<iframe title="Embed Player" src="https://play.libsyn.com/embed/episode/id/30202783/height/128/theme/modern/size/standard/thumbnail/yes/custom-color/87A93A/time-start/00:00:00 /playlist-height/200/direction/backward/download/yes/font-color/FFFFFF" height="128" width="100%" scrolling="no" allowfullscreen="" webkitallowfullscreen="true" mozallowfullscreen="true" oallowfullscreen="true" msallowfullscreen="true" style="border: none;"></iframe>

Caring helps makes us human. 

This is one of the strongest ideas one could infer from the work that developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik is discovering in her work on child development, cognitive economics and caregiving. 

As she explains to interviewer David Edmonds in this Social Science Bites podcast, caring “is one of the things that’s most characteristically human. And one of the things that I think has been the greatest engine of our thriving and success and to the extent that we can scale it up beyond just these close relationships, to our relationships to the world in general, say, our relationships to the natural world or our relationships to people who are on the other side of the planet, or our relationships to non-human animals.” 

Gopnik, a distinguished professor at the University of California Berkeley’s Department of Psychology Graduate School and affiliate professor of philosophy at Berkeley, reviews several aspects of “care” in the interview, including a comparison of paid and unpaid caregiving, how to square the existence of care with some understandings of evolutionary biology, and how caring is good not just for the cared-for but for the carer. 

Her work on caring is the focus of a three-year-old multi-disciplinary project, The Social Science of Caregiving, based at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford and operating .in collaboration with research at Gopnik’s UC Berkeley lab, the Cognitive Development and Learning Lab. 

Gopnik writes widely on psychological research for both academic and general audiences, such as through books like 2016’s The Gardener and the Carpenter: What the New Science of Child Development Tells Us About the Relationship Between Parents and Children and 2009’s The Philosophical Baby: What Children’s Minds Tell Us About Truth, Love, and the Meaning of Life or through the Mind and Matter column she pens for the Wall Street Journal. 

Last year, the Cognitive Science Society awarded Gopnik the David Rumelhart Prize in Cognitive Science. A fellow of the Cognitive Science Society, a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. 

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

David Edmonds: Academics should care a bit more about care. That’s the view of renowned psychologist Alison Gopnik. Caring for children, caring for elderly parents, this can take up a fair chunk of our time. It’s exhausting. It’s also fulfilling. But given how central it is the most of our lives, it’s strange that care has received so little scholarly attention. Alison Gopnik, welcome to Social Science Bites.  

Alison Gopnik: Glad to be here.  

Edmonds: We’re talking today about care. What is care?  

Gopnik: Well, that’s a good question. It’s something that is incredibly important and deep for all of us. But it’s very odd from the perspective of most theories of economics and politics and philosophy and social science, because what happens in care is that someone who has more resources gives them away to try to help someone who has fewer resources. And they do that exactly because the other person has fewer resources. And they do it even though in some sense, especially, because the other person is not going to reciprocate. And that makes it something that’s really deep and important if you ask people. There’s a recent social psychology study that asked people what’s the most important thing in your life? What motivates you more than anything else? And sure enough, it turns out that what people say first is the way that I need to care for the people around me, 

Edmonds: When you use the term resources, that sounds like money, care means money, but presumably we’re talking about not just financial care, but activities, changing that piece, and so on. 

Gopnik: Right. It’s resources in the broadest sense. And in some important ways we give up our lives for the people that we care for. It isn’t just that we give them resources in the sense of giving them financial resources, or giving them chocolate chip cookies and tuna fish sandwiches, but we also give up our time.  

And one way that you could think about it is that when we care for people, their goals become our goals, or certainly we subordinate our goals to their goals, especially if you think about cases like a baby. It’s not just that we sort of are feeding the baby, because otherwise the baby will cry, and it will be irritating. The baby’s hunger, the baby’s need, is overwhelming to us, more so than our own need. And that’s true even in less dramatic cases where we have someone who depends on us and their needs, in some important sense become our needs. 

Edmonds: Should we draw a distinction between the paid and the unpaid sector because obviously, in the private sector and the public sector, there are people who are paid to be carers, and we call them carers, people who work in old age homes, people who work in hospitals, nurses and doctors. They’re carers of a kind. 

Gopnik: Yeah, they absolutely are. And one of the things that’s very interesting that we’ve been thinking about and working on is that care has both the sides. So there’s a side to it that is being served by markets and states, like all the other kinds of economic activities that we engage in. And there’s a very large group of people who are paid to care.  

But probably most of the work and care is actually not done in the context of that paid, priced economic system. It’s done by parents and children and older siblings and even close friends. It’s done in this kind of informal way. And one of the real challenges is what’s the relationship between that paid-to-care economy and that unpaid economy. And one idea that people have had, again, this kind of irony is that everyone feels as if care is incredibly important, but the people who actually do it are characteristically underpaid. So they’re almost always women, [and] very often in the United States, and I think in Britain as well, very often immigrants, very often not treated with great respect and certainly not paid very well. And there’s an interesting argument that in some ways, the non-economic benefits of care mean that the economic benefits are underpriced. So when you talk to people who are doing this care work, what they’ll say is, “Well, I do it because it’s really intrinsically satisfying. And it’s important and I care about those particular people.”  

The example that always strikes me as being particularly vivid and painful is when they were doing interviews with eldercare workers during COVID. Literally, these people were risking their lives going into nursing homes to take care of people with COVID. And they were not getting paid or particularly well treated in order to do this. And what they would say is, “Well, look, it’s Mr. Jones, right. I can’t just turn around and leave Mr. Jones to get sick. Of course, I have to take care of him.” There’s a really interesting interaction between these very spontaneous, unpaid relationships of care and motivations of care, and what happens in the paid professional carers, too. 

Edmonds: Is it fair to say that you’re more interested in the unpaid than the paid sector?  

Gopnik: Well, what I’m interested in is, what is it that makes care such a strong motivation outside of pay. And that’s true obviously in the unpaid sector. So it’s a real paradox from a kind of classical economic point of view. Why are people investing all this work doing all this time when they’re not apparently getting any reward for it? But it applies to the care economy in general and I think an idea that lots of people have had is part of the reason why there’s a sort of crisis of care, we feel as if there just isn’t enough of it and it’s not being done very well, is exactly because it’s in this strange zone between what we think of as being paid work and what we think of as being unpaid work. 

Edmonds: At least the paid work, talk about it being underpaid, but at least it’s captured by GDP figures, whereas the unpaid work that the mother or father was doing with the kids doesn’t show up at all in the stats. 

Gopnik: That’s right. I mean, it’s completely invisible and it’s invisible in the statistics and it’s, it’s invisible in the conversation in economics, or political science or philosophy for thousands of years. Even though it’s so fundamental and imp