Iris Berent on the Innate in Human Nature

How much of our understanding of the world comes built-in? More than you’d expect.

That’s the conclusion that Iris Berent, a professor of psychology at Northeastern University and head of the Language and Mind Lab there, has come to after years of research. She notes that her students, for example, are “astonished” at how much of human behavior and reactions are innate.

“They think this is really strange,” she tells interviewer David Edmonds in this Social Science Bites podcast. “They don’t think that knowledge, beliefs, that all those epistemic states, could possibly be innate. It doesn’t look like this is happening just because they reject innateness across the board.”

This rejection – which affects not only students but the general public and sometimes even social and behavioral scientists — does have collateral damage.

So, too, is misinterpreting what the innateness of some human nature can mean. “[I]f you think that what’s in the body is innate and immutable, then upon getting evidence that your depression has a physical basis, when people are educated, that psychiatric disorders are just diseases like all others, that actually makes them more pessimistic, it creates more stigma, because you think that your essence is different from my essence. … [Y]ou give them vignettes that actually underscore the biological origin of a problem, they are less likely to think that therapy is going to help, which is obviously false and really problematic”

Berent’s journey to studying intuitive knowledge was itself not intuitive. She received a bachelor’s in musicology from Tel-Aviv University and another in flute performance at The Rubin Academy of Music before earning master’s degrees in cognitive psychology and in music theory – from the University of Pittsburgh. In 1993, she received a Ph.D. in cognitive psychology from Pittsburgh.

As a researcher, much of her investigation into the innate originated by looking at language, specifically using the study of phonology to determine how universal – and that includes in animals – principles of communication are. This work resulted in the 2013 book, The Phonological Mind. Her work specifically on innateness in turn led to her 2020 book for the Oxford University Press, The Blind Storyteller: How We Reason About Human Nature.

To download an MP3 of this podcast, right-click this link and save. The transcript of the conversation appears below.

David Edmonds: There are aspects of our human nature that we seem to resist, that we seem to find difficult to believe, at least according to Iris Berent, who teaches psychology at Northeastern University and is the author of The Blind Storyteller. The reason for our blindness, she says, lies in human nature itself. Iris Berent, welcome to Social Science Bites.

Iris Berent: Hi, David. Nice to be with you.

Edmonds: We’re talking today about human nature, human nature from a kind of meta perspective. Is it fair to sum up your theory that inherent in our human nature are dispositions that confuse us about aspects of our human nature?

Berent: Exactly. I think that those dispositions themselves are likely rooted in human nature. So, our troubles with human nature are in our nature, or as Lila Gleitman, the famous child psychologist, said, empiricism is innate.

Edmonds: OK, so let’s see how we get there. A crucial question in all this research is the nature/ nurture distinction. Are some of our beliefs and skills innate? Do you have a working definition of innateness?

Berent: Right, so here I would follow Richard Samuels, the philosopher, and suggest the following two conditions. One is typicality, so innate traits are ones that emerge naturally and spontaneously in the course of development. The other is that when we’re talking about psychological traits, innate psychological traits are psychological primitives in the sense that they do not arise from other psychological mechanisms, most importantly, learning. So innate psychological traits are not learned.

Edmonds: Let’s go through various aspects of innateness, and perhaps we can start with innate knowledge of objects or the physical world. Is there evidence that we are born with a disposition to understand how the physical world operates?

Berent: Yeah, a large literature of infant cognition has shown just that. It’s the work of Elizabeth Spelke and Susan Carey showing that infants, and indeed, non-human animals, are born with certain expectations about what objects are. For example, they expect objects to only move by contact, immediately after contact, rather than after delay. So if they see violations of that, say, two objects interact, and the object moves only after a while they are demonstrably surprised. You can detect it in their looking at this display.

Edmonds: So they have some kind of instinctive grasp of the laws of nature?

Berent: They are not exactly accurate. So intuitive physics is not the same as real physics, for example, because you expect force to only apply by contact; gravity is going to really surprise you. But it only puts the rudimentary understanding of how the physical world works.

Edmonds: So that’s the physical world. What about innate knowledge of other people, other minds? Humans, unlike objects, have goals, they have intentions. Is there research suggesting that knowledge of other people, of other people’s minds, is innate?

Berent: Yeah so there is evidence that young infants, when they see a hand, for example, moving towards an object, suggesting that there is an agent behind it, they would expect the hand to follow where the object is. So if you change the position of the object, it will go to where the original object is, even if the position has changed, so the goal is assumed to follow the object. If instead of a hand, you would see a physical object moving, say, a rod moving, they would not make the same expectation. So for agent, you expect actions to be driven by mental states, by goals, by beliefs and so forth. Even though we are physical entities, right? Even though we’re physical bodies that ought to follow the laws of physics, people expect agents to be driven by the mental states for the most part.

Edmonds: Do judgments about other people fit in here about whether other people are good or bad at the most crude level?

Berent: So there is evidence that infants also prefer creatures that help others to ones that hinder others. You see it at three months old, infants suggesting that this rudimentary sense of morality is probably innate.

Edmonds: Tell me how that is demonstrated.

Berent: So here you see a creature with eyes, an animated creature, say, a triangle that has eyes trying to reach up a hill. And there is another, say, square that comes and either pushes the triangle up the hill where it’s presumably trying to go, or pushes it in the opposite direction. Infants prefer looking at the helper than the hinderer. When they are older, they would grab the helper rather than hinderer when presented a choice, suggesting that they have very early understanding of this distinction, possibly one that’s innate.

Edmonds: So we’ve talked a bit about innateness of inanimate objects, I guess, in the physical world, and also innateness of our understanding of other minds, other people. Let me ask you whether there’s also innateness about ideas. And here I’m thinking about mathematics, for example, or logic, or language.

Berent: So each of those domains that we have just named, intuitive physics and intuitive understanding of people constitutes innate ideas in so far that your understanding of what object is as an idea. Say, objects are cohesive, that’s an idea. What agents are, they follow their goal, that’s an idea. They’re also understanding of a sense of number, of addition and subtraction. So we know that newborn infants, in fact, have an understanding of, say, three, the numerosity of three in general. So if they see three lights and three sounds, they are sensitive to the congruence in numerosity and distinguish it, say, from three sounds and nine lights, for instance. You see the same in non-human animals as well. So even fish show understanding of numerosity.

Edmonds: So it sounds like there’s an enormous body of research which suggests that innateness is very real across a whole range of domains. How do people react when they’re told about this?

Berent: With astonishment. I teach it to students when I start teaching psychology of language, and I tell people about [Noam] Chomsky and his ideas of universal grammar, innate knowledge of language, people don’t really get it. They think this is really strange, they don’t think that knowledge, beliefs, that all those epistemic states, could possibly be innate. It doesn’t look like this is happening just because they reject innateness across the board. When you ask people about innate emotions, for instance, people have absolutely no trouble accepting that emotions are innate. In fact, they make predictions that are demonstrably wrong. But the point being that people are completely happy to assume that, say, newborn infants prefer happy faces to angry faces, even if, in reality, they don’t. It is for ideas selectively that people do not think that innateness makes sense.

Edmonds: So the question is, why? And I think here we probably need to introduce two more concepts. The first is dualism, and the second is essentialism. Let’s tackle those one by one. So, what is dualism to start with?

Berent: So dualism is the intuitive belief – we’re not talking philosophy, but intuitions of laypeople, of young children – that the mind is ethereal, distinct from the physical body.

Edmonds: And are people natural dualists?

Berent: People seem to be natural dualists. You see those intuitions in young children. So young children think that what an agent knows, so if you have a creature that you know your name, the creature’s name, knowledge of that trait will remain in the afterlife after the person dies. But if you would say, copy the body of the creature, then knowledge would not transfer to the copy. So that suggests that those psychological traits are considered ethereal and distinct from the body. So what you know, your epistemic states are not part of the body. That’s how a dualist think.

Edmonds: And I guess almost everybody who’s a religious believer is a dualist, because they think that somehow, when their physical body dies, they, as people, persist in some way, I don’t know, through the soul or through some other means.

Berent: Those who are religious and those who are not religious. So Jesse Bering, the psychologist, did some really interesting experiments in which he asked people in advance, what are their explicit beliefs about the afterlife. Some people were straight extinctivists; they thought that when you die, that’s it. Nothing happens. And yet, when he presented them with vignettes that asked them to reason about the person who died and ask, “OK, so will the person still remember what he did in the morning of his death?” It took them a little longer to say, “No, it won’t.” It was a little harder. My lab finds the same, that even people who say they completely deny the afterlife, they still show evidence for dualism when you see them implicitly. So I know it’s very tempting to think that dualism arises from religion, but I think the evidence suggests the opposite relationship, namely that religion could very well be the consequence of dualism rather than its cause.

Edmonds: So we all find it very easy to draw this distinction between mind and body, and that is our dualism. I mentioned essentialism as well. Can you tell me what essentialism is?

Berent: Essentialism is a belief about the innate origins of biological kinds. So what makes a dog brown like its mother. And kids will tell you, well, the dog got from its biological parents some little piece of matter that lies in its body, it’s unchanging, and that’s what makes it what it is. So critically, what’s innate in us is a trait that is inherited and it lies in the body.

Edmonds: Explain that a bit further. Kids say that the reason they’ve got the same color hair as their parents, or the same color eyes as their parents, is that a bit of their mother or their father physically is actually inside them? Is that what they believe?

Berent: Yeah, that there is some physical entity that lies in the inside of the body. So they think that the inside, the physical aspects of the body, sometimes they think it’s like a certain substance, like blood, something that lies in the body, this tiny little bit, it’s there, it’s hiding there, and that’s what gives you your biological, innate biological properties.

Edmonds: At what age are they telling you this?

Berent: School-aged children, so 7, 8. You don’t see that actually in younger children, but this is something that you see in school-aged children.

Edmonds: So tie this all together for us. We began by talking about innateness. Many of us have difficulty believing in innateness, and then we talked about dualism and essentialism. What’s the link between all those things?

Berent: So the tension between dualism and essentialism is what causes our troubles with innateness. As an essentialist, you’d say that what’s innate lies in the body, it has to be in the body for this trait to be innate. The problem is that you’re also dualist, and you believe that knowledge isn’t in the body, it’s some ethereal property that’s outside the body. And that renders knowledge impossible in principle of being innate, because it’s simply in the wrong place for being innate.

Edmonds: So these different instincts that we have about the world lead us to making this systemic error about innateness?

Berent: Right. It’s really a syllogistic type of reasoning, right? You believe that knowledge is ethereal. There is indeed evidence that people think that those epistemic traits are not in the body. People think that’s what innate must be in the body. We have shown evidence for that as well, and in fact, we have shown evidence linking these two principles to our empiricist intuitions.

Edmonds: Now the people who are making these mistakes are ordinary folk. They’re not scientists like you. Does it matter that most people find it very difficult to grasp the truth?

Berent: Well, it could matter for scientists, too, insofar, the scientists are only people. They could very well be subject to the same biases. But it also matters for laypeople as well. Empiricist intuitions, for example, lead us to have troubles when we reason about neuroscience, to expect that knowledge cannot possibly be in the brain, and that for when we see that acquiring knowledge actually changes the brain, people are completely surprised, as if there was an alternative.

It creates a lot of misconceptions about, say, psychiatric disorders, right? So if you think that what’s in the body is innate and immutable, then upon getting evidence that your depression has a physical basis, when people are educated, that psychiatric disorders are just diseases like all others, that actually makes them more pessimistic, it creates more stigma, because you think that you know your essence is different from my essence.

So it is really problematic. What’s horrible here, it’s not just laypeople that give you intuitions. Psychotherapists and psychiatrists give the same intuitions. So as you emphasize, you give them vignettes that actually underscore the biological origin of a problem, they are less likely to think that therapy is going to help, which is obviously false and really problematic.

Edmonds: Once research is presented to people about innateness, can they not overcome these intuitions?

Berent: We don’t know. I think that’s a really good suggestion that we would like to follow up. So once you understand the mechanism, the question is whether making people aware of what they are doing could actually help them overcome that. We don’t know.

Edmonds: But presumably you’d think, in your case, it has. I mean, you don’t share the prejudices of everybody else.

Berent: Yes and no. So when I put [on] my scientist’s hat, and I think real hard, and I’m trying to overcome it. In my everyday life, I’m a dualist all the time. So to what extent it happens when I’m not attending to it, I don’t know.

Edmonds: Are there other areas of human nature that you would like to investigate where you think there might be a similar systemic problem about how we understand ourselves?

Berent: Yeah, so I’m really interested in exploring the implications of these ideas to psychiatric disorders. So one question is whether dualism could actually play some adaptive role, for example, in understanding our emotions. Could it shed light on how we reason about our identities, say our sex and gender? So these are all areas of research that we are working on right now.

Edmonds: Iris Berent, thank you very much indeed.

Berent: Thank you, David. It was fun talking to you.

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