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| karaysaabari |
Posted
on 25-Apr-02 01:21 PM
A review by Richard A. shweder
The expression "seductive ideas" is Jerome Kagan's euphemism for popular fallacies in the behavioral sciences, and he overturns far more than three of them in this brilliant and provocative book. Kagan, a professor of psychology at Harvard University, is a near-legendary figure in the field of child development. It is accurate, but superficial, to describe Three Seductive Ideas as a critique of some baneful errors committed by social scientists, which are unmasked by one of psychology's most erudite and rigorous experimentalists: Accurate because Kagan's treatise is a contravention written by a master of the trade. Superficial because the book deserves to be read more deeply. Kagan offers a candid defense of the moral and spiritual nature of human beings, written in opposition to several powerful intellectual currents, including evolutionary psychology, computational neuroscience, and cognitive ethology.
Groucho Marx once quipped "Whatever it is I'm against it!" Kagan, however, is a more discriminating skeptic, and he has very good taste. Three big ideas top his hit list of fashionable yet dubious assumptions.
The first idea is "infant determinism," the notion that the attitudes, aptitudes, and sentiments of adults are decisively shaped by their experiences in the first two years of life. "Somewhere in America today," Kagan writes, "a mother-to-be is playing a cassette recording of a Beethoven sonata near her abdomen in the hope that her unborn child will become sensitized to good music." Kagan disputes some highly publicized claims by neuroscientists that parents can stimulate creativity, smartness, and brain development in their infants by looking at them and bathing them in talk. Don't be seduced, he says. "No scientist has demonstrated that particular experiences in the first two years produces a particular adult outcome in even, say, one-fifth of those exposed to that experience." In discussing current concerns with an infant's attachment to its parent, he comments: "I suspect that most of the men who committed those terrible atrocities [in Bosnia, in Rwanda, in Nanking] had loving parents during their childhood years."
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| karaysaabari |
Posted
on 25-Apr-02 01:22 PM
The second doubtful assumption is "hedonism," the notion that human beings are primarily motivated by a desire to maximize pleasure and minimize pain. "Today," Kagan writes, "evolutionary arguments are used to cleanse greed, promiscuity, and the abuse of stepchildren of moral taint." We should not be seduced by the ideas that nature is "red in fang and claw" and that human beings bear the indelible stamp of their animal origins, he cautions. Instead, he identifies the most powerful motive for human beings as the desire to gain and maintain a feeling of virtue, the desire to be "good"--a desire unique among sentient animals. With regard to their moral sense, Kagan suggests, human beings are demonstrably a special creation.
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| karaysaabari |
Posted
on 25-Apr-02 01:22 PM
The third idea on Kagan's hit list is "abstractionism," the notion that the real causes of behavior are deep, law-like, and small in number, and remain the same across species, cultures, epochs, everyday contexts, and experimental task environments. Kagan speaks out against psychological abstractions (including the famous "g" factor of "IQ" and various other supposed global traits such as "neuroticism" or "emotionality"). Again, we should not be seduced. "Psychological traits are not stable structures hidden deep in the person's core." Different methods (for example, a self-report and various physiological measures) for assessing the "same thing" ("anxiety," for example) do not correlate. Given that research findings are local and method-dependent, he cautions us not to draw overly ambitious generalizations about all human beings. Speaking as a developmentalist, he suggests that even our norms for mental health should not be overgeneralized. "The belief that humans can and should be free of anxiety," he argues, "is one of the distinguishing illusions in Western thought in this century."
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