The psychology of solitude, perversion, and AI companionship
Psychologist Paul Bloom examines why loneliness feels like starvation, why people are drawn to behaving poorly, and why revenge feels righteous until it destroys everything.
Jul 11, 2026
Psychologist Paul Bloom has spent his career studying the parts of human nature we often feel uncomfortable examining: why loneliness feels like starvation, why people are drawn to behaving poorly, why revenge feels righteous until it destroys everything.
Bloom argues that the US doesn’t actually have a loneliness epidemic, it has a solitude epidemic, one being accelerated by AI companionship.
About the speaker: Paul Bloom is the Brooks and Suzanne Ragen Professor of Psychology at Yale University. An internationally recognized expert on the psychology of child development, social reasoning, and morality, he has won numerous awards for his research, writing, and teaching. Bloom’s previous books include Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil and How Pleasure Works: The New Science of Why We Like What We Like, and he has written for Science, Nature, The New York Times, and The New Yorker.
Timestamps
00:00:24 Chapter 1: The promise and peril of AI companions
00:05:10 Two concerns: addiction & yes-men
00:18:51 The case for AI companions
00:23:48 Chapter 2: Why are we compelled to behave badly?
00:30:03 The pear thief & the perversity project
00:36:35 Autonomy, art, and chaos
00:48:25 Chapter 3: The psychology of revenge
00:53:39 When morality turns cruel
01:04:04 In defense of (controlled) revenge
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Transcript
Below is a transcript of the first five minutes of this video interview. This is a true verbatim transcript that captures the conversation exactly as it happened. If you’d like to read the full transcript while following along with the video, click here.
I’m Paul Bloom. I’m a professor of psychology at University of Toronto and an emeritus professor at Yale University, and I study human nature. I study children, I study development, I’m really interested in morality and the social emotions, in how we understand ourselves and how we relate to other people.
Chapter One: The Promise and Peril of AI Companions
When people talk about loneliness — when we think about loneliness — we think about being alone, about solitude, and that can definitely be a source of loneliness. But a lot of us are comfortable being alone. And you could be alone for a long period of time but not feel lonely if you know there’s people who love you and understand you and appreciate you, kind of waiting in the wings for when you come back. What loneliness is at its root is a lack of human connectedness — the feeling that you aren’t loved, you aren’t needed, you aren’t respected.
This could mean you have nobody in your life, but it could also mean that you’re surrounded by people and you’re not connecting to them. Hannah Arendt pointed out that the most painful form of loneliness is when you are surrounded by people and you feel utterly isolated. And I’m interested in loneliness in part because it’s an exquisitely painful experience — it’s one of the worst states a human could be in, to feel alone, to feel disconnected.
People talk about a loneliness epidemic. There’s a wonderful discussion by Derek Thompson — he argues there is no loneliness epidemic, and in fact, if you look at the data, people were much lonelier a few years ago during COVID than they are now, and there’s not much evidence people are more lonely now than they were 20, 30, 40, 50 years ago. What we see instead is actually a solitude epidemic — so people are spending much more time alone than they ever have been. And it makes sense if you think about the way technology — our houses, are much better, our TVs are much better. Used to be your average person went to the movies multiple times a month; now we don’t go to the movies as much, we watch movies at home on our big screen TVs and abundance of streaming channels. We used to go out to eat a lot; now, you know, a lot of our dining is along and we order from Uber Eats. So as our interior life, the possibility for rich life indoors, inside, by ourselves, has gotten better, we have become more alone. And you could talk about whether solitude in itself is a problem. What I will say about loneliness is, regardless of whether or not it’s an epidemic, regardless of how bad it is relative to the past, it’s a terrible thing, and many people suffer from it. Estimates of how many people suffer — it’s hard to get a good estimate because it depends how you ask the question — but a reasonable estimate is one in five. One in five people are awfully lonely. Loneliness is most severe in adolescence, and it’s most severe in the very old, and these people really suffer.
We now live in a world with LLMs, large language models, generative AI, machines that seem to many of us to be intelligent — some say super intelligent — and more than that, seem compassionate, seem empathic. Last year, there was — I was part of a team of researchers that was led by my colleague Mickey Inzlicht. We wrote a paper called “In Praise of Empathic AI,” and in it we summarized a lot of the data suggesting that when you compare people interacting with people and interacting with AIs, at least for short-term interactions, the AIs win. So the typical experiment is: you’d have one person, one group of people would interact with other people, maybe over text or talking; another group would interact with ChatGPT, text or talking; and then later on they rate their experiences. And the main finding is that if you don’t know who’s a person, who’s AI — you’re not biased in any way — the people who interact with ChatGPT say they felt more listened to, they felt they were talking to somebody who was more empathic, more compassionate, to get more out of it.
So we published this, and we said, look, here’s a case for empathic AI, and man, people hated this article. I’ve written a few things people disliked, but boy, they — we got slammed. And I have some sympathy for the objections. We made the positive case for AI, but there’s a negative case too, and I think a proper understanding, a proper answer to the question, what role should these things play in our lives, should look at both sides of the issue. And I think, deal with some very, very difficult questions.
When I think of people interacting with AI companions, I worry. I’m very sensitive to negatives, and I’m most sensitive to negatives when I think about young people, about adolescents, maybe people in their 20s, and I see two problems, and they’re both deeply serious.
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