Five constraints on predicting behavior

Jerome Kagan

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 and 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 attribution of psychological concepts such as "fear" or "regulate" to brain patterns. Kagan describes the importance of context, and how the experimental setting - including the room, the procedure, and the species, age, and sex of both...