Three Seductive Ideas

By Jerome Kagan. 2000

139 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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.

Subfields: Education, Philosophy

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d14022721be9ef855ddf058c060f7305ef626e41

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Citations in the corpus

Social Withdrawal and Shyness (2011, background): “Indeed, some have argued that the behavior displayed by “C” babies in the Strange Situation is little more than the expression of inhibited temperament (Kagan, 1998).”
A Rose by Any Name? The Values Construct (2000, background): “, see Tomkins, 1962), and some believe that humans essentially strive to be moral or ethical (e.g., Aronson, 1992; Kagan, 1999).”
Self-Image and Perceived Self-Efficacy During Adolescence (2003, background): “To conclude, the rapid and profound socio cultural changes that have taken place in recent times seem to be reflected particularly vividly in adolescence and, to paraphrase Kagan (1998), the seductive ideas about development prove in this case to be completely insufficient.”
Comorbidity: A network perspective (2010, background): “Explanations that reference abstract tendencies of the sort identified in latent variable analyses are seductive (Kagan 1998) – so much so that, once, even Cramer et al. are enticed.”