Alison Gopnik's Quotes

Becoming an adult means leaving the world of your parents and starting to make your way toward the future that you will share with your peers.

Developmental scientists like me explore the basic science of learning by designing controlled experiments.

I'm afraid the parenting advice to come out of developmental psychology is very boring: pay attention to your kids and love them.

On the Web we all become small-town visitors lost in the big city.

One of the most distinctive evolutionary features of human beings is our unusually long, protected childhood.

Texts and e-mails travel no faster than phone calls and telegrams, and their content isn't necessarily richer or poorer.

The best scientific way to discover if one factor influences another is to do a controlled experiment.

The radio was an improvement on the telegraph but it didn't have the same exponential, transformative effect.

What happens when children reach puberty earlier and adulthood later? The answer is: a good deal of teenage weirdness.

What teenagers want most of all are social rewards, especially the respect of their peers.

Adults often assume that most learning is the result of teaching and that exploratory, spontaneous learning is unusual. But actually, spontaneous learning is more fundamental.

Animals are certainly more sophisticated than we used to think. And we shouldn't lump together animals as a group. Crows and chimps and dogs are all highly intelligent in very different ways.

As adults, when we attend to something in the world we are vividly conscious of that particular thing, and we shut out the surrounding world. The classic metaphor is that attention is like a spotlight, illuminating one part of the world and leaving the rest in darkness.

Being a developmental psychologist didn't make me any better at dealing with my own children, no. I muddled through, and, believe me, fretted and worried with the best of them.

Childhood is a fundamental part of all human lives, parents or not, since that's how we all start out. And yet babies and young children are so mysterious and puzzling and even paradoxical.

I'm the oldest of six children and I had my own first baby when I was 23. So I've always been interested in babies, and I had lots of opportunities to watch them.

Imaginary friends are one of the weirder forms of pretend play in childhood. But the research shows that imaginary friends actually help children understand the other people around them and imagine all the many ways that people could be.

Like most parents, I think, my children have been the source of some of my most intense joys and despairs, my deepest moral dilemmas and greatest moral achievements.

One of the best ways of understanding human nature is to study children. After all, if we want understand who we are, we should find out how we got to be that way.

Putting together philosophy and children would have been difficult for most of history. But very fortunately for me, when I started graduate school there was a real scientific revolution taking place in developmental psychology.

Successful creative adults seem to combine the wide-ranging exploration and openness we see in children with the focus and discipline we see in adults.

Teaching is a very effective way to get children to learn something specific - this tube squeaks, say, or a squish then a press then a pull causes the music to play. But it also makes children less likely to discover unexpected information and to draw unexpected conclusions.

The real excitement is collaborating with computer scientists and neuroscientists and starting to understand in detail how children learn so much so quickly.

The youngest children have a great capacity for empathy and altruism. There's a recent study that shows even 14-month-olds will climb across a bunch of cushions and go across a room to give you a pen if you drop one.

We learn differently as children than as adults. For grown-ups, learning a new skill is painful, attention-demanding, and slow. Children learn unconsciously and effortlessly.

Jesus was the first socialist, the first to seek a better life for mankind.