This textbook is lively, explains complex issues with clarity and memorable examples. Solso's writing is as engaging and interesting as he is. Lots of helpful diagrams and photos. An easy read, suitable for both undergrads and grad students. This book and Margaret Matlin's are the two best in the field, I use them both. Also highly recommend Solso et. al.'s Experimental Psychology textbook for the nuts and bolts of research design and experimentation.

An easy-read book with a magnificent layout. Good structure of the contents. It backs up a lot of it's saying on experiments performed and show the reader a bit about them. Nice "Recommended reading"-section closing every chapter.

This is an excellent text on cognitive psychology by one of the leading authors in the field. The chapters are well written and easily comprehended by all levels of students. Cognitive Psychology is also a great reference text due to its comprehensive review of cognitive psychology.

The book is well structured, with each chapter demonstrating one aspect of how irrationality keeps creeping up in our day to day decision making. The style is clear an pleasant.

Highly recommanded.

Dawes is the master at identifying what works from what only looks like it works. An important book that will stand the test of time.

In a simple style, rich with examples, Dawes explains many aspects of how simple principles of rationality can help resolve otherwise complex choice situations.

This book is a must read for anyone who wishes to understand the individual differences in people. Kagan, a Havard Professor, fills this book with information relevant to all areas in psychology. I referred to it many time for my thesis.

(sorry for my poor english, I'm French-Canadian)

As I entitled this review, this is a must for every serious and lucid social scientist (by the way, to many domains of research as well). In the early years of the twentieth century, prominent psychologists such as Allport, Lewin or Murray advocated that research should concentrate on the individuals rather than on the variables. Contemporary scholars such as Block, Cairns, and Magnusson continue to try to convince the scientifc community of the necessity to undertake research based on the holistic, interactionist, and person-centered perspective. I read a lot peer-reviewed scientific communication, and as I see it, researchers continue te be reluctant in adopting a person-centered perspective in their research (Jack Block (2000) proposed a number of reasons for that) ...

Here at amazon, I have read a number of reviews about controversial books on topics such as intelligence, personality, adjustment problems, behavioral genetics, etc. ... But do you know that nearly the totality of the results we dispose to date in social sciences are based on variable-centered studies ... thus, we only know about the "average person" ... Before doing interminable debates about the average individual, we should make more research that help us to understand the person we want to understand ... after that, we could go on with great (and exciting) debate about controversial issues in psychology and other social sciences. Do you know that the statistical parameters on which many debates are based (the parameters of the "average person" in a given sample) often do not apply to any of the real persons in your sample ... think about that ...

By the way, modern statistical methods are very powerful tools and the person-centered analyses will not answer to all the quesstion we can have ...

If you are a researcher in social sicence, and particularly if you are a student (undergraduate or graduate) planning to make a career in research, please, please, read that book !

Norbert Herschkowitz's book may not be as inspiring a read as The Prenatal Prescription by Peter Nathanielsz, but it's filled with valuable information on giving your baby the healthiest start in life, both prebirth and after birth. The information on how a baby's brain works (e.g. language acquisition) is particularly interesting.

I wish I had already had this book when my own children were growing up, but now I can consult it to follow and understand the development of my grandchildren. The authors' vast expertise has not kept them from writing a parent-friendly, easily-accessible-for-the-layperson book that answers the questions we all have as we watch our children progress: Are they developing as they should, according to the proper timeline? Am I being too demanding? Not enough? What makes it all work? We know our children are miracles of nature, but the text gives us a wider understanding of why and how. It quells doubts and cheers us, as we watch the "sample" children, so like our own, change from day to day.

The book is a rather good introductory book upon behavioral genetics, covering various emotional and behavioral disorders. It is stimulating and interesting, and very academic in nature. To a reader searching for practical implication of behavioral genetics, there may be little appointment. No matter what, I do agree that the behavioral genetics is a subject that every psychologist, or even every person, should have some ideas about this new development in science.

This is a book about psychological development. Here are the chapter titles, to give you a more specific idea: Guiding Themes in Human Development; The Infant; Connectedness; Establishing a Morality; The Emotions; The Generation of Thought; The Role of the Family.

Kagan is known for his work on temperamental shyness in infants. In this highly theoretical work (supported by evidence in many cases, but of course we don't know what counterevidence is going unmentioned) he critiques several generally accepted premises about psychological development. He argues that there is NOT a strong connectedness between the qualities a person has at early stages of development and the qualities he or she has at much later stages. He argues for the primacy of emotion over logic in our development. He notes in the preface that "It is not what parents do to children or siblings do to each other that matters, but rather the intention the child imputes to those who act on and with him or her."

Thought-provoking stuff even for us ordinary parents, not just professionals and academics, although the writing style is at times a little over the top. If you can tease out the point Kagan makes within each long paragraph, you'll find it worth discussing.

I used this book in school and it was wonderful for my psychology class. It discusses all of the definite studies as well as gives a great understanding for psychological disorders. At the end of eah chapter is a great study guide, which helped prepare me for all of my tests.

Jerome Kagan has so many inspiring things to say, I picked up this book even though my daughter is a teenager, now. Having a two year old is so stressful, not only physically, but emotionally.Moms need all the help they can get, at these times. Kagan's book provides great insight into what it means to be two years old and offers a bevy of information that is so useful. One of the joys of good parenting is that just changing one tiny thing you do in reaction to your toddler can make a world of difference...Mr. Kagan has handfuls of them. Read this book, you will not be disappointed. Enjoy your little ones...they grow up so darn quickly, don't they?

In Three Seductive Ideas, Jerome Kagan attacks the conventional wisdom of modern psychology. Asserting that psychology is only 100 years old, he goes on to compare many leading ideas in the field to the ideas in physics just 100 years after Gallileo. For Kagan, modern psychology is far too primitive.

Kagain in particular attacks three central notions: 1) that the human mind or personality has certain permanent features, essential characteristics like intelligence that do no vary over time or across situations, 2) that the human mind is permanently altered by experiences within the first three years of life, as though each hug or toy produced irrevocable synaptic changes, and 3) that the human mind is primarily driven in the seeking of pleasure, independent of social acceptance or moral righteousness.

Kagan's central point, that psychology is young and ought to be received only skeptically in making prescriptions for our day to day lives is well taken. However, the book has three major weaknesses that prevent my recommending it to others.

1) At each point in the book, Kagan replaces the "seductive" ideas with his own assertions. He says, for example, that intelligence is more properly divided among numerous tasks and talents than one general measure such as IQ. Although he takes time to attack the notion of IQ, his substitution is given short shrift. He does this throughout the book, attacking one idea only to replace it with another, equally young or new idea. Presumably in the next 100 years, Kagan hopes to see his ideas accepted and tested. However, we should remain as skeptical of Kagan as he urges us to be of the ideas he attacks.

2) I found Kagan's evidence lacking. In particular, he cites the now discredited peppered moth studies in his allusions to evolutionary theory. If he still believes in those studies, how can I be sure that the evidence he cites in other parts of the book outside my experience are accurate? Even if he is up to date and this is the only error in the book, it is fairly prominent and should have been caught by reviewers before publication.

3) Overall, Kagan has I think bitten off more than he can chew. Each of his three seductive ideas deserves a book of its own, tracing the history and philosophy of the idea as well as the state of the present evidence. It is a fine thing to attack essentialism, or infant determinism, or the pleasure principle. It is a sign of scattered thinking and shallow analysis to attack all three in the same book.

Each of these themes has other books with better explanations. If you are interested in essentialism or intelligence, read The Bell Curve and the Mismeasure of Man. If you are interested in infant determinism, read The Nurture Assumption and The Myth of the First Three Years. For an overview against the pleasure principle, read The Moral Intelligence of Children, or The Biology and Psychology of Moral Agency.

Three Seductive Ideas is a fair synopsis of some major issues in contemporary psychology. Those looking for a more detailed explanation or theory should avoid it and seek more specialized books.

Three seductive ideas is a must read for psychology majors or anyone interested in the field. The book gives an important look at several flaws in psychology and well needed changes in the field. It does not cover all angles but it is a good start. Kagan poses the problems but rarely presses any reasonable solutions.
No one (hopefully) will agree with all of Kagan's arguments but the general acknowledgements are important and interesting.

After a hundred years of trying to understand human behavior in scientific terms through very different fields, we are left with a confusing array of largely unconnected theories. Science is about finding unifying principles among diverse but compatible ideas, but our temptation is to settle too quickly for the next simple theory that comes along and sounds plausible and compelling.

Kagan starts with the perspective that physical sciences have been around for three hundred years, but psychological science as such for only a century, placing psychological science at the historical place where physical sciences were in the 17th century. While the analogy is questionable, the point that psychological science is, for all its vitality and productivity, truly in its infancy, is made powerfully between the lines throughout this book.

Kagan informs this situation elegantly by not only pointing out our need for telling simplifying stories but also showing how some of the grandest simplifying stories, which theorists often take for granted: (1) the notion of essential individual traits, (2) the early influences on the formation of the mind, and (3) the asssumed root of motivation in pleasure seeking, underlie roadblocks in our understanding of ourselves.

The book points out that we apply ideas like intelligence, fear, and consciousness to a wide variety of different agents, situations, and classes of evidence, prematurely assuming that we have found essential qualities in these things. That many of these abstractions are not so broadly applicable in the same way is demonstrated by a select set of experimental and clinical observations that make the point clearly.

While "Three Seductive Ideas" is oddly disappointing for not providing its own grand simplifying theory for human behavior, it does make specific suggestions for addressing the current assumptions he believes are mistaken.

In response to our passion for abstraction and premature creation of psychological essences built on a house of sand, Kagan emphasizes more rigorously specifying the agent, context, and class of evidence when we talk about these qualities. The experience of fleeing from a predator is not the same thing as the experience of worrying about a mortgage payment, even though the same drug might mitigate some of the "fear" in both cases. The situation and the history are in fact important in understanding what is going on.

In response to our tendency to emphasize the role of very early experience, Kagan emphasizes how we are more influenced by what is discrepant than what we expect. This limits the degree to which the adult mind can be meaningfully influenced by very early experience.

In response to the widespread assumption that we are motivated to seek pleasure, a quality believed held in common with animals, Kagan illustrates how human beings are also motivated by a broad range of socially relevant and more uniquely human feelings, such as guilt, shame, and pride. We not only anticipate pleasure, but even more, we are motivated to avoid risk and thus act in ways that are socially rewarding and bring feelings of virtue. In a meaningful way, human beings are not just hedonistic but also moral animals.

No easy answers here, but a shift in emphasis that may inspire better psychological science and open up currently blocked paths to understanding human beings more deeply.