Narcissism Doesn't Develop Naturally – It Is a Learned Condition | Alison Gopnik

Narcissists aren't born – they're made, says development psychologist Alison Gopnik. She takes issue with the popular notion that children need to unlearn brashness and learn civility, when neuroscience shows that it tends to work in the reverse. Gopnik's latest book is "The Gardener and the Carpenter: What the New Science of Child Development Tells Us about the Relationship Between Parents and Children" ().
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Transcript - One of the things that we've discovered in the science is that children already have moral intuitions from the time they're extremely young. So even 14-month-olds will go out of their way to try to help someone else who's in trouble. And there's even some evidence that this is true for babies, for infants. So the old picture that we had about moral development was that children started out being these amoral egocentric creatures and then they had to be socialized into being moral or caring about other people. And that view is sort of exactly the opposite of the view that we have now. There was a column in the New York Times that said someone like Donald Trump is like a two-year-old and I was extremely irritated, thought about writing a letter to say that's a terrible insult to two-year-olds. Two-year-olds are not narcissistic and egocentric and only concerned with their own happiness. They have the potential for caring about other people taking care of them. It's something that happens between being two and being grown-up that makes the narcissist and the egotists of the world develop. That's a grown-up condition not a condition of a two-year-old. Read Full Transcript Here: .