Gopnik: What's More Boring Than Human Differences?

Psychologist Alison Gopnik, whom I confuse with psychologist Susan Pinker, explains that she refuses to think about differences between individuals in intelligence.

From Marginal Revolution:

My Conversation with Alison Gopnik

by Tyler Cowen December 18, 2025

Alison Gopnik is a well-known professor at UC Berkeley and popular writer on developmental child psychology, the Mind and Matter columnist for the Wall Street Journal from 2013-2023. She is the sister of Adam Gopnik, the well-known utility-infielder writer on countless topics for The New Yorker, and of Blake Gopnik, the writer of art criticism for The Daily Beast and formerly for the Washington Post, where he made himself conspicuous by his fanatically ethnocentric hatred of Norman Rockwell.

The Gopniks’ father was an English professor and their mother was a linguist. Both taught at McGill U. in Montreal, where the little Gopniks were raised.

As you can see, the Gopniks of Montreal tend to be good with words.

Prof. Larry Gopnik of Minneapolis was better with equations than words

I must confess to frequently getting psychologist Alison Gopnik confused with psychologist Susan Pinker of Montreal, formerly a professor at McGill, and sister of Harvard professor Steven Pinker. Ms. Pinker has recently taken over writing the Mind and Matter column at the WSJ from Ms. Gopnik.

The Pinkers of Montreal also tend to be good with words, so I hope I can be forgiven for confusing Alison Gopnik and Susan Pinker. (I wonder if the Mind and Matter column got switched by accident when an editor at the WSJ told an intern to send the annual Mind and Matter contract to “what’s her name, you know, the Jewish lady professor of psychology from Montreal, the one with the famous brother” and the hastily-Googling intern came up with Susan Pinker instead of Alison Gopnik?)

Professor Cowen and Professor Gopnik debate Nature versus Nurture:

Excerpt:

COWEN: If it’s something like height, where there is clearly an environmental component, especially if the child is not well-fed, but it seems perfectly fine to say above a certain dietary level, it’s mostly genetic, right? No one says that’s ambiguous, and more and more traits will become like that.

GOPNIK: Well, first of all, I’m not sure that’s true. To a striking degree, the traits that people have looked at, like educational attainment, for example — we haven’t found consistent relationships to genetics. I think the reason for that is exactly because there’s this very complicated developmental process that goes from the genetics to the outcome.

… The other thing, of course, is, from my perspective, the common features of, say, what kids are doing are much more interesting than the variations. What I really want to know is how is it that anyone could have a brain that enables them to accomplish these amazing capacities? Thinking about, is this child smarter than the other one, given how unbelievably smart all of them are to begin with, I just think it’s not an interesting question.

I realize that I’m a notorious extremist, while the Gopniks are famously moderate (after all, who doesn’t viscerally loathe Norman Rockwell?). But, it strikes me that both questions:

• Why are humans smarter than chimps or dogs and why are six year olds smarter than two years olds?

• Why are some humans smarter than other humans of the same age?

are extremely interesting to me. I’ve probably written 50,000 or more words about the the first question (and at least an order of magnitude more about the second).

But if I wasn’t interested in one of these questions, I sure wouldn’t brag about my lack of curiosity the way Professor Gopnik does.

Everybody lumps and splits. They might lump/split along different dimensions: e.g., Professor Gopnik splits on age but lumps children in general, while Professor Gottfredson splits among children, but mostly lumps different ages together.

Both have their uses.

But only a crazed lunatic like myself would take a reasonable, evenhanded perspective like that, whereas the venerable Professor Gopnik rejects on principle learning about the best-replicating subfield in psychology.

COWEN: But say, what you would call the lay belief that smarter parents give birth to smarter children, at least above subsistence — surely you would accept that, right?

GOPNIK: Again, what does smarter mean?

COWEN: How you would do on an IQ test.

GOPNIK: What does genetics mean? It’s interesting, Tyler, that IQ tests, for example — they have their own scholarly and scientific universe, but they’re not something that we would teach about or think about in a developmental psychology class, and there’s a good principled reason for that.

Paywall here.