Iris Berent on the Innate in Human Nature

How much of our understanding of the world comes built-in? More than you’d expect.

That’s the conclusion that Iris Berent, a professor of psychology at Northeastern University and head of the Language and Mind Lab there, has come to after years of research. She notes that her students, for example, are “astonished” at how much of human behavior and reactions are innate.

“They think this is really strange,” she tells interviewer David Edmonds in this Social Science Bites podcast. “They don't think that knowledge, beliefs, that all those epistemic states, could possibly be innate. It doesn't look like this is happening just because they reject innateness across the board.”

This rejection – which affects not only students but the general public and sometimes even social and behavioral scientists -- does have collateral damage.

So, too, is misinterpreting what the innateness of some human nature can mean. “[I]f you think that what's in the body is innate and immutable, then upon getting evidence that your depression has a physical basis, when people are educated, that psychiatric disorders are just diseases like all others, that actually makes them more pessimistic, it creates more stigma, because you think that your essence is different from my essence. … [Y]ou give them vignettes that actually underscore the biological origin of a problem, they are less likely to think that therapy is going to help, which is obviously false and really problematic”

Berent’s journey to studying intuitive knowledge was itself not intuitive. She received a bachelor’s in musicology from Tel-Aviv University and another in flute performance at The Rubin Academy of Music before earning master’s degrees in cognitive psychology and in music theory – from the University of Pittsburgh. In 1993, she received a Ph.D. in cognitive psychology from Pittsburgh.

As a researcher, much of her investigation into the innate originated by looking at language, specifically using the study of phonology to determine how universal – and that includes in animals – principles of communication are. This work resulted in the 2013 book, The Phonological Mind. Her work specifically on innateness in turn led to her 2020 book for the Oxford University Press, The Blind Storyteller: How We Reason About Human Nature.