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Jerome Kagan: Methodological flaws

Jerome Kagan is Daniel and Amy Starch Professor of Psychology at Harvard University.

04 October 2009

By Guest

I remain puzzled over what appears to be a compulsion, that I cannot tame, to publish papers and books that summarize the empirical evidence pointing to serious problems with popular procedures and assumptions that permeate many domains in psychology.

These include: (1) the use of decontextualized predicates for emotional, personality, and cognitive concepts that fail to specify the agent, the local context, and source of evidence; (2) the reliance on single sources of evidence for broad constructs; and (3) the sole reliance on self-report data without supporting behavioural observations.

This writing seems to have little effect on the practices of the relevant investigators, yet I persist. It is not because I am arrogant. I celebrate humility and my close friends support that self-diagnosis. Any help with this symptom will be appreciated.

About the author

Jerome Kagan is Daniel and Amy Starch Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. A pioneering developmental psychologist, he was listed as among the 100 most influential psychologists of the twentieth century by the Review of General Psychology in 2002.