Three Seductive Ideas

Kagan, Jerome

ISBN 10: 0674890337 / ISBN 13: 9780674890336

Published by Harvard University Press, 1998

Item in good condition. Textbooks may not include supplemental items i.e. CDs, access codes etc. Seller Inventory # 00090567893

Synopsis:

Do the first two years of life really determine a child's future development? Are human beings, like other primates, only motivated by pleasure? And do people actually have stable traits, like intelligence, fear, anxiety, and temperament? This text takes on the assumptions behind these questions, in an attempt to prove them mistaken. Scientists, as well as lay people, tend to think of abstract processes - like intelligence or fear - as measurable entities, of which someone might have more or less. This approach, in Kagan's analysis, shows a blindness to the power of context and to the great variability within any individual, subject to different emotions and circumstances. "Infant determinism" is another widespread and dearly held conviction that Kagan contests. This theory - with its claim that early relationships determine lifelong patterns - underestimates human resiliency and adaptiveness, both emotional and cognitive (and fails to account for the happy products of miserable childhoods, and vice versa). The last of Kagan's targets is the pleasure principle, which, he argues, can hardly make sense of unselfish behaviour impelled by the desire for virtue and self-respect - the wish to do the right thing.

Review: 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.--Richard A. Shweder "Science "

Bibliographic Details

Title: Three Seductive Ideas
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Publication Date: 1998
Binding: Hardcover
Condition: Good