Paul Bloom

Paul Bloom (born 1963) is a Canadian-American psychologist, professor emeritus of psychology and cognitive science at Yale University and professor of psychology at the University of Toronto. Born in Montreal, he studied at McGill and took his doctorate in cognitive psychology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology under Susan Carey. His research explores how children and adults understand the physical and social world, with special attention to language, morality, religion, fiction and art. He taught at the University of Arizona from 1990 to 1999 and at Yale from 1999, and since 2003 has co-edited the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences. He argues that religious belief arises as an accidental by-product of other evolved traits, and in 2017 he received the Klaus J. Jacobs Research Prize for work on the emergence of morality in children.