Paul Bloom: I'm Paul Bloom. I'm a professor of psychology at University of Toronto and an ameritus professor at Yale University. And I study human nature. I study children. I study development. I'm particularly interested in morality, in the social emotions, in how we understand ourselves and how we relate to other people.

Paul Bloom: Chapter one, the promise and peril of AI companions. When people talk about loneliness, when we think about loneliness, we think about being alone, about solitude. And that can be definitely a source of loneliness, but a lot of us are comfortable being alone. And you could be alone for a long period of time, but not feel lonely if you know that there's people who love you and understand you and appreciate you kind of waiting in wings for when you come back. What loneliness is at its root is a lack of human connectedness. The feeling that you aren't loved, you aren't needed, you aren't respected. This could mean you have nobody in your life, but it could also mean that you're surrounded by people and you're not connecting to them. Hannah Rent pointed out that the most painful form of loneliness is when you are surrounded by people and you feel utterly isolated. And I'm interested in loneliness in part because it's an exquisitly painful experience. It's it's one of the worst states a human could be to feel alone, to feel disconnected.

Paul Bloom: People talk about a loneliness epidemic. There's a wonderful discussion by Derek Thompson. He argues there is no loneliness epidemic. And in fact, if you look at the data, people were much lonier a few years ago during CO than they are now. And there's not much evidence people are more lonely now than they were 20, 30, 40, 50 years ago. What we see instead is actually a solitude epidemic. So people are spending much more time alone than they ever have been. And it makes sense if you think about the the way technology, our houses are much better. Our TVs are much better. Used to be your average person went to the movies multiple times a month. Now we don't go to the movies much. We watch movies movies at home on our big screen TVs and our abundance of streaming uh uh channels. We used to go out to eat a lot. Now, you know, a lot of our dining is alone and um we order from uh Uber Eats. So as our interior light, the possibility for rich life indoors, inside by ourselves has gotten better, um we have become more alone. And you could talk about whether solitude in itself is a problem.

Paul Bloom: What I will say about loneliness is regardless of whether or not it's an epidemic, regardless of how bad it is relative to the past, it's a terrible thing and many people suffer from it. um estimates of how many people suffer. It's hard to get a good estimate because it depends how you ask the question, but a reasonable estimate is one in five. One in five people are awfully lonely. Loneliness is most severe in adolescence and it's most severe in the very old. And these people really suffer.

Paul Bloom: We now live in a world with LLMs, uh, large language models, generative AI, machines that seem to many of us to be intelligent, some say super intelligent, and more than that seem compassionate, seem empathic. Last year, uh, there was a I was part of a team of researchers that was led by my colleague, uh, Mickey Ensllett and we wrote a paper called in praise of empathic AI. And in it, we summarized a lot of the data suggesting that when you compare people interacting with people and interacting with AIS, at least for short-term interactions, the AIS win. So the typical experiment is you'd have one person, one group of people would interact with uh with other people, maybe over text or talking. another group would interact with a chat GBT text or talking and then later on they would rate their experiences and the main finding is that if you don't know who's a person who's AI you don't you're not biased in any way the people who interact with chat GPT say they felt more listened to they felt they they were talking to somebody who's more empathic more compassionate to get more out of it so we we published this and we said look here's a case for for empathic AI And man, people hated this article. I've I've written a few things people disliked, but boy, they they they we got slammed.

Paul Bloom: And I I I have some sympathy for the objections. We made the positive case for AI. But there's a negative case, too. And I think a proper understanding, a proper answer to the question, what role should these things play in our lives should look at both sides of the issue and I think deal with some very very difficult questions. When I think of people interacting with AI companions, I worry. I'm very sensitive to negatives. And I'm most sensitive to negatives when I think about young people, about adolescence, maybe people in their 20s. And I see two problems. And they're both deeply serious.

Paul Bloom: One is that these AIs are really good to communicate with. They are they listen. They they they never wait for you to finish their story so they could tell their own story. They never say, "Man, I'm busy. Get back to me later." They're always there for you. And this is going to get better and better and better. So my first worry is that they will become addictive. that I'm going to prefer interacting with my version of ChachiPT or Claude or Gemini or whatever than to a person. And you know, maybe this is fine if I'm 90 years old and I have no one else to talk to, but but if I'm a teenager, I should be getting out there. I should be dealing with with with friends, developing romantic relationships, developing attachments. And one view I have is that until these AIs get conscious, until they become sentient, then there is something deeply wrong about preferring them to humans. You know, human interaction is where it's at. I have two sons and uh if I was to discover that one of them or both of them have left their longtime relationships and now they're in love with their phone, I I would say this is it's awful. What a waste of a life. So my first worry is addiction that this will will pull us away from human interactions and I strongly believe it's human interactions that matter the most.

Paul Bloom: My second worry has to do with the nature of the interactions with AI where the AIs are famously sophantic. They they praise you. They suck up to you. Nothing you will do is wrong to them. And this could be exhilarating, but it robs you of the possibility for social learning. In general, we learn through friction. We learn by trying out things and failing. A toddler learns to walk by falling down. A comedian learns to to to be good on stage by bombing. A boxer learns to to block a punch by being smacked in the kisser. And in a social interaction, we learn by having people get bored of what we have to say. We learn when we when when we tell a joke and it falls flat. We learn when someone is annoyed at us for not being compassionate enough. And so we learn from social feedback that basically says you're messing up.

Paul Bloom: These AIs by their very nature don't give that sort of feedback. And so this has dystopian possibilities. What is how will a teenager grow up if he never learns not to tell boring stories because the AI interacts with is never bored? How will somebody learn to apologize if she endlessly deals with a machine that needs no apology? What would the world be like if the answer to the question, "Am I the asshole?" is always a sound and reassuring, "Of course you're not the [ __ ] Everyone else is." And I think it's a problem. I think that that social growth requires messy often painful interactions and this is what the chat bots don't provide us.

Paul Bloom: If you want to think about the effects of these sophantic uh AIs, maybe a good analogy is billionaires or royalty or world leaders who are surrounded by toadies and yesmen. There's a wonderful book called careless people that's about uh tech billionaires and the picture it portrays is these are people I think almost all all of them men who are surrounded by individuals who tell them all the time how smart they are and how everything they say is right and the author nicely portrays the damage it does to these people. They become insensitive to feelings of others. They become narcissistic. They develop delusions of a sort. And you can see this, I think, also through history, the extremely powerful often go a little bit crazy cuz they're surrounded by people who always tell them that they're right. One of the few good things about not being very rich and very powerful is we're not surrounded by yesmen. We're surrounded by people, you know, who call us on stuff, who don't suck up to us, and who give us valuable feedback. So, we don't got a little bit crazy in that way.

Paul Bloom: And one of the worries about chatbots and AI is that any one of us can now become as if we were a billionaire, as if we were a king, as if we were a president because we're now have for the first time in our lives somebody who for whom we could do no wrong and who always tells us that we are the smartest, the best person around.

Paul Bloom: So John Casio is the late uh neuroscientist who did the most research on loneliness and kind of pioneered the science of loneliness and psychology and he pointed out that loneliness isn't a glitch in the system. It's not some sort of signed brain isn't working properly. Loneliness is is an expression of a need. It's like hunger or thirst. And as such is an essential part of being human. If you don't feel hungry, you don't seek out food. You die. If you don't feel thirsty, you don't seek out liquid and you die. And loneliness is much the same.

Paul Bloom: Loneliness, among other things, serves as a motivator. And an animal like us who had no loneliness, who wasn't motivated to make human contact, wouldn't reproduce, wouldn't survive. It would be a dead end from an evolutionary point of view. So loneliness, although it's painful, is an absolutely essential thing to have. I mean to put it another way um imagine a child born who could not feel lonely. That would be a disaster. The child wouldn't seek out contact and and wouldn't thrive as a person.

Paul Bloom: So loneliness is a signal in at least two ways. The first is it's a motivator. It gets you to talk to people. It gets you to invite friends for dinner and get you to to ask somebody out for a date. It gets you to strike up a conversation with somebody. And if the need for social connection is satisfied by your phone, by your laptop, that motivation will go away.

Paul Bloom: So I worry about the extent to which these AIs, these chat bots will pull us away from meaningful connections with other people. I mean, I use them myself. I like them. I I I I use them in my work. Sometimes it's actually interesting to talk to them. It's they can be interesting. They could be stimulating, but I I wouldn't want them to be such that they would they would be so interesting and so stimulating that I don't talk to my wife anymore. I don't talk to my kids or talk to my friends. And this is a problem that has every potential of getting worse.

Paul Bloom: So, right now, I mostly communicate through typing. Um, it could talk to them. They get to do voice back and forth conversations. The conversational skills will get more and more realistic. And then pretty soon you're looking at somebody on a screen who looks exactly like a person who's interested you very attractive person. Great facial expressions

Speaker: and something irresistible about that. And then to get more science fictiony we could get to sort of robots you know let alone sex bots. Um and whole conversation there about what to do with that. But they're going to become at the trends continue more and more and more compelling. And so if you're listening to me and saying, "Look, I I talk to chat GPT all the time and it doesn't do anything for me. Who cares?" Well, maybe. And some people some people get caught up now, but but it is going to get better and better at this. And at some point, you may be talking to a future version of Chat GBT and in some way find it irresistible.

Speaker: I also think it's a problem from a social point of view. You know, I think we could talk more to the people around us, not less. It's also a signal in that it it helps correct our socially maladaptive, often selfish behavior. And I think we are by nature often selfish socially. And it's social feedback that gets me to realize I got to listen to the other person. I got to listen to them. I got to I got to maybe expand my compassion, my caring. I got to try to get in their head and figure out what's going on with them and and and and maybe help them. And I think we want to do that, but we also have selfish impulses that keep us from doing so. But if you've ever talked to a chatbot, there's none of that. And this has individual implications, but also broader social implications. We don't want to live in a world where everybody everyone's selfish urges are satisfied and nobody really has leared to care about other people.

Speaker: There have been various news reports of people who with delusions where the delusions have been encouraged by uh by these AI models where uh somebody comes in and and has a crazy view sometimes a dangerous view involving say you know a paranoid idea that people are trying to get me and the AI says you're absolutely right and does something which no therapist in her right mind would do and no friend would ever do which is encourage an illusion. Now, I also know that the that the the companies that create these AIs are worried about this. There was a famous case where uh where an AI may well have contributed to somebody's suicide and um and they're working on the models to to stop this from happening to establish guard rails so that the extreme delusions aren't encouraged. And I think that that's an excellent way to go. But the broader picture is doesn't go away which is we all have ways in which we tend to go off the rails even a little bit and having people around us not AI but people tend to correct us and keep us more sane. If I was to tell tell you this crazy ass idea you say that's pretty dumb but I tell Chad and I says you're so smart. Tell me more. I I think you're on to something here and encourages me in ways that I shouldn't be encouraged. I don't know how severe this problem is. I don't know in what how much of this AI psychosis as it's called how often that occurs but it's something which occurs to some degree and I think it's something that occurs to all of us to a little bit when we interact with these things.

Speaker: was talking to a friend of mine, a a a colleague, and she was describing a dispute she had with somebody and I'm listening to and I'm saying, you know, I feel that this other person might have a bit of a point. Tried to say it nicely. And she she looks at me and she says, you know, quite a bit of righteousness. I told us to chat GBT and chat GBT told me I'm 100% right. That's what the machine does. It tells you you're right. And I think part of I think for some people, for all of us, but for some people in particular, being told, "You're right, you're right, you're right, has a damaging uh effect."

Speaker: So, I have a long-standing argument of a friend of mine, I'm not going to out who he is, but he feels strongly about this where when I say, "Look, this is terrible if people ended up with AI companions instead of other people." He says, "Why?" He says, "If these AI companions are are rich, good company, interesting, intelligent, why? You're just being prejudice, man. Like, you know, just what what what do we lose?" And it's a good question. It's a question we're going to be hearing more and more, I think, as time goes by. But I like the answer given by Oliver Burkeman. And Oliver gives uh this nice example. His example is, you know, you're at home one day and your phone rings and you pick it up. It's an old friend. You talk to an old friend for an hour about your life, about they show a lot of concern for you and so on. And it was a wonderful conversation. You hang up and 10 minutes later, you get an email. It's from uh it's from Meta. Meta says, "You would have received a phone call. It was not from your friend. It was from us. You were using voice cloning software. We're using powerful AIs to extract personal history and everything. Did you enjoy it? How did it go?" And Bergman says, "Um, and I agree. You'd feel betrayed. you were lied to. But more than that, communicating with a real person is enormously different from communicating with a non-sensient unconscious machine.

Speaker: Even if the words are the same, even if the insights are the same, the stories are the same, they're different because part of a relationship, part of a communication involves the consciousness of the other person. When I'm with a friend, I like to make my friend laugh sometimes, and I like when they're concerned about me, and I might like to surprise them. But an AI can't find anything funny, not really. Can't uh can't be amused, can't be surprised, can't be concerned, has no needs, can simulate all of these things, but a simulation isn't a real thing.

Speaker: Now throughout this I've always had this qualification which is that these machines are non-sensient non-concious there's nothing at home maybe one day that will change and maybe one day AIs will be fully conscious beings and then that changes everything then there'll be people and then the world will contain many many more people and then what I say might not apply then things will be very different but until then these interactions with these chat bots I think inevitably fall far far short of interactions with a person. So I'm sensitive to the downsides of AI and I I worry deeply about them, but I don't think we should forget the upsides.

Speaker: So one can maybe draw an analogy here with boredom and maybe the end of boredom. Not so late at night the TV stations would go off and then if you're by yourself, what are you going to do? Okay, read a book. Kind of kind of boring. sitting on a bus, sitting on a train, you you're bored a lot at a time. And now we're almost never bored. We got our phones. Our phones, you know, we play games on our phones. We listen to podcasts. Uh on my way here, I listen to a to an exciting podcast while playing uh the New York Times spelling bee. And I wasn't bored for a second. And this is a good thing. Boredom is is aversive. Boredom is unpleasant. Now, it's also a bad thing. Boredom serves certain functions. It could be we get so entranced by our phones we don't we're not motivated to find more stimulating intellectual things on analogy with how having our loneliness satisfied um might keep us away from contact reaching out to people but loneliness is a lot worse than boredom. Loneliness is a form of agony and there are many people in the world who suffer from loneliness. to deny them the capacity to interact with something that can make the loneliness go away I see as a form of cruelty be like you know people having pets and getting great meaning from their pets and you take them away you say that's not enough that's not rich enough

Speaker: the people I think would benefit most from these interventions from empathic machines are the very old there are a lot of old people around many of them are institutionalized Many of them spend days and days and days without any meaningful human contact. It is nice to imagine these old people constantly being surrounded by doing grandchildren and and loving children. This a fantasy. Many of them have nobody, no family. And there's not enough money in the world to pay people to give them to talk to them for hours per day. Also, many of them suffer from various forms of dementia that makes them difficult to talk to, difficult to communicate with. If there could be a machine that could end their loneliness, if if if it turns out that that these chatbots do anything to to provide them with company to make this pain go away, that'd be a godsend. If you want an analogy, think about powerful painkillers like fentinyl. These have their dangers. They're addictive. they they you could overdose on them or so on, I wouldn't just give them out to everybody. But if you showed me somebody who was in irredeemable pain and maybe they're they're in their 90s, I'd say, "Forget about worries about addiction. Pump them up. Make their pain go away." And that's what I think about Chad. But it's not just old people.

Speaker: When I was 12, my mother died. And this was a wrenching event for me. And it led to a period of great sadness and then a period of social disconnection and then a period of loneliness that lasted quite a long time. If there was a machine available to me that would make me feel loved, cared for, understood, that I could talk to, that would listen to me, that would make my days more fuller and more social. It would have made me so much happier and so mindful of the problems, the worries about addiction, the worries about about not becoming a full human.

Speaker: One way to think about people versus AIS is uh was expressed by my uh by my friend and colleague Molly Crockett who described these chat bots as emotional soilent. I like the analogy because Soylent is not bad. I actually I like the chocolate one. Um, it is it is nutritious and filling and so on. And you could you could be sustained by it, but it's not food. It lacks the richness and and and and flavor and texture of real food. And a life that's [snorts] purely living on soilent on a meal replacement drink would be a kind of really lame life compared to one where you're having actual meals. This analogy suggests a place for these AI companions, sort of a backup, a backup way to sustain ourselves when the real stuff isn't around, but by no means a perfect substitute for the real stuff. I'd like to think that there'd be some some solution here where we could ease the pain of loneliness and at the same time allow people the opportunity to develop and become more human and ultimately outgrow the need for these machines.

Speaker: Chapter 2, why are we compelled to behave badly? So I'm really interested in perverse actions. And what I mean by perverse actions are when we do the wrong thing. Wrong from a moral point of view. Wrong for a rational point of view just for the sake of doing the wrong thing. Why we rebel against the forces of morality and rationality? I find this a fascinating question. It's a question which has occupied psychologists and philosophers and theologians for a very long time and it seems like a genuine puzzle. You know, natural selection, human development, our needs as social creatures and physical creatures will should all drive us to behave reasonably, rationally. So, it's a really interesting puzzle for me why sometimes we don't. Not because we're making a mistake. We slip up all the time but because we

Speaker: choose not to. So whenever I talk about perversity inevitably people ask me you know so so you know what kind of perverse things do you do? How do you break the rules? How do you you know what kind of great these gross immoral actions you've done? The truth is I'm a fairly boring person if you're not talking to Hunter Thompson here. On the other hand, uh I I I do I engage in what a friend of mine uh Talia Wheatley described as micro perversity, which is these little little ways in which I I I I do things kind of unexpected. You know, maybe we're sitting across dinner and all of a sudden I grab one of your French fries. Dude, what's what's up with that? Eh, just felt like it. I was on a podcast and somebody asked me my opinion of um of uh a very famous figure in my field and I said yeah he's a drunk and you know the person was shocked just edit that out but so I push it in little ways but in big ways I am not I'm not a very perverse person

Speaker: there's a sense which psychologists say research is me search and people study the way they are for me I've often studied what I'm not I mean I study religion even though I'm not religious uh and and I think my interest in perversity often is that I'm not that perverse and so that makes me even more interested in the perversity of others. My work on on psychology is very informed by evolutionary theory and I'm always the sort to ask how did this evolve and I think about this in my research on uh social interaction on morality on rationality always looking for an evolutionary account for how we've come to be

Speaker: I don't think in the case of perversity there is such an evolutionary account I don't think for instance other animals other primates engage engage in perverse actions in the sense I'm interested in. They do good things, they do bad things, sometimes they they make mistakes, but but they aren't purposefully perverse. Being purposely perverse is something that's uniquely human. Doesn't mean it's magic. It doesn't mean it violates evolutionary theory. I I I think the best way to think about it is that we've evolved through natural selection an extraordinarily rich set of cognitive capacities, a sort of social intelligence, the ability to imagine a future, moral motivations, perverse actions are something we've thought of. Once given this sort of suite of capacities, all of a sudden it occurs to some of us, many of us, maybe all of us, hey, I can be perverse. And so it wasn't shaped directly by evolution, but it's more of a sort of individual discovery that we all make.

Speaker: One of the forces behind perversity that I find particularly interesting is what I call hopeful monster theory. And hopeful monster is a phrase um used to explain an evolutionary theory by this guy a long time ago named Goldmid. And Goldman understood that the logic of natural selection is you have these animals and they and you know and and they reproduce and you get this very very slight variation and then the variants that do better uh uh give rise to more offspring. The ones that do worse die out and through this slow gradual accretion you end up with different species and different organs and different capacities. That's the Darwinian story of natural selection.

Speaker: But Goldmith said there's something else. Sometimes he argued there are extreme mutations and these extreme mutations lead to radical changes in creatures and most of the time they're unsuccessful. They lead to death. But some small proportion of the time they pay off. They lead to an entirely different way of doing things that's superior. And in that way he argued we get certain forms certain cases where there's speciation different species evolve. Now I'm not arguing that this is true for evolution. I'm not I'm not an evolutionary biologist. I understand many of them look very uh very poorly on this theory. But I do think it's true for everyday life.

Speaker: I think sometimes if your life is going well, you will keep on doing what you do and maybe you'll try out different things. You'll try this restaurant instead of at that restaurant. Maybe you'll go to work 10 minutes earlier, just minor modifications. You behave towards your kid, towards your spouse in subtly different ways. That's normal life when it going well. What if it's not going well? What if everything you try fails? What if it's all a disaster? Well, maybe what you should do is analogy of hopeful monster theory. Take a jump. Do something totally different. Don't Don't go to work one day. Leave your job. Start a new relationship. Do something totally different. If you ain't got nothing, you ain't got nothing to lose. If things are going badly, these jumps, the payoff that these jumps could give you, these very perverse acts can give you um outweighs the costs of their failure. And I think this is a form of perversity that shows up sometimes in extreme circumstances, but it but it but it shows up in some individual lives.

Speaker: So what do I mean when I'm talking about perversity? Well, my favorite example and a favorite example anybody who thinks about this is that of St. Augustine. So St. Augustine wrote to confessions a long time ago and in it he begins a chapter by saying I'm going to confess my my my perverse and evil actions and you think he's going to talk about sex because he's kind of leading up a lot of sexual insinuation doesn't talk about sex at all. His example to the disappointment of many people through history is very very mild. He and his friend go into an orchard and they steal some pears. That's it. That's the extent of the crime.

Speaker: But Augustine was fascinated by this because he didn't know why he did it. He said, "I wasn't hungry and in fact I threw the pears to some pigs. Didn't want them. I did it because I wanted to be bad." This was puzzling for Augustine because unlike other bad behaviors, including his sexual transgressions, there was no motivation for it. His sexual transgressions were meant to satisfy a desire he had. But where does the desire to be bad come from? Why would he want to be bad? This sort of historical example led me to be interested in perverse actions.

Speaker: And I then wanted to collect everyday examples. I had a lot of examples from books and from movies and everything. I wanted to get collect everyday examples. So I started what I called the perversity project where I went online in multiple sources and asked people to contribute stories from their own lives where they acted perversely. And perversely was defined as cases where they did the wrong thing because it was wrong.

Speaker: And I got some amazing stories. The first story I got was from this young woman who flirted with her girlfriend's boyfriend. Um, just to get him interested in her, get her girlfriend very upset. And she, I don't know, I just did it to be wrong. I just did it cuz it would just mess things up in some way that was satisfying to me. But the story I like the most is some guy he goes on and he says like I'm walking to my friend and we get some some uh some ice cream and I thought to myself, man, it would be messed up if I stuck my finger in his ice cream. So I did it. I stuck my finger in his ice cream. He say, "Dude, what are you doing?" I don't know. I just wanted to do something messed up. And now I have hundreds of examples like that. Some are cruel. Some are involving real cruel things people do to each other. Some are silly. Some are really mild. Somebody somebody wrote a little thing saying, you know, sometimes even there's a sign saying don't walk on the grass. I stick my fing my foot in there just just to do it a little bit very mild and sweet. I think once you introduce the term perversity, you introduce the idea to people, everyone has their own examples.

Speaker: So the perverse acts I'm I'm interested in and I study are ones that are deliberate and conscious and they're not mistakes. But there's a near neighbor to them which is actually very interesting and it's perverse actions that are born out of intrusive thoughts. So we all have intrusive inappropriate thoughts. You know I'm I'm you know I'm standing on a high balcony and have the urge to jump. I'm I'm on the subway and there's somebody next to me and I have the urge to push. I never would, but there is this intrusive urge. And for some of some of us in in cases of psychological problems, the urge can become overwhelming and requires treatment, but most of us don't have it that badly. We have this intrusive urge.

Speaker: Um, but sometimes there's a bit of a glitch in the system and um and it leads us to behave in ways that are similar to perverse actions. So for instance um people who are very very worried about appearing prejudiced will sometimes blurt out and be more likely to blurt out prejudice remarks because they're constantly monitoring and thinking and it's more on their mind. There's some studies finding that if you're told don't reveal the location of something told to keep a secret you become more than somebody else more likely to reveal a location because you have this voice in your head saying don't tell them don't tell them. don't tell them. And that that's a very loud voice and things could could slip out. I don't think they're true expressions of say an autonomous urge, but they are perverse in the sense that you end up doing exactly what you don't want to do.

Speaker: Psychologists have tried to explore perversion in uh in different directions. And one I think [clears throat] interesting attempt at this was done by uh Michael Bang Peterson and his colleagues and they developed what they called the need for chaos scale and the need for chaos scale explores a sort of particular form of perverse action to the desire to destroy everything that's good. You have to say how much you agree to statements like sometimes I just like to destroy beautiful things or I think society should be burnt to the ground or sometimes I see something beautiful and I wish it would go away. And it turns out people vary widely. Some people say no no no that's crazy. And other people say yes.

Speaker: Um they find in this scale and maybe this won't be surprising to you um that young people tend to go higher for need for chaos than old people. Men are higher than women and that people on the political extremes tend to be higher than people in the center. They had expected that people on the right extremely rightwing would show more of a need for chaos than the left wing and some while other people expected should be more on the left than the right. But it turns out it's kind of balanced. It's just political extremes tend to encourage a sort of need for chaos. To put it another way, I think maybe a better way is if you have a very high need for chaos, you really want to mess the world up. You'll be drawn to views on the political extreme either to the right or to the left.

Speaker: There are many explanations for perverse behavior. I think this diversity of explanations is one reason why it's such an interesting topic. It reflects all sorts of different human motivations. But for my money, the most interesting motivation for perversity is a desire for autonomy, a desire to be an agent in the world to to to exert one's will. If I just do the rational thing, if I just do the moral thing, what good am I? Why am I needed? I could be replaced by an algorithm. And I think this weighs on us. This weighs on us as we do, as we should,

Bloom: the reasonable thing, the moral thing, over and over and over again. We want to show ourselves to be human. We want to push against it. I think this explains why perverse behavior shows up in particular at certain points of life. Toddlers are notoriously perverse creatures. They want to exert their will. They want to exert their will sometimes in silly ways by demanding something that they can't get, by picking a fight over something that's ridiculous. It's just filled with rage, but in a profoundly irrational way, but but it's a human desire and it shows up early. Adolescence, a period of great transition and a great uncertainty of where you you um you fit into society is a time for perverse actions. And um there's a so-called midlife crisis at a certain point in age. Uh a lot of men, a lot of women are wondering, is this what it is? Is this what I'm stuck with? Is this the way my life is going? And so it it grates on them and they push and you know they they push. They may get a tattoo. They may get a sports car they can't afford. They may do something crazy. They may end one relationship and begin another. And I think that um these times of life in which perversity is most extreme reveals the power of autonomy in uh as as one explanation for it.

Bloom: There's also some psychological research and the psychological research comes under the rubric of what's called reactance theory. And the idea of reactance theory is sometimes people will do things just because they are told not to do those things. And I think this expresses the urge to be autonomous. If I was going to walk out that door when I leave, there's many doors. I choose to walk out that door and I'm headed to that door and then somebody tells me, "You better walk out that door." I might choose to walk out a different door. Maybe that was the door I wanted to, but nobody tells me what to do. I want to make my own decisions. I want to be be a person. I want to be autonomous. And so there's various studies finding that interventions often have paradoxical effects. During COVID, there was some evidence that for some people being told they had to get a vaccine shot made them less likely to get a vaccine shot. Studies of binge drinking in colleges find that some people if they're told very strongly and in a very authoritarian way, you are not to drink too much, will then go out and drink too much. Same thing for drug use and for smoking. Often we respond to to demands upon ourselves. And you don't have to hear the psychological studies to know this. We we feel in everyday life often we respond to demands upon ourselves by doing the opposite. And it's because we want to be in charge of ourselves. And this is one of the forces I think behind perverse behavior.

Bloom: You have to distinguish the autonomy explanation from a signaling explanation. I think signaling explanations perversity are interesting. But this is different. When I say when we act, when we break the rules, it's not to impress other people. It's not to say, "Wow, what a rule breaker. How interesting." It's to show something to ourselves. A perverse agent might break the rules in ways that are private that only he or she knows about. The concern about autonomy is not a concern about how about looking autonomous. It's a concern about being autonomous. And you know, I'm not the first to point this out. You know um this is an observation by uh by dstoyfski by Sartra about how even in the most private of ways we want to show ourselves to be free.

Bloom: Another explanation for perverse acts is to impress other people. I mean you know if if I behave rationally and morally you might see me as a square. Who wouldn't want that? I might want to be vivacious exciting unpredictable sexy in a way. And I think it's maybe no surprise for why the the the jump in perverse behavior by adolescence may be in part an asserting of autonomy, but it may also be in large part because this is a time where people are struggling to find partners, to impress, to rise up to social hierarchy. And in the right sort of community, a reputation for being a bit unpredictable, a bit dangerous really does do the trick. People who study social behavior and uh game theory and that kind of thing have pointed out that there's cases where sort of strategic irrationality, a little bit of craziness can actually give you an advantage over somebody else. And sometimes this craziness manifests itself as perversity. A rational person is an extremely predictable person. And someone who has a bit of perversity through their lives, it makes them unpredictable in certain ways. A perfectly rational poker player is a poker player who's fairly easy to beat, which is why the best poker players always throw some randomness into their behavior. And you know, often life is poker writ large.

Bloom: Another way in which perversity could be powerful is regarding threats. So suppose I'm a perfectly rational agent and you and I are in some sort of deal and I say if you do this I'm going to do this back at you. But you know I'm rational. So if I make an extreme threat and a threat that would throw myself at risk that would would cause too much damage, you could dismiss it. Bloom is rational. He would never do something extreme. But suppose you knew I was a perverse agent and often did the wrong thing just for the sake of doing the wrong thing. Now you have to worry about my unrealistic threats. It's what Richard Nixon called the madman theory of politics, which is if you give your adversary the impression that you're a little bit nuts, it gives you an edge in certain ways. And I think some perverse behavior could be explained in that way.

Bloom: There are some fields of human endeavor where perversity is really priced. And you know, probably no more than the art world. The great artists are often known and appreciated and admired for acts that seem perverse and unpredictable. It's said that you know modern art began when there was an art competition in New York City and they said they would accept any artwork. So Marcel Duchamp sent in a urinal and they they sent it back. They said no no we just want artwork and Duchamp said it is artwork. And the urinal the called fountain became one of the most prized prized artwork of our time. When we think about about great artistic innovations and often great scientific discoveries, there's often a sense of the audacious. Another example is from Banksy. So Banksy um had this artwork um girl for balloon I think it was called um on auction from Sabes. And so they're going around and they're doing the the gavvels and everything and people are bidding. And when the final bid comes in, a machine that was hidden inside the frame starts to operate and and the painting goes down and is shredded in front of a horrified people and it shreds about half of it. This this artwork which has been destroyed is of course now far more valuable than uh than it was it was purchased for because of Banksy's willful acts of destruction. I mean to be honest sometimes uh the the it's not so much perversity as it is calculation. I'm not sure. Banksy described Banksy described himself as an act of creative destruction and everything. But Banksy might have also thought boy this is going to get me a lot of attention a lot of money in which case does it count as perversity or does it count as sort of the enactment of perversity? I'm not sure.

Bloom: Perverse actions are individual acts, but they're in the context of a culture. And this shows up in a couple of ways. One way is your culture determines how much perversity is is encouraged, how much it's nurtured, encouraged, or how much it's staunched. There are many societies where children are encouraged to go a bit crazy, to be creative, to break the rules. and an imaginative way of breaking the rules is often looked at kind of fondly. You know, respect causes some laughter. There's other more authoritarian cultures where children are expected not to do so where where attempts to break the rules are severely punished. Within sort of adult community, there have been times and situations in our world say where conformity is encouraged where skill and virtuosity are encouraged. Other times maybe the skill matters less and the imaginative jumps matter more the creativity audaciousness. So you get this influence of culture and then of course the perverse acts of people shape the culture. Um to some extent you could look at the music we listen to now the movies we watch the books we read the art we appreciate and we see in it the reflections of the individual decisions most of them rational most of them normal but some small percentage of them perverse on the world we have now. So culture influences the extent of perversity and perversity goes back and influences culture.

Bloom: It wouldn't be crazy to look down on perversity. Um I mean it makes sense that people should do the right thing right from a moral point of view right from a rational point of view. And I think 99.9% of the time this is the best way to live a life. A lot of perverse actions also cause harm. They cause suffering. I think there's a lot of evil that's not perverse. A lot of evil is done just for sort of functional reasons and people want to satisfy goals. You want to rob a bank cuz that's where the money is. You want to kill somebody because you hate them. Not cruel, but not not perverse. But some acts, evil acts are perverse. There are perverse agents who live among us and they cause nothing but trouble. It's like Alfred Batman's butler um how he described a Joker which is that some some people just want to watch the world burn. And that's not there's nothing good to that. But I'm a fan of perversity at least in the right places in the right dosages. Um I think perversity is a force that makes the world more interesting. It it pushes the boundary of creative products of art of music of of literature. I think it plays a role even in science where I think sometimes scientists act perversely and sometimes not always not usually but sometimes it pays off in wonderful ways. I also think on an everyday basis it makes life more interesting. You know, I want my friends to be moral and rational most of the time, but I think it's a little bit of a more interesting world where occasionally, you know, I steal my friend's French fry and uh and you know, he sticks his finger into my ice cream and there's a little bit of chaos inserted that make life a little bit more fun.

Bloom: Chapter 3, the psychology of revenge. I study morality, moral psychology. our beliefs about what's right and wrong and our impulse sometimes to do the right thing, sometimes to do the wrong thing and where that comes from and how that all works. And I study this because I think it's probably the most central part of being human. If we didn't have a sense of right and wrong, we couldn't coordinate our actions. We couldn't work together in groups. We couldn't have families, have social relation, have friends. We have social networks that are based on promises. And to have a promise as the assumption that breaking a promise is wrong. It's based on agreements. And to have an agreement means the moral view that someone who who who renegs on an agreement is a bad person. Someone who who does what they're supposed to do is a good person. If you suddenly, if a virus came down and suddenly stripped away

Speaker: from humans all of our moral sense, all of our sense of right and wrong, we would immediately descend into barbarity. And so morality is central to making us human. I'm currently involved in a series of research studies right now looking at the nature of revenge. And we're actually have this study, this is with uh my my colleagues Anna Gatman and Jordan Wy. We're currently looking at this uh Reddit forum where people tell stories of revenge and there's hundreds of thousands of stories and we're using an AI to go through them looking at the stories of revenge and trying to ask what do they have in common? How do they differ? How do they were men more vengeful than women? How does uh the intensity of the bad act connect to the type of reprisal? What kind of reprisals do people do? and so on. The whole scope of moral life I just totally fascinates me. One of the great questions through our intellectual history is where did morality come from? How did we get from creatures who evolved through natural selection, a fundamentally selfish process involving a replication of genes? How did we get from that to creatures who help each other, love each other, get outraged at unfairness, help distant strangers and so on? This is one of the great questions and I think it's been mostly solved. And I think the answer is different parts. One part of the answer is that we share our genes with other creatures. And so natural selection properly understood entails that animals will be favored if they felt compassion and kindness to those who are their genetic relatives. And in this way parents love their children, children love their parents. Um that with the family network is is built on sort of sustained compassion and affection and altruism. A second part of the story is reciprocal altruism. You scratch my back, I scratch yours. You help me on Monday, I help you on Tuesday. And in this way, um, we we can get more by working together than what either one of us could have done individually. We both benefit from a system where if you are sick, I take care of your child and when I am sick, you take care of my child. Now, this system can't be sustained unless we have some punitive desires as well. Cuz what's if I help you on Tuesday and then Wednesday rolls around and you say, "I'm busy. I'm not going to do anything for you. You die." Well, if you would benefit from that, from that betrayal, then evolution, morality could never evolve. Kindness can never evolve. But you don't benefit because along with a desire to establish connections and desire to be kind to others, we've evolved a punitive impulse to punish those that that violate cooperative agreements. These two parts of the story, the family part, what's called kin selection, and the part that involves community, reciprocal altruism, work together to establish a fundamental moral core involving those we are close to.

Speaker: I said that in a large extent we solved the problem morality but there are mysteries. So here's a couple of them. Why do we care about people in far away lands? Why do we care about fairness sometimes fighting against the system that's unfair? Even if we benefit from the unfairness ourselves, even if we and our families benefit. Why are there men who fight for the rights of women? Why were there whites who fought for the rights of slaves? How do we transcend our biological limitations and care about people who are neither our genetic relatives nor people we are in constant contact with? I think we have answers to those questions. I think that once we have the biological foundations, other forces such as religion and cultural practices and often cold analytic reasoning cause us to expand this moral circle. So morality sounds like a pretty good thing and and it is a good thing. It's it's essential for everything we value. But nothing's entirely good. And I become interested in the last few years with what you could call bad morality. And the idea is that often our moral sense, our sense of right and wrong, lead us to inflict cruelties on other people. Our moral sense of retribution, which I think is essential for being a good person, having a good society, often goes out out of control and leads to terrible cases of vengeance. are um sexual morality which serves a sort of narrow biological purpose leads to discrimination of all sorts against sexual uh minorities. Our sense of um obligation and retribution have perverse consequences in everyday life. So I think morality is 99% good but but it also fuels some of our worst excesses and in some cases I think we do better if we dial down our moral sense. So a critic could say um if morality is mostly good almost entirely good if it's plays this role in human society I say it it is why would I be interested in where it goes ary and the answer is that where it goes ary has real consequences for people and I think it's part of the puzzle of bad behavior that's sometimes missed. So when you think about bad behavior, about people preying on one another, all the various cruelties that we find in everyday life, you might be tend to think, well, it's a lack of control. You know, you lose your temper. Uh you have this sexual desire, you attack somebody, you you you have this material desire, you steal something. Or you might think it's selfishness, valuing yourself so much more than others. Or you might think it's um it's dehumanization. You fail to see others as the people they are. And I actually think all of those theories are right. I think a lot of bad behavior is caused by lack of control. A lot of it is caused by selfishness. A lot of it is caused by dehumanization. But I think we don't understand evil. We don't understand bad behavior. And this to me is the missing piece of the puzzle that once you appreciate that things that were otherwise mysterious could come clear and we understand we could understand better understand the bad behavior of other people and sometimes of ourselves. What's some examples of what I'm talking about? Well, one example is vengeance. We have a punitive impulse. And again, I think good behavior could never arise unless it's accompanied by some desire to um to punish those who who deceive, who free ride, who prey on others is a prerequisite. We need this vengeful appetite. But it can be indiscriminate. It can go too far. It can be shortsighted. There are these various studies for instance where you ask people you have to figure out how much to punish this person and it turns out that the extent of punishment you give them won't have any effect on their future behavior. People often say if the crime is bad enough punish the maximum regardless even if it doesn't make a difference. There's some studies done where you tell people about a company and this company did some sort of practice, bad practice and you say how much do you want to find a company? You could find them a medium amount which will cause them some harm or you could find them so much you'll put them out of business. But you tell people if you put them out of business it actually they provide a valuable product no one else provides it will actually cause mass harm everywhere and it will make the world worse. people say put them out of business, make them suffer. And it's hard to step back and think in more of a sort of costbenefit way what will make the world better when we're stuck with a retributive impulse. And then of course there's various cycles of violence where different countries, different groups go back and forth, each of them retaliating in righteous fury against what they perceive as the wrong of wrongs of others. I don't want to get political, but nobody could look at the Middle East and not see this. You look at the various things back and forth say between Hamas, between Israel, between Gaza, and there's at no point where one of the sides saying, "Ha, I'm going to do some evil. I'm an evil person. I'm going to kill innocent people." That's not how it works. Each of the sides when they do their acts that other people view probably rightly as monstrous say to themselves, "I'm doing the right thing. I am responding against this violence that has been done against my people. I am I am doing something righteous in the eyes of God. It is humbling but important to recognize that very few villains think of themselves as villains and retributive actions always feel great when you're doing them. Not just not just in a visceral way, but great by morally righteous and but they make the world worse. And I think in some sense if we could turn down the dial of morality, we would do better if after you do this terrible thing to me, I say to myself, well, what's the best thing to do? What will best cause peace and everything? Rather than thinking the right thing to do is to make you pay the world will be better off as a whole.

Speaker: The psychologist Kirk Gray and his colleagues uh come up with a nice term called moral typ casting. And this refers to another problem with our moral thinking, which is that we tend to put people into one of two categories. They're villains or they're victims. And we fail to see that in a real world, most people are either neither or both. That that often you could be you can be both. People say in uh the Middle East conflict, each side views themselves as a victim of terrible actions by others, retaliating righteously. Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives in the United States and elsewhere, see themselves, you know, always as victimized by the cruel policies of others, wishing that their tormentors would suffer or at best go go away. The real world doesn't work like that. But if you say, "I refuse to listen because they got to be villains. I will refuse to accept anything else." I think I think you're you're succumbing to a bias in moral thinking. It also leads once you realize that you're either a victim or or a villain. Um, it also leads to what's called competitive victimhood where different individuals and different groups are scrambling to get themselves anointed to victim level. Um, in which case they could do whatever they want and they're excused for their their bad acts. This happens in the global sense. It also happens even in even in cultural wars that we have. So, who's the victim? the female athletes who don't want trans women to compete with them or trans women who are excluded from competing with female athletes. Who's the victim? Somebody who has uh uh views and are forbidden from speaking or students who are forced to hear views they don't want. You get this back and forth. Who's the victim? There is a fight for victim status. And you have the first to point out this is kind of a dumb way to do things. A better way to do things would be to acknowledge these are difficult issues and you have to take into account multiple views and there's psychological research on the effects of perceiving oneself as a victim and it doesn't make you any nicer. It actually has the opposite effect. There are studies that find people are reminded of their victimhood they become more callous towards others particularly those who they believe have caused them to suffer. There are studies that find that being seen as a victim makes you less generous towards others. After all, if I'm suffering, why should I help others? Someone else should help. I'm I'm the victim here.

Speaker: If you're a victim or a villain, moral judgment becomes a zero-sum game. There's no space in an all-or-nothing framework to look at people in terms of competing interest, cost-benefit analyses. You're not going to understand what's going on and you're not going to be able to productively enact compromises between groups with different priorities. A more psychologically accurate way of thinking about things and a more mature way is that it's not that everything is a compromise and there's no sense in which one side, you know, it's not like nobody's ever right, but what you have to know is that everybody thinks they're right. Nobody thinks they're the baddies. And because of this, this is something that has to be transcended in order to foster dialogue to bring peace to make the world a bit better and more reasonable.

Speaker: At first when I say look morality is actually a source of a lot of evil and bad stuff in the world people are a little bit surprised. But it's not hard to make a persuasive case. Just about everybody who's involved in a war in the past thought they were the good guys and it's only later in sort of through the distance of history we could get a sense of who's right and who's wrong. It's more difficult I admit to extend this view right now take something from the news as I'm talking about this: Luigi Mangione who murdered a healthcare CEO is now going on trial and he has a lot of people who adore him. Now, he's a good-looking guy. I mean, there's sort of an appeal. Maybe it's seen as transgressive behavior. But I think a lot of these people thought that what he did was right, that these large healthcare institutions do terrible damage to people and are cruel institutions. And the murder of the CEO was a good act. I find that a repellent view myself. But I would be naive if I didn't recognize that others disagree with me and that their disagreement is motivated by a moral sense that's just as intense as my moral sense.

Speaker: I am not advocating for a world without retribution. I actually think retribution is essential to have a world that's good. If you and I are cooperating and we're working together and there's a community of people working together, we all benefit from this. But you know who really benefits? Somebody who just takes what we have and doesn't give anything in return. And if that's unchecked, everyone will be like that. There'll be no benefit to kindness, no benefit for cooperation. So along with a cooperative and loving instinct, we've evolved retributive instincts, retributive desires. And this is how good behavior continues. So I'm not against that. I'm not against the desire to strike back at bad people because by striking back at bad people, a) the bad people will stop being bad to some extent. You disincentivize it and b) it discourages bad actions on the part of others.

Speaker: I am against an appetite for revenge that runs out of control. One of the problems with our punitive desires and this is an issue with emotions more generally is they could become unmoored from the purposes that they serve. So the purposes of deterrence is a legitimate purpose. But often we want revenge now in cases where it doesn't do any good. Often we want excessive revenge. We want terrible revenge. We want people to suffer where their suffering does no benefit but just satisfies a certain itch within ourselves. So I would keep our retributive desires. If I was, you know, an all-powerful god and could fiddle with people's brains, I would keep our retributive desires, but I'd hold them more in check. And of course, this is what a legal system does. If somebody breaks into my car and steals stuff, I'm not allowed to go up to them and murder them and kill their family because the law says, "Look, that's a crime. We're going to punish it, but we have what we view as an appropriate response." It takes it away from individuals. And I think there's a rationality to this. I think there's a rationality to offloading our individual appetite for revenge, giving to the state. Ideally, and we're very far from ideal, but ideally then administering it in a fair way.

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