I think one of the deep aspects of psychology and any thinking person is thinking about how you're different from an animal, but you are an animal. And we forget about our kinship with other animals that we are animals. We end up with bizarrely unrealistic theories of human nature. I have evolutionary psychology friends who analogize everything we do to the behavior of animals. That gets me annoyed too. Because look what we're doing now. It man is, man is the only creature that has podcasts.
Do psychologists know anything? Psychologist Paul Bloom says yes--but not the things that you might think. Bloom discusses his book Psych with EconTalk's Russ Roberts and what the field of psychology can teach us about human intelligence, consciousness, and unhelpful instincts. They also discuss just how far psychology is from a true understanding of the human mind, and why, according to Bloom, that might not be such a bad thing.