suggests that you have a goal, you have an outcome that you know about beforehand, and you'll succeed if you bring about that goal.

So you know, if you are building a chair, you have an idea of what the chair looks like, and you're a good carpenter if you build that, that chair. But if what you want is to introduce more variability into the world, and there's a very close relationship between variability, exploration and learning, especially, again, learning about a new environment, then that's not a very good way of doing it, I mean, almost by definition, right? If you, if you know what the outcome is going to be, then you're not going to be, it's not going to be something surprising, it's not going to be something unusual, it's not going to be something that's never been in the world before.

And if you think about what you do when you're gardening, at least if you're the kind of messy cottage gardener that I am, what happens is – and this is something profoundly about what makes for a good garden – is not, I'm going to shape each of these flowers to come out a particular way, but I'm going to develop an ecosystem that's robust enough, so that when there's a drought, or when it's the coldest day in Melbourne in 8 years, um, the garden's going to be able to survive.

And it does that because different plants will flourish in different ways at different times. And I think it's the same way with parents and children. What you really want is to enable this wide variety of children with different strengths and different weaknesses. And your role as a, a caregiver is to allow all of those, you know, allow all of those different flowers to, to bloom, that's what your, you know, that's what your role is.

And it, as, as you say in that quote, it's not like that's, it's not like you just sit back and it just happens by itself, there's a lot of manure involved, but, uh, but it's a very different picture, it's a very different model.

Cassie: It's a really beautiful image though, and I think even if our listeners don't know all the details of your work, just kind of talking about that you're a gardener, not a carpenter is so powerful as a parent.

Alison: Well, I hope that that's true, and I hope that it has the effect, and I think it has had the effect of empowering parents. But I have to say I have often been, when the book came out, I would be in, you know, this kind of a, an interview and someone would say, so, you know, what you're saying is you shouldn't have these specific goals, and we think that's great. Now, could you just tell our listeners, how do you go about being a gardener parent again? Like, what should you do to make sure that...

It was sort of, it's a very deep seated set of anxieties. But actually, you know, it's funny, the book is actually probably being read now more than it was when it first came out, and I think it was a bit prescient in that the pressures on parents to be carpenters to get their children out in a particular way, and also the sense that people have of now saying, no, that's not a good outcome. It's not letting us thrive, it's not letting our children thrive, our children aren't developing the ability to be resourceful, to be adults, to be able to do all the things that they need to do. I think that's actually just intensified in the 10 years since the book.

Cassie: And I think added to that the pressures of social media and screen time. I'm not surprised that more parents are reading that.

Alison: And you know, one of the things that we know about young people, there's this very strange profile now, which is in many respects, teenagers, for example, are doing better. They're not getting into trouble, crime is going down, um, there's fewer teenage pregnancies, there's less drug use, but they're also not going out into the world and exploring and finding out about things, and, and they're much more anxious.

And one of the things we know about anxiety, sort of counterintuitively, is that being very protected from ever seeing anything that's dangerous, actually makes you more anxious rather than less anxious. So the therapy for anxiety is to expose yourself to the thing that you're scared of. And I think it's kind of like a whole generation of children is being raised in a way that, that, you know, um, a cognitive behavioural therapist would say, oh no, that's a good recipe for making people anxious is to tell them all the time how dangerous things are and all the things that, yeah, all the things they can't do.

Nick: So we'll move on from the beautiful image of manure and your past books towards what you spoke about uh yesterday at the oration, um, Alison, and you've already brought up this idea that there is no single intelligence and you've talked about the explore versus exploit distinction and how they are in some ways tradable off against one another.

And this idea that childhood is a stage of rampant exploration is such an important idea, especially you're not just saying kids are aimlessly moving around and bumping into stuff and causing mischief, but they're really adept at figuring out how the world ticks, and you call this causal learning. And now not all of our listeners will have backgrounds in academic psychology, so can you tell us a bit about how kids accomplish causal learning?

And maybe along the way explain what a 'blicket' is.

Alison: Yes, so to go back to what you were saying about the idea of the children being little scientists, one of the next questions that we asked is, OK, well what are scientists doing that lets them learn as much as they do?

And at least one thing that they're definitely doing is figuring out the causal structure of the world. That's a really important part of science, and it's maybe the part of science that makes it most useful in the long run when we understand what causes what, that means you can do something to the cause and bring about the effect. And we wanted to know when and how children were doing this.

Now if you ask even adult scientists, and certainly ordinary adults, something like, when you have conditional probabilities and a confounder that you've controlled for, can you infer that there's actually a causal chain? It, it's one of the good things about being a developmentalist is that you don't actually ask three-year-olds dumb questions like that, although sometimes psychologists ask grown-ups dumb questions like that. Um, so we wanted to test how is it that children are doing this, and the way we did it was we built a number of machines, but one of them that we used especially was called the blicket detector.

It's a little box, and it lights up and plays music when you put some things on it and not other things. So even with this very simple system, there's lots of ways that it could work. It could be that the red one is a blicket that makes it go. Or it could be that you have to put on two blickets simultaneously to make it go. Or it could be that a blicket will keep it from going unless you have another blicket. I mean, there's all sorts of structure as to the way that it goes, it would work.

And what we would do is to show the children the machine, show them some pattern of data about the machine. Another thing is maybe, in one experiment we did actually with 2-year-olds, one block makes it go 8 out of 12 times, and another block makes it go, let me make sure I get the numbers right, you know, makes it go 2 out of 3 times, and then they would have to do the probabilities to figure out which was, which one was more likely to work.

And then we would just say, make the machine go, or we would say, tell me which one is a blicket, or tell me how it works. And using that technique, the children turned out to be incredibly sophisticated, as sophisticated as some of these very fancy computational AI causal inference programs were. But what we've been doing more recently, you know, one of the things that we, we should always listen to what children are telling, especially as a developmental psychologist, and the main problem that we had with the machine, which parents out there may already have guessed, was the kids just wanted to play with it.

And we had to say to them, no, no, you get to play with it at the end, just look very carefully at this pattern of data that I'm giving you in a very controlled way, and then you can, then you can play with it when we're done.

And more recently I've been thinking, maybe that's telling us something. I mean, after all, how is it that we manage to find out as much as we do about the world? We do experiments and scientists do experiments, and um, 2-year-olds do experiments, but we call it getting into everything. And if you look carefully at a 2-year-old or a 3-year-old, what you'll see is that they're just constantly, constantly doing experiments. They can do more experiments in 5 minutes than we scientists can do in 5 years.

So then we wanted to try and figure out, is there some way, again, formally computationally, that we could explain or describe what's going on? And it's important to say this is one of the big gaps in current artificial intelligence systems like the large models, is that they can summarise a lot of information that human beings have put out on the web. But what they don't do is go out and find something new. They don't do experiments. They don't find something that's really different from all the things that everybody else has said on the web. And little children are doing that all the time.

Nick: In your talk, you link childhood exploration of this sort to the sort of weirdness of the human life history, specifically the extended period of dependency on carers and also this um connection I hadn't heard before uh in terms of the close spacing of human kids, which Cassie can relate to with three, you know, lovely boys born one year apart.

Can you just explain that link between the human life history and that proneness to explore among human babies?

Alison: So, a life history is things like how many young you have, how long you live, how, how long a period of fertility you have. It's all the, those kinds of features of an animal. And humans have this very bizarre life history because we have a very long childhood, much longer than any of our close primate relatives. Chimps are producing as much food as they're consuming by the time they're 7. And, you know, my 14-year-old grandson is definitely not doing that.

And even in forager cultures, kids aren't doing that until they're, say, 16 or 17. We also have children more often, so we have babies about once every, every year or two, and, chimps, for example, are only having babies once every five years or so, so we have a lot of these useless babies. And it's, that's really puzzling from an evolutionary perspective.

Another part of our life history is that we have postmenopausal grandmothers, so we have women who are living for another 20 years past their fertility, and it's not quite as sharply defined in men, but you also have men living another 20 years into their 70s or their 80s. And so the question is why this strange life history?

And one of the things that you notice if you go out and look at many different animals, is that this combination of a very long childhood, lots of babies, lots of investment from other people and taking care of those, from other animals and taking care of those babies, goes with having a big brain, goes with being able to learn, goes with being able to deal with many different kinds of environments to make tools, things that we might anthropomorphically think of as, as intelligence.

And we seem to be sort of on the end of the distribution on all of those.

Nick: That's where the New Caledonian crow comes in, you said, compared to the chicken.

Alison: That's right. So, the New Caledonian crows are famously intelligent, they use tools at a level that makes them look like primates, can solve all sorts of complicated problems. They're fledglings for two years, which is a very long time in the life of a bird. And there's some lovely studies that were actually done in New Zealand, showing that in that period, what they're doing is exploring. They're trying things out, they're failing, they're putting things in at the wrong end, putting the sticks in at the wrong end, going to the wrong termite nests, and then it's in that period of exploration, and you know, the moms are sort of tapping their feet and dropping another worm into the baby crow's mouth. And that's the period when they learn all the things that will enable them to thrive later on.

The other example, by the way, is the quokka. So, quokkas have this very long period where the baby's inside of the pouch, and both males and females are involved in taking care of the baby. And they have really big brains for a marsupial. I don't think anyone's quite figured out what they use their brains for, but they definitely have –

Cassie: Smiling and creating tourism.

Alison: Yeah, exactly, that's right. I was talking to someone at the talk yesterday who was saying they have very complicated social lives, and that's probably what they're using it for.

Cassie: I must just interject for a moment because my kids will listen to this and I don't want them to think that they're useless babies even though they were so close together. But, related to that idea of learning how to impact your environment or to control your environment, you talked about empowerment or empowerment gain, this idea that we intrinsically want to learn how the relationship between our actions and our, their effects, and that that's intrinsically rewarding. Is that correct that we don't kind of need that external reward to learn how to control our environment?

Alison: Yeah, so as I said, one of the things that I got interested in is what's driving children to be so experimental, right? Like what's the motivation that's letting them get into everything, I mean, that's using up a lot of calories to actually do that, why are they doing it?

And a very interesting idea comes out of reinforcement learning, which is one of the techniques that people have used a lot in AI. The idea behind reinforcement learning is, you do something, you're rewarded, you'll do it again. But of course usually the rewards are, you know, cheese or avoiding a shock or something like that. But an idea that people have had more recently is maybe doing something like being effective, making things happen in the environment, is a reward in and of itself, or uh finding something new is a reward in and of itself.

And this idea of empowerment is that part of what you want to do is just be able to make things happen in the world around you. Whether they're good things or bad things. You just want to feel as if you know how to consistently make things happen. And I think when you start looking, especially at infants and toddlers from this perspective, you see them doing this all the time, you know.

There are some lovely experiments actually back from the 70s, where you could do something like uh, tie the baby's foot to a mobile with a ribbon, so that when the baby kicks, the mobile moves. And babies just think this is the most wonderful thing in the world, and they'll kick, and then they'll stop kicking, and then they'll wave their hands, and I had a video, one of the great things about being a developmental psychologist is you get to show cute videos of kids in your talks. Um, another nice thing about being, I have, I'm a grandmother of two groups of three, within a short period of time. So I have this lovely video of my, my grandson Kit, with a, playing with a xylophone. And you can see him trying the stick end, and then trying the mallet end, and then trying his fat little hand, and seeing all these different ways that he could make noises, even though of course the tones aren't doing him any good, they're just cool. And he really likes the idea that he can be very consistently bringing about a certain sound by performing a certain action, and he's discovering that just in the course of playing with the xylophone.

And if you think about all the best baby toys, like a busy box, right? That's really an empowerment device. Or Wired magazine talked about the, uh, once made a list of the world's 10 best toys and the top one was the stick. And again, if you know, if you have 3 boys, you know about sticks, so a stick is an amazing empowerment device, right? When you've got a stick, you've got this superpower. You can get things that are really far away, you can poke things, you can move things back and forth.

And every, you know, whenever you go like for a walk in the forest with a child, they'll get this giant stick as big as them that they'll, they'll drag behind them.

Cassie: My kids are 8, 9 and 10, and a stick is probably still, yeah, a  good thing.

Alison: Um, actually there's a funny story. I was, I was on a podcast like this on an interview program, and my oldest grandson, who was then about 4, was listening to it. I said, see, grandmom's on the radio, listen. And grandmom on the radio said, you know, after all, a 4 year old isn't going to know what to do when there's a mastodon, you know, when there's a, a, a charging mastodon coming at them. And he said, I'd know what to do. And I said, really? And he thought about it for a minute, he said, I'd use a stick, I'd use a stick.

But of course, the problem is, and I don't know if this has happened with your children, but it has certainly happened with mine, that the stick can also lead you to the emergency room, right?

Cassie: Absolutely!

Alison: You know, you end up doing stitches and, uh, so a stick is a really lovely example of the sort of thing that children love, just because it lets them do all sorts of new things in the world, and in spite of the fact that it can be dangerous.

Nick: Towards the end of the talk, you introduced some new work you've been doing on caregiving, and you did allude to that a little bit earlier, and you describe it as a very neglected topic, but one that's especially important, especially among elders. And I think it's intriguing conceptually that you talk about caring as an intelligence or as a set of capacities, because I think very often in psychology, we tend to think of it as an emotional disposition or something like that. Can you expand on that idea of care, caring or caregiving, uh, as an intelligence and maybe link it to the orca example?

Alison: Yeah, yeah, right. So think about that example of the ER and the stick. The disadvantage of exploration, there's two disadvantages. One of them is you don't have resources while you're just exploring, and the other one is exploring be dangerous.

It can, it can actually have, have negative utilities as well as positive ones. And if you have a 2-year-old or a teenager, you know that those creatures can actually be driven to prefer the, the disagreeable outcomes as long as they're the ones who are in control and bringing them about. So the thought is that in order to, for this kind of exploration to happen, you have to have something else, which is that you have to have another animal, a, a creature who's actually taking care of you during that period.

You know, when I was writing The Gardener and The Carpenter, I started thinking about it, because obviously if you're thinking about parents and being a parent, that involves caregiving. But Margaret Levi, who's a political scientist, and I started doing this project about it, and it's amazingly invisible in the social sciences, in the sciences in general.

So, you know, in economics, caregiving never shows up in the GDP, right? I mean, care workers do, but the caregiving that we all do every day doesn't.

And if you look at political science, nobody talks about – moral philosophy, even though this is the thing that if you ask people, is, you know, the hardest moral decisions, the thing that gives their life meaning, the thing that they're most invested in, it's invisible in moral philosophy and moral psychology. The intelligence part is, you know, there's an affective element about how you feel when you're caring for someone, but just think about how hard it is to decide what to do to care for someone.

And part of the reason why it's so hard, uh, I've argued, is that the basic cognitive structure of caregiving is really different from the structure of all the other kinds of activities that we're engaged in. So, usually, say if we're in a social relationship with someone else, we have a kind of reciprocity. They do something for you, you do something for them, and there's whole fields of economics and game theory and a formal philosophy that, that describe these kind of complicated social contracts between, between one person and another.

But that's not what caregiving's like, right? I mean, you don't think the person you're caring for is going to reciprocate. In fact, it's kind of striking that they don't reciprocate. Um, and by the way, we have this beautiful experimental design that we've just started. I didn't get a chance to talk about it in the talk. My postdoc, Melis Muradoglu has done this, where what she's done is show children little vignettes of aliens. So this is an alien planet. Here's these little aliens. And in one vignette, what happens is, one of the aliens gets cold, and the other one gives him a sweater, and then the, the, the second alien gives a blanket to the first one. So it's sort of reciprocal.

In the other one, what happens is, the alien gets cold, and the other alien gives him a sweater, and then the other alien gives him a blanket, and he doesn't do anything in return. And if you ask kids, which of those are friends and which of those are a mom and child, they say, oh, the mom and child is when you just keep taking care of the baby even when you're not getting any return.

And in fact, if you sort of, I mean, another kind of structure you could have that we're familiar with is a power relationship where one person has more resources, so the second person subordinates their goals to the first person's. But if you think about caring relationships, what happens is you have two people, one of them has more resources than the other.

And as a result, because they know that the other person is needy, they go out of their way to try to help that other person to accomplish their goals. And if you've ever tried to do this, it's really tricky, because what goals do you want them to accomplish? Do you want them just to be better off, what, you know, economists would call their objective utilities? Well, sometimes you just want to give them the sandwich that will fill them.

Or do you want to give them what they want? Do you want to let them watch Paw Patrol for 2 hours, as in the case of my 4-year-old? Well, sometimes you sort of do. Um, and when you think beyond just caring for children, think about the way that we extend our caregiving to elders, for example, or to spouses or to students, as I was mentioning with Jerry Bruner or, or to patients.

What we really want is to give them resources so they can be empowered, so, in this kind of technical sense that I was talking about before, so that they can actually go out and do things themselves. And that's a really tricky thing to know how to do, like how do you decide how much autonomy you should, you should give a teenager, right? When do you decide when your elderly father should stop driving?

Those are really cognitively complicated, and it's because the structure is really different from the kind of structure that we're used to. So we're used to the idea that what you do is you go out and do things to try to maximise your own goals, but we're not used to the idea that you're doing things to try to get someone else who is needy and need, and, and doesn't have resources to have resources.

And yet, I mean, not only is this true about our relationship to children and elders and children and students and patients, but I think it's what religions talk about when they talk about Caritas. It's something about the way that we should be caring about the planet, or we care about the natural world.  It's this combination of thinking, you know, the planet can't really take care of itself, we have an obligation to, to pursue its goals, even though exactly what its goals are might be really hard to figure out.

Cassie: Just on that caregiving topic, as a parent, I think you're always conflicted between how much to kind of protect your child and how much to push them out into the world, and I think we're seeing that at the moment with, you know, kids probably having too much screen time and not enough outside time and now seeing that, that push for what is sort of being called as free range kids to get them out again.

What, what's your kind of view on this, you know, getting kids more outside and doing things in the free-range kids movement?

Alison: Yeah, I think that was kind of what I was talking about in The Gardener and the Carpenter, and I think it's just gotten more intense over the last, over the last 10 years or so. Um, and there's good empirical evidence that, for instance, just the range, literally the range that children have, how far, how far away they go from home has really narrowed dramatically.

And things like, you know, whether a 7 or 8-year-old could walk to school by themselves in big parts of the States. They won't, you won't let a 7-year-old, go out on the street by themselves, or go to the park by themselves, or go to the store by themselves.

And as I said before, that just seems to be a recipe for having children who are not good at adulting, as they say now, and who are suffering from anxiety. So I think both of those, I, I think the kind of free-range children idea is really, uh, I mean it's ironic and very,  American maybe, that it has to be like a formula that you are going to tell your children to go by themselves to the grocery store.

But that's better than, as opposed to – I was just hearing a wonderful talk at, so we've been doing a series of workshops about caregiving to try to fill in this terrible gap. We have a special issue of the journal Daedalus, with philosophers and economists and social scientists talking about caregiving. But we just did one with a bunch of anthropologists, and in forager cultures, not only are the 4-year-olds going out into the jungle to explore, but, you know, they're being taken care of by the 7-year-olds, and they're taking care of the babies, the infants.

So, moms are going out to forage and they're taking their kids with them, and it's not just that they're looking after the kids, the kids are looking after themselves and looking after the other, the other kids, which means that by the time you're an adult having children yourself, you really know a lot about caregiving. You've developed this kind of intelligence of caregiving, and I think one of the, one of the great, you know, um, crises lacks in our current culture, possibly partly responsible for the, the sort of fertility crisis is that people don't, haven't learned about taking care of other people.

And then of course, we have this other crisis, which is that we have this ageing population. So, you know, we've always had people in their 70s or 80s. Now we have a very large population of people in their 70s and 80s, and we tend to sort of segregate them out into, into, away from the rest of the society.

This gets to the point about the orcas. So, that care, I think there's good reason to, you know, again, we all do all of this, but elders seem to be particularly involved in care. And there's some evidence that grandmothers keep those, you know, when you think about those, those groups of babies, the infants and the toddler and the preschooler, the grandmothers are the ones in forager cultures who are really responsible for keeping the, the toddlers and the preschoolers alive while the mom is nursing the new baby.

So the only other creature that we know of that has, the other, only other mammal we know of that has postmenopausal grandmothers is actually the orca, the killer whale. And it turns out that in orca pods, those grandmothers, those postmenopausal grandmothers, give information to the rest of the pod about things like, oh, there was, there was krill here 30 years ago, now we're getting short of food. Here's the place to go to find out about the krill.

And they pass on information. They have kind of cultural transmission, cultural learning about, here's the kind of things that you do to, to eat. I, I like the idea as a grandmother myself that the central thing that they do is give recipes for, to the next generation. But I think for humans, also, if you think about things like stories, or you think about songs, or you think about, you know, the big picture about how a culture, what's important in a culture or not.

Those are things that characteristically elders are passing on to grandchildren. The parents typically are so terribly involved in just trying to put out fires, that they don't have as much time to do that. But you know, at night when you're around the fire, the grandmothers are the ones who are, uh, giving the, telling the myths and singing the stories, and the children are learning from them, grandmothers and the grandfathers, um, and the grandfathers as well. And again, the fact that we segregate out the elders and the children, you know, uh, um I think is a terrible institutional failure and if we are pretty clear that it would be better for both ageing people and for children if they were interacting more.

Cassie: There's a, um, a show on the ABC here called Old People's Home for 3 [4] Year Olds, where they basically take 3-year-olds into these kind of elder care homes and the relationships and the interactions are just beautiful and, i's funded from a, a, an educational grant, but they're just continuing it and you see these beautiful relationships come through.

Alison: I mean, one of the things that I've proposed is that in America, for example, and this could be true in Australia as well, you know, there, we never quite have enough people for preschool, so you know, you want to have universal preschool, but there's never quite enough teachers there, and I proposed that we should just sort of have a designated grandmom in every, in every classroom and that it's not an ECE teacher, but just someone from the community who's an older person who wants to make some extra money and who wants to do something that has to do with little kids, and that's exactly the circumstance in which you can get these kind of close relationships that enable care and also enable things like cultural transmission.

Nick: We probably should draw a close because you've been very generous with your time. Thank you so much for sharing your wisdom with us, Alison, and we hope you have a great rest of your stay here in Australia.

Alison: Yes, well, as I say, very happy always to come and visit here. I went to the Fitzroy Primary School Fete on the first day that I was here, which is wonderful, that enough, but that, I mean, not to downgrade the wonders of talking to all the brilliant people at Melbourne, but that by itself was enough motivation to come back.

Cassie: We'll also make sure you get up to date with your Bluey episodes as a developmental psychologist.

Alison: I am for no other reason, I would be grateful to the Australian nation for Bluey as a grandmother of six as well.

Cassie: Thank you so much for your time. Thank you.

Nick: That was Professor Alison Gopnik from UC Berkeley joining us for a special PsychTalks episode recorded during her visit to Melbourne for the Pip Pattison Oration. You can find Alison's books and talks online.

Psych Talks is produced by Mairead Murray, Gemma Papprill and Celia Harvey with sound engineering by Jack Palmer. I'm Nick Haslam. Thanks for listening to our special episode and if you haven't already, follow or subscribe so you don't miss our next episode. Until next time, take care.