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Five Constraints on Predicting Behavior
A distinguished psychologist considers five conditions that constrain inferences about the relation between brain activity and psychological processes.
Scientists were unable to study the relation of brain to mind until the invention of technologies that measured the brain activity accompanying psychological processes. Yet even with these new tools, conclusions are tentative or simply wrong. In this book, the distinguished psychologist Jerome Kagan describes five conditions that place serious constraints on the ability to predict mental or behavioral outcomes based on brain data: the setting in which evidence is gathered, the expectations of the subject, the source of the evidence that supports the conclusion, the absence of studies that examine patterns of causes with patterns of measures, and the habit of borrowing terms from psychology.
Kagan describes the important of context, and how the experimental setting--including the room, the procedure, and the species, age, and sex of both subject and examiner--can influence the conclusions. He explains how subject expectations affect all brain measures; considers why brain and psychological data often yield different conclusions; argues for relations between patterns of causes and outcomes rather than correlating single variables; and criticizes the borrowing of psychological terms to describe brain evidence. Brain sites cannot be in a state of "fear."
A deeper understanding of the brain's contributions to behavior, Kagan argues, requires investigators to acknowledge these five constraints in the design or interpretation of an experiment.
Scientists were unable to study the relation of brain to mind until the invention of technologies that measured the brain activity accompanying psychological processes. Yet even with these new tools, conclusions are tentative or simply wrong. In this book, the distinguished psychologist Jerome Kagan describes five conditions that place serious constraints on the ability to predict mental or behavioral outcomes based on brain data: the setting in which evidence is gathered, the expectations of the subject, the source of the evidence that supports the conclusion, the absence of studies that examine patterns of causes with patterns of measures, and the habit of borrowing terms from psychology.
Kagan describes the important of context, and how the experimental setting--including the room, the procedure, and the species, age, and sex of both subject and examiner--can influence the conclusions. He explains how subject expectations affect all brain measures; considers why brain and psychological data often yield different conclusions; argues for relations between patterns of causes and outcomes rather than correlating single variables; and criticizes the borrowing of psychological terms to describe brain evidence. Brain sites cannot be in a state of "fear."
A deeper understanding of the brain's contributions to behavior, Kagan argues, requires investigators to acknowledge these five constraints in the design or interpretation of an experiment.
256 pages, Hardcover
Published August 11, 2017
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About the author
Jerome Kagan
84 books84 followersJerome Kagan was an American psychologist, who was the Daniel and Amy Starch Research Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, as well as, co-faculty at the New England Complex Systems Institute. He was one of the key pioneers of developmental psychology.
Kagan has shown that an infant's "temperament" is quite stable over time, in that certain behaviors in infancy are predictive of certain other behavior patterns in adolescence. He did extensive work on temperament and gave insight on emotion.
In 2001, he was listed in the Review of General Psychology among the one hundred most eminent psychologists of the twentieth century. After being evaluated quantitatively and qualitatively, Kagan was twenty-second on the list, just above Carl Jung.
Kagan has shown that an infant's "temperament" is quite stable over time, in that certain behaviors in infancy are predictive of certain other behavior patterns in adolescence. He did extensive work on temperament and gave insight on emotion.
In 2001, he was listed in the Review of General Psychology among the one hundred most eminent psychologists of the twentieth century. After being evaluated quantitatively and qualitatively, Kagan was twenty-second on the list, just above Carl Jung.
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August 25, 2017
Jerome Kagan is a favourite author. I've read everything put out since Galen's Prophecy. This isn't because he's an exceptional prose stylist – his style is to be direct and to the point, with some detail in his argument, punctuated by what is a broad and deep knowledge base: history, philosophy, culture and so on.
Kagan is also a critiquer, something which appeals to me, and he incisively dissects others' research methods and claims, invariably with some basic logic, at least that's how it appears to me, but then I'm a fan. Some would call him a complainer, I suppose, a label thrown in my direction in my field when I think I'm asking questions and making comments that need to be asked, pointing out the obvious in a way. The endorsements of two well-known names in Sir Michael Rutter and Joseph LeDoux speak of Kagan's status, LeDoux stating "no other psychologist 'tells it like it is'" as Kagan does.
This doesn't mean that Kagan just critiques and doesn't offer alternatives or solutions, because that's far from the case.
The focus of this book is on neuroscientific research, or "brain-mind relations", as Kagan puts it. Themes surrounding this work are familiar ones, if you've ever read a Kagan book. Examples are given from the human (infants, children, adults) and animal world: there appears a preponderance of studies from 2016 or just before, even one from 2017. The book has 170 pages of text, 70 of references. Actually, Kagan is so keen to provide references that citations can be half or more of a paragraph, or page. The implication "you don't believe me? Here's the reference" is a tactic I employ myself. I have no idea whether it works, but one of the aims is to say that what is being read isn't unsubstantiated opinion.
As the title suggests, Kagan is putting forward 5 constraints on what researchers and others say about behaviour, or approach their research. These are:
The context of a situation e.g. the difference in response to seeing a snake pictured on a screen to seeing it there in front of you or the experience of being in a scanner or other laboratory setting;
Expectedness, or what a being thinks will happen in a particular situation, whether rat, ape or a student involved in someone's experiment (Kagan makes an interesting comment regarding the Milgram experiments in this context).
Sources of Evidence, e.g. Events, verbal reports, interpretations of uncertainty. Here, and elsewhere in the book, Kagan questions the avoidance by researchers that a being might have their oen thoughts about what is happening and what they might want to do. A perennial topic here is the usefulness of self-report questionnaires, and Kagan launches into a critique of the Big 5 in a few places, which is very interesting.
Patterns, which means having a number of sources of information from which a pattern can be discerned, rather than judging from one interpretation of one event.
Attributing psychological properties to brain profiles, in which Kagan critiques the tendency to put human labels on animal berhaviours (a long-standing peeve), the application of theoretical constructs to research, such as looking for neuroticism. Here, Kagan alludes to a particular research practice where researchers weren't actually looking for anything, or any construct, but just to see what was there. Interestingly, for me at any rate, the method described and recommended is analogous to the stated method of C.G. Jung and which he defended as empiricism, although not the "Anglo-Saxon" version.
In many respects, this is a typical Kagan book. Here, some of the neuroscientific jargon is a bit daunting, but really, the main point is the argument and critique he presents and concentrating on that can help navigate the occasional swampy areas where this jargon occurs.
Kagan hopes that his discussion will help scientists, and that his audience is "the collection of active scientists and students in the social sciences, psychiatry, or neuroscience" and that he would be grateful if any idea in his book changes a single mind.
I think another audience is the ordinary reading person who wants to be clearer about the presentation of research results in the media and elsewhere.
A few days ago, a journalist in a Melbourne newspaper was extolling the virtues of tidiness and hot-desking and so on in her working environment (and kitchen, for some reason), cheerfully acknowledging that many of her colleagues did not have the same view. As support for her proposition she mentioned a research article which involved working in a chaotic environment (as defined by the researchers at any rate). The research subjects were university students.
Now, Kagan points out in this book that students are not representative of society, which is fairly obvious on a number of levels. Furthermore, the chaos (so called) doesn't appear to be of the students' making. A journalist, or even this writer, inclined to what others might call chaos in their workplace, might have a different view and be ab;e to find whatever is required, or even be stimulated by the various pieces of paper or other objects that might appear messy to others.
I think all of Kagan's constraints could be called into play here, particularly as there's copious evidence in books and journal articles that discuss neatness, messiness or however you want to describe it.
So this book is also for the general person. There are clear explanations about the 5 constraints and a lot of clear thinking around it, which means it can be easily applied.
Kagan is also a critiquer, something which appeals to me, and he incisively dissects others' research methods and claims, invariably with some basic logic, at least that's how it appears to me, but then I'm a fan. Some would call him a complainer, I suppose, a label thrown in my direction in my field when I think I'm asking questions and making comments that need to be asked, pointing out the obvious in a way. The endorsements of two well-known names in Sir Michael Rutter and Joseph LeDoux speak of Kagan's status, LeDoux stating "no other psychologist 'tells it like it is'" as Kagan does.
This doesn't mean that Kagan just critiques and doesn't offer alternatives or solutions, because that's far from the case.
The focus of this book is on neuroscientific research, or "brain-mind relations", as Kagan puts it. Themes surrounding this work are familiar ones, if you've ever read a Kagan book. Examples are given from the human (infants, children, adults) and animal world: there appears a preponderance of studies from 2016 or just before, even one from 2017. The book has 170 pages of text, 70 of references. Actually, Kagan is so keen to provide references that citations can be half or more of a paragraph, or page. The implication "you don't believe me? Here's the reference" is a tactic I employ myself. I have no idea whether it works, but one of the aims is to say that what is being read isn't unsubstantiated opinion.
As the title suggests, Kagan is putting forward 5 constraints on what researchers and others say about behaviour, or approach their research. These are:
The context of a situation e.g. the difference in response to seeing a snake pictured on a screen to seeing it there in front of you or the experience of being in a scanner or other laboratory setting;
Expectedness, or what a being thinks will happen in a particular situation, whether rat, ape or a student involved in someone's experiment (Kagan makes an interesting comment regarding the Milgram experiments in this context).
Sources of Evidence, e.g. Events, verbal reports, interpretations of uncertainty. Here, and elsewhere in the book, Kagan questions the avoidance by researchers that a being might have their oen thoughts about what is happening and what they might want to do. A perennial topic here is the usefulness of self-report questionnaires, and Kagan launches into a critique of the Big 5 in a few places, which is very interesting.
Patterns, which means having a number of sources of information from which a pattern can be discerned, rather than judging from one interpretation of one event.
Attributing psychological properties to brain profiles, in which Kagan critiques the tendency to put human labels on animal berhaviours (a long-standing peeve), the application of theoretical constructs to research, such as looking for neuroticism. Here, Kagan alludes to a particular research practice where researchers weren't actually looking for anything, or any construct, but just to see what was there. Interestingly, for me at any rate, the method described and recommended is analogous to the stated method of C.G. Jung and which he defended as empiricism, although not the "Anglo-Saxon" version.
In many respects, this is a typical Kagan book. Here, some of the neuroscientific jargon is a bit daunting, but really, the main point is the argument and critique he presents and concentrating on that can help navigate the occasional swampy areas where this jargon occurs.
Kagan hopes that his discussion will help scientists, and that his audience is "the collection of active scientists and students in the social sciences, psychiatry, or neuroscience" and that he would be grateful if any idea in his book changes a single mind.
I think another audience is the ordinary reading person who wants to be clearer about the presentation of research results in the media and elsewhere.
A few days ago, a journalist in a Melbourne newspaper was extolling the virtues of tidiness and hot-desking and so on in her working environment (and kitchen, for some reason), cheerfully acknowledging that many of her colleagues did not have the same view. As support for her proposition she mentioned a research article which involved working in a chaotic environment (as defined by the researchers at any rate). The research subjects were university students.
Now, Kagan points out in this book that students are not representative of society, which is fairly obvious on a number of levels. Furthermore, the chaos (so called) doesn't appear to be of the students' making. A journalist, or even this writer, inclined to what others might call chaos in their workplace, might have a different view and be ab;e to find whatever is required, or even be stimulated by the various pieces of paper or other objects that might appear messy to others.
I think all of Kagan's constraints could be called into play here, particularly as there's copious evidence in books and journal articles that discuss neatness, messiness or however you want to describe it.
So this book is also for the general person. There are clear explanations about the 5 constraints and a lot of clear thinking around it, which means it can be easily applied.
February 11, 2019
This is a very insightful treatise on why it is so hard to predict human behavior. The book is about neuroscience, primarily, but has many important points that are relevant to economics and psychology as well.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews