Under Bloom, Swarthmore assumed a position of broadly recognized leadership in American liberal arts education.
The concept of "ethical intelligence,” which has gained currency within and outside of higher education, was introduced by Bloom who first expressed it in his inaugural address as president of Swarthmore in 1991 and has since amplified its meaning in numerous writings and speeches.
He is the author of "The Linguistic Shaping of Thought: A Study of the Impact of Language on Thinking in China and the West" (Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1981) and Moral Behavior in Chinese Society (Praeger Publishers, 1981) as well as numerous articles including "The Privileging of Experience in Chinese Practical Reasoning," Journal of Chinese Philosophy; "Psychological Ingredients of High-Level Moral Thinking: A Critique of the Kohlberg-Gilligan Paradigm," Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour; and "Caution - The words you use may affect what you say," Cognition.
Bloom has argued for a weak version of the so-called linguistic relativity hypothesis, which postulates an influence of language on the way speakers conceptualize and arrange the reality; he has tried to show this through his most widely known experiment.
The text, which had been initially written in English and later on translated into Chinese in a literal way, reported a set of counterfactual events that were told by using the subjunctive, a verb mood that is nowhere found in the Sinitic languages.
Therefore, Bloom's conclusion was the impossibility to translate literally between languages: Chinese and English express different thoughts, even when they are telling the same story.