In summarizing his life and work, Jerome Kagan goes against the grain and points to six entirely unrelated events as the sources of his success. In doing so, he overlooks the very important fact that the coincidences (Kagan 2007) he cites were subjected to his exceptionally inquisitive mind, remarkable persistence and passion for learning and discovery. An ordinary person would likely have failed to follow their path to the place where I encountered Kagan in the course of our conversation—a position that is among the most renowned living psychologist. This, at least, is what we can glean from the ranking of the 100 most influential psychologists of the twentieth century, published in 2002 in Review of General Psychology (Haggbloom et al. 2002). Jerome Kagan is to be found there in 22nd place, even above Carl Jung (23rd), the founder of analytical psychology, and Ivan Pavlov (24th), who discovered the reflex bearing his name.
He is probably best known for his experiments on temperament, which he describes during our conversation. In fact, in 2004 The Boston Globe even gave him the nickname “The Temperamentalist” for being the scientist who restored legitimacy to the ancient notion of temperament (Shea 2004). However, he made his discoveries in a time of near-universal belief that the individual’s environment is the primary determinant of their psyche. This understanding of development manifested itself with particular clarity in John Bowlby’s attachment theory which claimed that the bond between mother and infant, as measured in the first year, plays a key role in later emotional and even intellectual growth. Kagan was among the harshest critics of attachment theory. In spite of the quite strong empirical evidence against attachment theory, it retains the loyalty of a small group of contemporary psychologists, which, in Kagan’s view, results from the fact that many scientific conceptions are grounded not in the results of experiments, but rather in the life experiences of their creators and their culture.
Attachment theorists are not the only ones whose claims have run up against Kagan’s fierce objection. Supporters of evolutionary psychology (who see Darwinian selection at work in many human psychological traits) have also come in for criticism at his hands. Particularly intense fire was trained on Judith Rich Harris, author of “The Nurture Assumption” (1998), who argues that parents play little role in shaping their children’s basic personality traits. After her book was published in 1998, he said during an interview with Newsweek “I am embarrassed for psychology,” and in the Boston Globe, he commented on Harris’ book by simply saying “It had nothing to do with science. If the media had not hyped it - partly because it was so crazy - nobody would know about her.”
For some scientists, his rejection of attachment theory is in conflict with his own criticism of Harris. Indeed, in this criticism Kagan emphasizes the importance of environment. In reality, his approach emanates from his conviction of the interactive nature of those two powerful forces—genetics and environment.
Jerome Kagan is an uncompromising scientist who does not hesitate to oppose the majority when he feels they are attempting to impose their views. On several occasions, he has sparked outrage among public opinion and the media. One such statement came in 2012 during an interview for Der Spiegel, when he responded to the interviewer’s question of whether ADHD is just an invention. “That’s correct; it is an invention. Every child who’s not doing well in school is sent to see a pediatrician, and the pediatrician says: ‘It’s ADHD; here’s Ritalin’ (Kagan 2012b). In fact, 90% of these 5.4 million kids don’t have an abnormal dopamine metabolism. The problem is, if a drug is available to doctors, they’ll make the corresponding diagnosis.” He found himself tossed almost immediately into the eye of a storm that had erupted around him, and his words were repeated on countless occasions. This comes as no surprise, as they referred to over 5 million American children who had been given such a diagnosis; to their parents as well, for whom the diagnosis entailed certain consequences; to teachers; to the doctors who had made the diagnosis, and generally followed up by prescribing medication to their patients, most frequently Ritalin. And if we add to this both the pharmaceutical companies producing the medicine and the pharmacies selling it, we have a group as numerous as the population of the state of New York. Yet we also know that ADHD is eagerly diagnosed outside the USA as well.
Jerome Kagan can be described using his own sobriquet: “Strong, silent, Clint Eastwood type,” which would explain why he handles intellectual jousting quite well, and does not allow himself to be affected by the labels slapped on him: iconoclast, extremist, dogmatist, etc. In my view, however, they are detrimental to many of the fundamental postulates he advances, and are a defense mechanism guarding against uncomfortable statements. For years, Kagan has criticized psychologists’ passion for abstraction, attacking researchers for conducting experiments that ignore the context, and for failing to take into account the expectations of study participants placed in experimental situations. He has warned against relying only on a person’s verbal reports of their traits or past experiences as the basis for bold conclusions about behavior or mood; he also points out a plethora of other weaknesses of our field. The weight of his criticism cannot be overstated, but nevertheless, when someone assigns to the author of such warnings the labels of extremist or dogmatist, it becomes much easier for us to deprecate them.
Professor Kagan, during one of your lectures you described a dream in which you meet people working on the renovation of an eighteenth-century house, and you offer to help them out. In response, one of them asks you to work on the restoration of a beautiful but run-down chest. When the chest is ready, you bring it to the renovated house, but the house isn’t there. During the time you were working on the chest, the house had fallen apart. This is essentially a very bitter metaphor of your professional career. Are things in psychology really so bad that what we have today is worth far less than what you encountered when beginning your career as a scholar/researcher?
The state of psychological research in the domains that study humans has not advanced as rapidly as many hoped. There are several reasons for this sad fact. One is that government support of basic research on behavior, cognition or emotion that does not involve genes or brain measures has become hard to obtain. It is difficult, though not impossible, to make an important discovery if the investigator has limited funds. Second, private foundations have become reluctant to fund basic research and prefer to support work that is likely to have a benevolent effect on humans or society. Third, the number of non-tenured faculty in psychology departments has increased by a large amount. This means that many junior faculty are competing for a small number of professorial appointments. Because deans and chairpersons use number of publications in prestige journals as the primary bases for promotion, rather than quality of the work or teaching talent, junior faculty strive to have many published papers over a short interval. This pressure to publish is not conducive to brilliant insights.
Among well-known psychologists, you are probably the harshest critic of our field. In your books, you highlight both misconceptions that have taken root over generations, as well as methodological problems in psychology. You also offer proposals for resolving them. Your unquestioned position in the profession makes it difficult for others to overlook your admonishments. Do you think that your efforts have led to changes of at least some beliefs and bad practices among psychologists?
There have been some positive changes in the practices of psychologists who study humans but I cannot be sure they are due to my critiques. These include publishing scatter plots, interest in human temperaments, and an acknowledgment by investigators who use questionnaires that their conclusions are limited to this source of evidence.
Not much. In your view, which of the misconceptions and bad practices are the most deeply rooted, the most difficult to change, and why?
The kinds of practices and habits that should be changed involve questioning the practice of: (1) the increased use of questionnaires as proxies for behavior, (2) an indifference to the context of observation and the source of evidence for an inference, (3) a preference to affirm a priori hypotheses by searching for a relation between single predictors and single outcomes, rather than beginning with a puzzling phenomenon and probing its features and consequences with an open mind, (4), assuming that a popular word, such as anxiety, loneliness, fear or learning, names a single natural kind that can be observed with a brain measure or behavior, (5) the reluctance to abandon DSM categories as outcomes or predictors, even though every category is heterogeneous in its etiology, (6) using covariance to control for the contribution of social class or gender despite the warnings by eminent statisticians (e.g., Helene Kraemer of Stanford) that this practice often produces invalid inferences.
That’s quite a lot. Have the practices you list contributed to what is referred to with increasing frequency as the crisis in psychology? What I have in mind is primarily the problems with replicability of investigations, academic fraud, low statistical power of psychological research, decline effects, etc.
Yes.
What should be done to change this?
I do not know what can be done to alter these habits. I suspect it will require more investigators demonstrating the validity of the above critiques.
Do you think that the initiatives proposed and undertaken by open science movement can help to solve some of these problems?
I don’t know.
How does the professional community react to your disruptive activities?
As of 2018, American psychologists have responded to my books with silence. I have received neither hostile nor praiseworthy messages.
Have reactions by psychologists from other parts of the world been more enthusiastic?
European psychologists have been more receptive than Americans.
Considering that your books address issues of major import for our discipline, the reaction of American psychologists is quite frightening. What explains that reaction?
Americans are pragmatic. As long as papers are accepted for publication, why change.
From all your years of unflinching criticism of some misconceptions and practices rooted in psychology, are there moments that you recall with particular fondness or that you cringe when you think about them?
I have a special fondness for 4 findings that, at the time, were inconsistent with popular ideas. One fact was the discovery of the sudden increase in duration of fixation time at 7–8 months to stimuli that had been recruiting shorter attention spans from 3 to 7 months. I interpreted this as due to maturation of brain connectivity between temporal sites and the frontal lobes which enhanced the infant’s working memory and the ability to relate the present event to a schema for a recent past event. This explanation of object permanence is inconsistent with Jean Piaget’s interpretation.
A sweeter moment accompanied the data showing that the infant’s cry to separation from the parent appeared and peaked at the same age in children from the USA, Israeli kibbutzim, a Mayan Indian village in Guatemala, the town of Antigua in Guatemala, and Kung San families in Botswana, even though the infants in these 5 settings experienced very different maternal practices in the first year. This evidence contradicted the popular idea that separation fear was a sensitive index of the infant’s attachment to the mother. The data are on page 49 of The Human Spark (Kagan 2013).
A third moment occurred when my students and I discovered the emergence of four basic competences in the interval between 12 and 24 months. The four are the ability to infer the thoughts of another, a symbolic language, a moral sense and self-awareness. The close correspondence in time of appearance of all four is due partly to brain maturation in the second year (Kagan 1981).
A fourth pleasing discovery occurred in 1972 while I was observing infants and families in the village of San Marcos on Lake Atitlan in Northwest Guatemala. Although the one-year-olds were severely retarded and apathetic, because they received little stimulation as they lay in hammocks in the back of the adobe home, the behaviors and select cognitive skills of the five-year-olds, who were allowed to leave the home, resembled the traits of children of the same age in other societies. That observation in 1972 was inconsistent with the premise that an infant who did not receive adequate stimulation in the first year was at serious risk for later problems (Kagan and Klein 1973). This paper did attract some criticism, but later work by others affirmed our original inference.
Looking at what you do from the contrary positions, is there any particular type of criticism aimed at you that you feel is particularly serious and justified?
I have often made speculations with insufficient evidence. I also have been a bit biased in my reviews by emphasizing the papers that support my view and not giving equal time to the papers that do not.
Has this ever led to any problems? Have you ever had to distance yourself from theories or hypotheses you had formulated in a rush to judgment?
Yes. The concepts I used in “Birth to Maturity” (Kagan and Moss 1962) were too indifferent to age and gender.
As you wrote in your autobiography (Kagan 2007), this book brought some degree of celebrity to you and to Howard Moss because you had discovered what the community wanted to believe. Is the rule still in psychology that these achievements are rewarded, which confirm what most of us believe in?
Yes, that is true in all the sciences.
Do you still consider the discoveries written about by Judith Harris in The Nurture Assumption to be part of this group?
Yes.
Let’s spend a moment discussing the problems of applied psychology, which you are also familiar with. The World Health Organization estimates that roughly 350 million people around the world suffer from depression, which is almost 5% of the population. On a global scale, over one-third of people at some time in their life meet all diagnostic criteria for at least one psychological disorder. These data suggest us that we are experiencing a pandemic of mental illness on a scale unknown in human history. The numbers illustrating the scale of mental disorders and illnesses are continually growing. What do you think about all this?
The high prevalence of a diagnosis of depression as a mental illness is due to the incorrect assumption that a bout of depression is abnormal and reflects a compromise in human brain functions. I suspect that depression was far more common during the Dark Ages when infections, premature deaths of infants and parents, bandits, fear of God’s wrath, and hunger were common. Psychiatrists are not paying enough attention to the reason for a bout of depression. The medicalizing of anxiety and depression has led to the belief that we have an epidemic of depression or anxiety, when, in fact, there is an increase in only select causes of these states. For example, I suspect that social anxiety is more prevalent now than 1000 years earlier because so many live in large cities rather than villages. Moreover, unsureness over one’s moral imperatives, which can precipitate a depression, is more common in young adults in 2018 than 1018. And as the number of adults older than 60 years increases, depression due to a chronic illness increases. The main point is a need to parse the term main depressive disorder (MDD) into the many different cascades that can trigger a depression and to stop treating the concept as a unity.
Just after you received your B.S. degree, the first edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) was published. It described a mere 106 illnesses and disorders. The most recent 5th edition from 2013 contains almost four hundred. In just 60 years, the number of mental disorders has multiplied nearly fourfold. If we are treating these numbers and their growth seriously, we are forced to conclude that humanity is facing total decimation and the world is going mad. Another conclusion that can be drawn from analysis of these numbers is that over a period of 60 years, psychopathology has made unprecedented progress by identifying the majority of psychological illnesses and disorders that have plagued civilization, and which had gone for so long unidentified. Or perhaps there is yet another explanation for this phenomenon?
The increase in DSM categories is due partly to the discovery of different patterns of symptoms for each DSM category. Second, psychiatrists have decided that behaviors or moods that were not a sign of illness 200 years ago are signs today. For example, in nineteenth-century America, men were supposed to be hyper-masculine and behave in ways that would be called borderline personality disorder today. The guilt over premarital sex in Colonial America was normal in the seventeenth century, not today. Children who were hyperactive and had a short attention span in medieval Europe would not have been diagnosed with an illness because these traits did not compromise adaptation in their rural setting. The point is that historical changes in circumstances alter the likelihood that a trait will or will not be called a sign of mental illness. The exceptions are severe intellectual retardation, incoherent thought and severe compromises in the ability to interact with others.
Does this mean that you consider psychological disorders and illnesses as products of culture?
No. Most DSM categories are heterogeneous combinations of biological vulnerabilities, experiential vulnerabilities from childhood, trigger events and the immediate circumstances when a trigger event happens to a person with a vulnerability.
Would it thus be accurate to state that the conditions we presently live in are conducive to the occurrence of these trigger events, and thus cause the more frequent presence of psychological disorders?
Yes.
Your views on some disorders, particularly ADHD, have been at the heart of some considerably significant controversies. Has your perspective changed to any serious degree, or is it still your view that ADHD is an invention?
ADHD stands for a variety of disorders with different causal cascades. Each cascade is real, but using the term ADHD for all of them is an invented idea.
What other conditions do you feel are invented and over-diagnosed?
Most DSM categories contain many different causal cascades.
An article published just this year (Meichenbaum, Lilienfeld 2018) informs us that the number of psychotherapeutic modalities has already exceeded 600. Is their intensive development a solution to the problems we are discussing?
The number of psychotherapeutic regimens has increased because there is no theory of remission or cure. A patient usually gets better if the healer and patient share the same ideas about cause and cure, as Jerome Frank wrote many years ago in “Persuasion and Healing” (Frank 1961). No therapy is better than any other for all patients with a particular symptom. This judgment does not apply to the small proportion of cases of autism or bipolar disorder.
Does that mean that psychotherapy is merely a ritual, and the various modalities it offers for explaining the causes of disorders and manners of treating them have nothing to do with what science has discovered so far?
Psychotherapy is an interaction between a patient and a clinician. Therapy is successful when patient and clinician share the same ideas of cause and cure, and the patient believes clinician is wise and cares about patient. The actual ritual is not very important when these two conditions hold. That is why shamans can cure.
Your definition is also suitable for recovered memory therapy. I’ve encountered many patients who have undergone such therapy, and they unanimously shared the views of therapists on issues of cause and cure, and they believed the clinician is wise and cares about their patient. I would not, however, consider the results of these psychotherapy interventions a success, and in many cases, they were catastrophic. Do you think that your understanding of psychotherapy could help in sanctioning similar modalities?
The failure of the therapy could be due to the severity of the patient’s symptoms, the therapist’s personality or the patient’s evaluation of the therapist.
Can’t this just be due to some incorrect theoretical assumptions made by psychotherapy?
Partly, yes, too many therapists believe their theory is best.
Probably we could spend a lot more time analyzing the problems inherent to our discipline. But let’s set them aside for now, to take a closer look at psychology’s achievements. Your studies and publications have reached the top of the mountain in terms of citations and are a fundamental part of our field’s accomplishments. Which of your discoveries do you consider the most important in the development of science, and why?
The transition in the first year at 7–8 months, described earlier;
The emergence of inference, language, moral sense and self-awareness in the second year;
The fact that the retarded San Marcos one-year-olds recovered normal functions after being allowed to confront the world outside the home;
The data from the Fels longitudinal sample implying that the prediction of many adult personality traits improves after age 6 years, summarized in “Birth to Maturity”;
The discovery of the two temperamental categories called high and low reactive.
The discovery of the three kinds of conceptual styles called analytic, relational and conceptual.
Some of these discoveries have led you to question the myth of infant determinism, itself firmly anchored not only in imagination of the general public but also in science and therapy, as you presented in your book Three seductive ideas. Do you think your arguments have convinced therapists, including child therapists, to abandon practices based on such assumptions?
No, I do not think so.
What about scientists? I’m curious as to how you judge the impact of your discoveries on the perspectives of other scientists. Have they come to accept your findings?
Many now accept the claim that for most children, excepting the rare cases of extreme deprivation in Romanian orphanages, the events of the first 3 years are not deterministic when the later years are benevolent.
Are your convictions also shared by adherents of Bowlby’s attachment theory?
I do not think so.
Let’s get back to the achievements of our field. The power of science is found in the questions it asks and the answers it provides. What other great questions have psychology managed to answer so far?
Establishing that associations are formed when two events occur contiguously in time or space, or have links to related words or schemata;
The growth of working memory in development;
The special features of procedural, declarative and episodic memory;
The role of the prefrontal cortex in modulating actions and feelings;
The Gestalt laws of perception;
The bases of color vision;
The different outcomes that accompany variation in the social class of the family of rearing;
The idea of “biological preparedness” for an event;
The return of temperament as a contributor to personality;
The growth of language in the first 5 years in different societies;
The influence of culture on behavior, values and emotions.
Which great questions remain unanswered?
Why does class of rearing exert so much power?
How do identifications with family, class, ethnicity and/or religion form?
How does any psychological product emerge from a brain profile?
How do genes, brain patterns and life history blend to produce a specific outcome in a person of a particular age, gender, class, ethnic group and local setting?
Do you think searching for answers to these questions can be aided by the intensive growth of AI that we are witnesses to?
I am skeptical that AI will be able to simulate human thought because AI relies only on a digital code while humans rely on blends of schemata, semantic forms and prototypes. Second, all AI programs require someone to assign a weight to each of the features in the events to be presented. These weights are often based on intuition and ignore the setting in which the events occur. But the human brain-mind alters the weights depending on the context.
Our conversation will also probably be read by young people just getting their careers started, and who are wondering what specialization to explore. What areas of investigation in psychology do you think are particularly promising and would recommend?
In my opinion, the areas ripe for study are: relation between brain states and perception, the effects of the context on behavior and brain profiles, the relations between the experiences in the homes of advantaged and less advantaged infants and children in at least 3 different cultures and the child’s cognitive skills and behaviors.
Who would you point them to as an example to follow?
Some good role models are David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel, Charles Darwin, Neal Miller, Endel Tulving, Alexander Thomas and Stella Chess, John Garcia, Russell Poldrack, Gyorgy Buzsaki, Jennifer Doudna, Vera Rubin, Eleanor Gibson, Nora Newcombe and Barbara McClintock. These scientists were open to new ideas, patient, careful, attended to details and brought passion to their work.
What should they be careful of? Can you give them any other advice?
Be careful of favorite ideas you want to believe are true, examine raw data before you compute any statistic, avoid covariance if possible, do not begin a study based on a word, instead study a puzzling phenomenon and do not rely on one predictor and one outcome.
Someone with your achievements and experience can allow himself to engage in a bit of futurology. In your opinion, what will psychology look like in two or three decades? Do you think that it will remain a field unable to overcome the crisis and escape the limitations you wrote about in Psychology’s Ghosts, or will it manage to reach a higher plane?
I cannot predict what psychology will be like in 2048 because I do not know what new machines or procedures will be invented. The discovery of the structure of DNA because of X-ray crystallography changed genetics in a major way.
Do you think we will finally achieve a wide-ranging theory that incorporates the achievements of psychology into a uniform system of knowledge?
I do not believe this will happen in next 20–25 years because we need many more firm facts.
What are the greatest challenges facing psychology in the twenty-first century?
The greatest challenges facing psychology are: recruiting young investigators who have the traits of the those mentioned earlier; developing new methods; a willingness to study important phenomena that are difficult to measure, such as ethnic and class identity, a feeling of confidence that a major discovery is likely if one is patient, appreciates that asking the right question is more important than trying to have a publishable paper, and a willingness to reject a favored idea if the evidence demands it.