His research explores how children and adults understand the physical and social world, with special focus on language, morality, religion, fiction, and art.

[2] As an undergraduate he attended McGill University, where he earned a Bachelor of Arts in psychology (with honors first class) in 1985.

He attended graduate school at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he earned a PhD in cognitive psychology in 1990, under the supervision of Susan Carey.

In 2017, he received the $1 million 2017 Klaus J. Jacobs Research Prize for his investigations into how children develop a sense of morality.

Taking his cues from Darwin, Bloom posits that our spiritual tendencies emerged somewhere in the evolutionary process, most likely as "accidental by-products" of other traits.