Three Seductive Ideas

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 book, the product of a lifetime of research by one of the founders of developmental psychology, takes on the powerful assumptions behind these questions—and proves them mistaken. Ranging with impressive ease from cultural history to philosophy to psychological research literature, Jerome Kagan weaves an argument that will rock the social sciences and the foundations of public policy.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, of course, fails to account for the happy products of miserable childhoods and vice versa). The last of Kagan’s targets is the vastly overrated pleasure principle, which, he argues, can hardly make sense of unselfish behavior impelled by the desire for virtue and self-respect—the wish to do the right thing.Written in a lively style that uses fables and fairy tales, history and science to make philosophical points, this book challenges some of our most cherished notions about human nature.

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., Jerome Kagan shows how, by acceding to the seduction of big ideas, we are actually reducing what we know and, worse, causing real damage… While the book on one level is an elegant exercise in skepticism, what it leaves in its wake is just the opposite of an intellectual quandary or ruins. I guess it’s because he leaves us feeling not how little we can now fully understand, but rather how much is already known to us and ready for our informed interpretation. Rarely have I experienced a call for intellectual humility as such an upper., Three Seductive Ideas isn’t merely a book about how all people think; it’s about how psychologists think about what they do. Kagan argues that the consequences of their ill-considered and misplaced enthusiasms—in favour of infant determinism, the pleasure principle and the stability of emotions and intelligence (the three seductive ideas)—trivialize their discipline and retard the progress of knowledge. His erudite text, quietly assured whenever possible and quietly skeptical when necessary, lacks both vanity and false modesty. Kagan is always polite, even when deflating hyperbole, redirecting ill-considered ascription or fleshing out abstraction… Kagan has provided nothing less than a thorough critique of psychological discourse and method. His colleagues will ignore it at their peril; lay readers will gain from it both wisdom and delight., This is an intriguing book, thoroughly worked out., [This is a] wonderful book…a serious indictment of psychology as a legitimate and useful science, implying as it does that it might be more akin to folklore than physics. But it is part of Mr. Kagan’s artfulness in this book to show us both that psychology as folklore has its own (psychological) logic and that psychology as a science could be dramatically improved… This remarkable book attempts, and largely succeeds, in revisions of psychology as generally conceived… And it does this not by proclaiming an amazing new theory for our conspicuous consumption; but by examining, simply, and with patience and wit (and occasionally startling ‘facts’), the familiar theories we all take for granted… This book has been written with all the passion and eloquence of a moral motive. And that motive is to prevent us being duped by psychology into an unruly pessimism or a callous optimism. I can’t imagine anyone being unchanged by reading this book.

Jerome Kagan was Daniel and Amy Starch Research Professor of Psychology Emeritus at Harvard University.