Three Seductive Ideas

Rating:
Summary: Interesting and important
Review: After a hundred years of trying to understand human behavior in scientific terms through very different fields, we are left with a confusing array of largely unconnected theories. Science is about finding unifying principles among diverse but compatible ideas, but our temptation is to settle too quickly for the next simple theory that comes along and sounds plausible and compelling.

Kagan starts with the perspective that physical sciences have been around for three hundred years, but psychological science as such for only a century, placing psychological science at the historical place where physical sciences were in the 17th century. While the analogy is questionable, the point that psychological science is, for all its vitality and productivity, truly in its infancy, is made powerfully between the lines throughout this book.

Kagan informs this situation elegantly by not only pointing out our need for telling simplifying stories but also showing how some of the grandest simplifying stories, which theorists often take for granted: (1) the notion of essential individual traits, (2) the early influences on the formation of the mind, and (3) the asssumed root of motivation in pleasure seeking, underlie roadblocks in our understanding of ourselves.

The book points out that we apply ideas like intelligence, fear, and consciousness to a wide variety of different agents, situations, and classes of evidence, prematurely assuming that we have found essential qualities in these things. That many of these abstractions are not so broadly applicable in the same way is demonstrated by a select set of experimental and clinical observations that make the point clearly.

While "Three Seductive Ideas" is oddly disappointing for not providing its own grand simplifying theory for human behavior, it does make specific suggestions for addressing the current assumptions he believes are mistaken.

In response to our passion for abstraction and premature creation of psychological essences built on a house of sand, Kagan emphasizes more rigorously specifying the agent, context, and class of evidence when we talk about these qualities. The experience of fleeing from a predator is not the same thing as the experience of worrying about a mortgage payment, even though the same drug might mitigate some of the "fear" in both cases. The situation and the history are in fact important in understanding what is going on.

In response to our tendency to emphasize the role of very early experience, Kagan emphasizes how we are more influenced by what is discrepant than what we expect. This limits the degree to which the adult mind can be meaningfully influenced by very early experience.

In response to the widespread assumption that we are motivated to seek pleasure, a quality believed held in common with animals, Kagan illustrates how human beings are also motivated by a broad range of socially relevant and more uniquely human feelings, such as guilt, shame, and pride. We not only anticipate pleasure, but even more, we are motivated to avoid risk and thus act in ways that are socially rewarding and bring feelings of virtue. In a meaningful way, human beings are not just hedonistic but also moral animals.

No easy answers here, but a shift in emphasis that may inspire better psychological science and open up currently blocked paths to understanding human beings more deeply.

Rating:
Summary: Much needed perspective on behavioral and social sciences
Review: After a hundred years of trying to understand human behavior in scientific terms through very different fields, we are left with a confusing array of largely unconnected theories. Science is about finding unifying principles among diverse but compatible ideas, but our temptation is to settle too quickly for the next simple theory that comes along and sounds plausible and compelling.

Kagan starts with the perspective that physical sciences have been around for three hundred years, but psychological science as such for only a century, placing psychological science at the historical place where physical sciences were in the 17th century. While the analogy is questionable, the point that psychological science is, for all its vitality and productivity, truly in its infancy, is made powerfully between the lines throughout this book.

Kagan informs this situation elegantly by not only pointing out our need for telling simplifying stories but also showing how some of the grandest simplifying stories, which theorists often take for granted: (1) the notion of essential individual traits, (2) the early influences on the formation of the mind, and (3) the asssumed root of motivation in pleasure seeking, underlie roadblocks in our understanding of ourselves.

The book points out that we apply ideas like intelligence, fear, and consciousness to a wide variety of different agents, situations, and classes of evidence, prematurely assuming that we have found essential qualities in these things. That many of these abstractions are not so broadly applicable in the same way is demonstrated by a select set of experimental and clinical observations that make the point clearly.

While "Three Seductive Ideas" is oddly disappointing for not providing its own grand simplifying theory for human behavior, it does make specific suggestions for addressing the current assumptions he believes are mistaken.

In response to our passion for abstraction and premature creation of psychological essences built on a house of sand, Kagan emphasizes more rigorously specifying the agent, context, and class of evidence when we talk about these qualities. The experience of fleeing from a predator is not the same thing as the experience of worrying about a mortgage payment, even though the same drug might mitigate some of the "fear" in both cases. The situation and the history are in fact important in understanding what is going on.

In response to our tendency to emphasize the role of very early experience, Kagan emphasizes how we are more influenced by what is discrepant than what we expect. This limits the degree to which the adult mind can be meaningfully influenced by very early experience.

In response to the widespread assumption that we are motivated to seek pleasure, a quality believed held in common with animals, Kagan illustrates how human beings are also motivated by a broad range of socially relevant and more uniquely human feelings, such as guilt, shame, and pride. We not only anticipate pleasure, but even more, we are motivated to avoid risk and thus act in ways that are socially rewarding and bring feelings of virtue. In a meaningful way, human beings are not just hedonistic but also moral animals.

No easy answers here, but a shift in emphasis that may inspire better psychological science and open up currently blocked paths to understanding human beings more deeply.

Rating:
Summary: An extraordinarily stimulating book.
Review: I have worked as an educator for 38 years. At present I run an alternative high school that exists to support teenagers who believe they can spend their time more productively by doing something other than going to high school. One of many destructive things they have encountered in school is an extremely narrow view of what constitutes intelligence, and many of them internalize the view that they're not very smart because they do not excel at doing school things.

One student who had done very poorly in high school and had not graduated went on to an aeronautics school where he earned nothing but the highest marks. He expresses much of his intelligence through his hands (in this regard, Frank Wilson's "The Hand" is most instructive). Another student, a talented musician, skipped most of high school, went to a community college, and is now studying in a music school in New York. She left high school because she found it boring, frustrating, and uninspiring, and felt that it held her back; it was not a place where she could nurture her musical intelligence.

I have in my basic literature a section on intelligence. When I was a few pages into the chapter section on intelligence in "Three Seductive Ideas," I knew I had to rewrite that section and make it even broader.

This is one of the very few books that prompted me immediately to consolidate several ideas, change some others, and act on these new perceptions at once. It is one of the most stimulating books I've ever read. This passage was one of the critical ones for me: "The number of human cognitive talents, probably as numerous as the number of diseases to which we are vulnerable, include perception in varied modalities, distinct memory processes, imagination, inference, deduction, evaluation, and acquisition of new knowledge. All of this extraordinary diversity is ignored when one declares a commitment to [general intelligence]." (The comparison to diseases may seem odd, but Kagan draws parallels between cognitive functioning and health.)

Rating:
Summary: A bit too scattered
Review: In Three Seductive Ideas, Jerome Kagan attacks the conventional wisdom of modern psychology. Asserting that psychology is only 100 years old, he goes on to compare many leading ideas in the field to the ideas in physics just 100 years after Gallileo. For Kagan, modern psychology is far too primitive.

Kagain in particular attacks three central notions: 1) that the human mind or personality has certain permanent features, essential characteristics like intelligence that do no vary over time or across situations, 2) that the human mind is permanently altered by experiences within the first three years of life, as though each hug or toy produced irrevocable synaptic changes, and 3) that the human mind is primarily driven in the seeking of pleasure, independent of social acceptance or moral righteousness.

Kagan's central point, that psychology is young and ought to be received only skeptically in making prescriptions for our day to day lives is well taken. However, the book has three major weaknesses that prevent my recommending it to others.

1) At each point in the book, Kagan replaces the "seductive" ideas with his own assertions. He says, for example, that intelligence is more properly divided among numerous tasks and talents than one general measure such as IQ. Although he takes time to attack the notion of IQ, his substitution is given short shrift. He does this throughout the book, attacking one idea only to replace it with another, equally young or new idea. Presumably in the next 100 years, Kagan hopes to see his ideas accepted and tested. However, we should remain as skeptical of Kagan as he urges us to be of the ideas he attacks.

2) I found Kagan's evidence lacking. In particular, he cites the now discredited peppered moth studies in his allusions to evolutionary theory. If he still believes in those studies, how can I be sure that the evidence he cites in other parts of the book outside my experience are accurate? Even if he is up to date and this is the only error in the book, it is fairly prominent and should have been caught by reviewers before publication.

3) Overall, Kagan has I think bitten off more than he can chew. Each of his three seductive ideas deserves a book of its own, tracing the history and philosophy of the idea as well as the state of the present evidence. It is a fine thing to attack essentialism, or infant determinism, or the pleasure principle. It is a sign of scattered thinking and shallow analysis to attack all three in the same book.

Each of these themes has other books with better explanations. If you are interested in essentialism or intelligence, read The Bell Curve and the Mismeasure of Man. If you are interested in infant determinism, read The Nurture Assumption and The Myth of the First Three Years. For an overview against the pleasure principle, read The Moral Intelligence of Children, or The Biology and Psychology of Moral Agency.

Three Seductive Ideas is a fair synopsis of some major issues in contemporary psychology. Those looking for a more detailed explanation or theory should avoid it and seek more specialized books.

Rating:
Summary: 5 star ideas, 3 star presentation
Review: Those of us who have written critiques of the poor scientific base underlying claims about the human mind often find ourselves dismissed, in one way or another--the most patronizing being that we are clinicians who do not understand science or really know the state of the art. Jerome Kagan of Harvard has spent his life as one of the foremost scientists in psychology. Unlike most academic psychologists, he has actually made discoveries that stand up well to critical inquiry. Thus, this searing critique of the poor quality of thought that passes for science in our beliefs about the mind cannot be dismissed so easily. Kagan is not only right: He has the credentials to force anyone with an iota of intellectual conscience to question claims of "experts" about the mind. More important, his arguments show that in this fledgling field, the science of the mind, the chaff far outweighs the wheat--even among the most cherished beliefs and most prestigious research. Clearly written, this book is for anyone who wants to know the truth about the state of the art in our efforts to understand the mind.

Rating:
Summary: Interesting and important
Review: Three seductive ideas is a must read for psychology majors or anyone interested in the field. The book gives an important look at several flaws in psychology and well needed changes in the field. It does not cover all angles but it is a good start. Kagan poses the problems but rarely presses any reasonable solutions.
No one (hopefully) will agree with all of Kagan's arguments but the general acknowledgements are important and interesting.