11. Conversation ♫

Janet: I’ve just come across an old photograph album of my mother’s in this drawer. Come and have a look, Mike.

Mike: Gosh! Is this a picture of you as a baby? You were quite cute then. It’s a shame you’ve grown up.

Janet: Don’t be nasty! Look, here’s a photo of my sister Paula when she was still in the fourth form at school. That’s an old boyfriend of hers beside her.

Mike: She looks a bit young for boyfriends – but I suppose she takes after you – you always used to have a different boyfriend whenever I saw you in those days.

Janet: Look who is talking! I remember looking through some of your old photos a while ago – and I found a whole collection of pictures of different girlfriends of yours.

Mike: Look! Here’s an old photo of your mother. Didn’t she look like you then?

Janet: Yes, everyone says we are very alike.

Mike: What a ridiculous hat she is wearing!

Janet: It’s not ridiculous at all. It was the height of fashion – then.

Mike: Something has just occurred to me – if your mother looked like you twenty years ago, you’ll probably look just like her in twenty years time…

Janet: So?

Mike: So… er… well… Look, a picture of young David!

12. Introduction to Psychology ♫

Paul Bloom: What we’ve been talking about so far in the course are human universals, what everybody shares. So, we’ve been talking about language, about rationality, about perception, about the emotions, about universals of development, and we’ve been talking about what people share. But honestly, what a lot of us are very interested in is why we’re different and the nature of these differences and the explanation for them. And that’s what we’ll turn to today.

So first, we’ll discuss how are people different, different theories about what makes you different in a psychological way from the person sitting next to you, and then we'll review different theories about why people are different. And this is the class which is going to bother the most people. It’s not dualism. It’s not evolution. It’s this because the scientific findings on human psychological differences are, to many of us, shocking and unbelievable. And I will just try to persuade you to take them seriously…

How happy are you? This is also such a good topic it's going to get its own class. The very last class of the semester is devoted to happiness and the question of what makes people happy, what makes people unhappy, and what makes people differ in their happiness. If I asked you to rank how happy you are from a scale of 1 to 10, the numbers would differ across this room. And there are different theories as to why.

Your success and failure in life – this is somewhat interesting because you could study this in more or less objective ways. We don’t have to ask people. We could look at your relationships, how they begin, how they end, your job satisfaction. We could look at your criminal records. Some of you are going to see time. Most will not. Some of you will get into little troubles all through your life. Some of you already have seen the inside of a police station, possibly a lineup. Others couldn’t go near such a thing. What determines that?

And at the root of all human differences are two main factors. And so, I want to talk about the two main interesting factors. One is personality. The other is intelligence. And this is what – these are the differences I’ll talk about today first from the standpoint of how do we characterize them, how do we explain them, and then from the standpoint of why these differences exist in the first place.