Paul Bloom (psychologist)


Paul Bloom is a Canadian American psychologist. He is the Brooks and Suzanne Ragen Professor of psychology and cognitive science at Yale University. His research explores how children and adults understand the physical and social world, with special focus on language, morality, religion, fiction, and art.

Early life and education

Bloom was born into a Jewish family in Montreal, Quebec. As an undergraduate he attended McGill University, where he earned a Bachelor of Arts in psychology in 1985. He attended graduate school at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he earned a Ph.D in cognitive psychology in 1990, under the supervision of Susan Carey.

Career

From 1990 to 1999, he taught psychology and cognitive science at the University of Arizona. Since 1999, he has been a professor of psychology and cognitive science at Yale University.
Since 2003, Bloom has served as co-editor in chief of the scholarly journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

Honors and awards

Bloom has held the Harris Visiting Professorship at the Harris Center for Developmental Studies at the University of Chicago ; the Nijmegen Lectureship at the Max Planck Institute at the University of Nijmegen ; the Templeton Lectureship at Johns Hopkins University ; and the Visiting Distinguished SAGE Fellowship at the UCSB SAGE Center for the Study of Mind.
In 2003, the Society for Philosophy and Psychology awarded Bloom the Stanton Prize for outstanding early-career contributions to interdisciplinary research in philosophy and psychology, and in 2005-06, he served as the society's president. In 2006, he was made a fellow of the American Psychological Society in recognition of his "sustained outstanding contributions to the science of psychology".
In 2004, he received the Lex Hixon Prize for teaching excellence in the social sciences at Yale. In 2007, his Introduction to Psychology class was selected as an outstanding Yale course to be made available worldwide through the Open Yale Courses initiative.
In 2017, he received the $1 million 2017 Klaus J. Jacobs Research Prize for his investigations into how children develop a sense of morality.

Books