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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