Conversations with Tyler · Mercatus Center at George Mason University

Alison Gopnik on Childhood Learning, AI as a Cultural Technology, and Rethinking Nature vs. Nurture

December 17, 2025·1 hr 1 min·4 clips

Gopnik uses the physics concept of simulated annealing to explain why four-year-olds are better explorers than adult scientists.

The question is old. How do people know so much about the world when the data are so thin? Tyler presses the problem, and Gopnik starts by separating the usable scraps of Freud from the bigger system modern psychology has mostly left behind. Freud is not the center of the conversation. She says he barely shows up in contemporary psychology, even at Berkeley, which she calls the country's best department. Still, one hunch holds up: Freud and some Freudians took children's inner lives more seriously than the old caricatures suggest. Babies are not blank scenery. They are already making guesses about social and psychological worlds, and those guesses matter. Piaget gets a different treatment. For Gopnik, he is still the big ancestor under cognitive development, the figure researchers keep arguing with while claiming they are doing the thing he meant to do. Then the conversation pulls back to Plato and Aristotle, where the same puzzle is already waiting. If the data are too thin, maybe some structure has to be there from the start. Tyler keeps it moving with short, sharp questions. Gopnik builds the long chain: psychology, philosophy, childhood, development. The episode closes on elders, with care as something older people both receive and give.

As heard by us

Gopnik measures the old Freud-Piaget intuitions against the developmental record and shows what held.

Gopnik's central claim is old enough to have roots in Piaget and Freud: infants are active inference engines, not passive recipients, and the developmental record has spent decades backing her up.

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Why you'd press play

The oldest question in learning theory, revisited by the researcher who has spent decades testing it.

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