Alison Gopnik Quotes

We decided to become developmental psychologists and study children because there aren't any Martians. These brilliant beings with the little bodies and big heads are the closest we can get to a truly alien intelligence (even if we may occasionally suspect that they are bent on making us their slaves.)

~ Alison Gopnik

We decided to become development psychologists and study children because there aren't any Martians. These brilliant beings with the little bodies and big heads are the closest we can get to a truly alien intelligence (even if we may occasionally suspect that they are bent on making us their slaves.)

~ Alison Gopnik

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

~ Alison Gopnik

Imagine if baseball were taught the way science is taught in most inner-city schools. Schoolchildren would get lectures about the history of the World Series. High school students would occasionally reproduce famous plays of the past. Nobody would get in the game themselves until graduate school.

~ Alison Gopnik

Scientists and philosophers tend to treat knowledge, imagination and love as if they were all very separate parts of human nature. But when it comes to children, all three are deeply entwined. Children learn the truth by imagining all the ways the world could be, and testing those possibilities.

~ Alison Gopnik

Knowing what to expect from a teacher is a really good thing, of course: It lets you get the right answers more quickly than you would otherwise.

~ Alison Gopnik

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.

~ Alison Gopnik

Young children seem to be learning who to share this toy with and figure out how it works, while adolescents seem to be exploring some very deep and profound questions: 'How should this society work? How should relationships among people work?' The exploration is: 'Who am I, what am I doing?'

~ Alison Gopnik

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.

~ Alison Gopnik

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.

~ Alison Gopnik

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

~ Alison Gopnik

If you wanted to design a robot that could learn as well as it possibly could, you might end up with something that looked a lot like a 3-year-old.

~ Alison Gopnik

Because we imagine, we can have invention and technology. It's actually play, not necessity, that is the mother of invention.

~ Alison Gopnik

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.

~ Alison Gopnik