A Challenge to Some Well-Accepted Beliefs. - Review - book review

Three Seductive Ideas. By Jerome Kagan. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2000. ISBN 0-674-89033-7. 232 pp., Paperback, $14.95.

Ideas can seduce society. Ideas can seduce scientists. Ideas can even seduce skeptics. To this point, Jerome Kagan, a world-renowned developmental psychologist, writes, "... Sadly, the gut feeling that an idea is right is a poor guide to truth." Kagan, in this provocative and powerful work, challenges three well-respected and accepted beliefs. Not only does he challenge the gut feelings of social and behavioral scientists, but he bravely challenges the philosophical foundations upon which these sciences are built.

Just what are these three seductive ideas of which Kagan is skeptical? They are: (1) the universal appeal of psychological processes; (2) "infant determinism," and (3) the "pleasure principle" as the origin of moral behavior. He says Three Seductive Ideas was written with skepticism. His conclusions are: (1) that many psychological processes do not generalize broadly; (2) that most adaptive adult characteristics are not determined by experiences of the first two years; and (3) that the majority of our daily decisions are issued in the service of gaining or maintaining a feeling of virtue and nor in gaining or maintaining pleasure.

I'll rake up each of Kagan's challenges in order individually.

(1) "Many psychological processes do not generalize broadly."

Kagan strongly believes, and offers ample documentation, that abstract processes such as intelligence, learning, communication, memory, depression, cooperation, avoidance, and fear are not measurable entities as usually considered by today's social scientists. Kagan writes "... if psychology (like philosophy) is to be informative, it has to descend from a global to a more local level."

An example, according to Kagan, of an abstract psychological process that has been generalized too broadly is "fear." He believes that in everyday conversation certain words are used to stuff dissimilar phenomena into the same drawer for the sake of efficiency." For example, "fear" to a clinical psychologist or psychiatrist is a patient describing a phobia of restaurants while to a neuroscientist it is a rat freezing when a tone associated with shock is presented. Kagan believes that a problem with the scientific literature is that scholars use words and sentences in a global nature for the sake of efficiency. When "fear" is used to describe and measure many things that are dissimilar, it doesn't adequately describe or measure a thing. Therefore, "fear" should specify the class of agent (rats or humans), the context (a laboratory or a restaurant), and the source of the evidence (freezing to a tone or ordering from the menu). Thus, "fear" does not generalize broadly.

Another example of a psychological process that has universal appeal is "intelligence." Kagan argues that "g" (general intelligence) has never been proven. He writes, "The defenders of g ... fail to appreciate that organs and physiological systems develop independently. No single general factor can represent the growth rates of the diverse classes of cells, tissues, and organs in animals or humans. The description "intelligent" is frequently found in sentences that are indifferent to the age and background of the person (or sometimes the animal species) or the evidential basis for the assignment." Thus, again, a psychological process does not generalize broadly. Although Kagan never uses the two German terms, he argues that social and behavioral scientists deny the zeitgeist ("spirit of the time") and ortgeist ("spirit of the place") when defining the psychological processes they study.

(2) "Most adaptive adult characteristics are not determined by experiences of the first two years.

Kagan strongly argues against "infant determinism," the idea that the first two years of a human's life is a very critical period in development. Kagan writes, "To the disappointment of many, it has proven difficult to find critical periods in human development that are as robust as the discoveries

with ducklings and kittens."

He adds:

... the evidence does not support infant determinism.... The thousands of infants who will be born today across the world will experience very different environments in their first two years. Some will be raised by surrogate caretakers in kibbutzim; some will be cared for by grandmothers or older sisters; some will attend day care centers; some will remain at home with their mothers. Some will have many toys; some will have none. Some will spend the first year in a dark, quiet hut wrapped in old rags; some will crawl in brightly lit rooms full of toys, picture books, and television images. But despite this extraordinary variation in early experience, excluding the small proportion with serious brain damage or a genetic defect, most will speak before they are two years old, become self-conscious by the third birthday, and be able to assume some family responsibilities by age seven. The psychological differences among these children are trivial when compared with the long list of similarities.