On May 10th, 2021, EPIC (Education for Persistence and Innovation Center) and Teachers College, Columbia University lost its valuable advisor and beloved friend, Dr. Jerome Kagan. Not only was Jerry an influential member of Harvard University where he worked, he was also an intellectual giant in the field of developmental psychology. Born and raised in Newark, New Jersey, Jerry received his B.S. in biology and psychology from Rutgers University and later completed his Ph.D. in psychology from Yale University, where he studied under Dr. Frank Beach, a prominent psychologist. Jerry had a long and distinguished academic career in the field of infant studies, particularly regarding emotional and moral development.  He was best known for his work on temperament and how one’s biological nature and nurturing environment interactively impact an individual’s development.  Among many accomplishments and recognition in his life, he won the Hofheimer Prize from the American Psychiatric Association in 1963; the American Psychological Association Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award in 1987, the Distinguished Scientist Award from the Society for Research in Child Development in 1989; and the G. Stanley Hall Award from the American Psychological Association in 1994. Jerry also played an integral part in establishing Harvard University’s Human Development program. (For a detailed description of Jerry and his work, please read this NY Times article as well as visit ISDP’s “In Memoriam for Jerome Kagan” article, which was written by his former graduate students, Nathan Fox and Koraly Perez-Edgar.)

The Director of EPIC, Xiaodong Lin, first met Jerry in-person at the 2018 Learning & Brain Conference, in which the overarching theme was “Reaching for Greatness: Unleashing potential, passions, and Creative Talents in Students with Cognitive Science.” His energy, clarity of thinking, and passion towards psychological science, along with his willingness to change his conclusions in the face of scientific evidence, were distinctive and deeply impressive— especially for someone as renowned and senior as he was. Junior colleagues and scholars-in-training also had the same impression of Jerry; an EPIC Ph.D. student who met him during the conference later commented, “wow, he is amazingly motivated to learn about new ideas, even at his current career level. He clearly takes young people’s ideas seriously, and I appreciate how he challenged our thoughts vigorously.”

Ever since the meeting in Boston, Jerry had been deeply involved in EPIC’s research studies.  He attended several lab meetings, listened to graduate students’ presentations of initial findings, and challenged all of us to think more deeply by asking us questions, such as, “what new things have we learned today that we did not know yesterday?” He repeatedly validated EPIC’s mission to study how humans understand, react to, and handle failures or undesirable situations. He too believed that failure is central to the human experience.

Every encounter with Jerry began with, “so, what are your new discoveries lately?” He frequently corresponded with EPIC to share articles he read that were relevant to our research. He responded to every email and invitation to speak within 24 hours of receiving the messages, attesting to his passion for this field. Although we—members of EPIC—were not his graduate students during his tenure at Harvard, we definitely felt like we were his graduate students during his final years. The intensity and frequency of his advice to EPIC were deeply appreciated, especially during the times when our research projects failed unexpectedly. Here are some memorable anecdotes that reflect his wisdom:

• Don’t Hang Up on Individual Words Regardless of How Beautiful They May Sound: To Jerry, words are hollow and meaningless unless we understand the phenomena behind the words. During one of our discussions, he said, “psychologists assume that classification words like success, failure, intelligence, smart, grit, stress, anxiety, regulation, and etc. apply to varied subjects and contexts. These classification words are ambiguous until one specifies the agent and the setting. A stressed rat is not like a stressed child, and one must specify the stress, the setting or events that cause the stress, and so forth. Study phenomena, not words! The word “failure” may mean scoring 90 on a math test or 65 on a math test, or 80 in English class and 50 in Music class. How one views an experience as success or failure completely depends on who that person is, where that person stands in class, what schools that person attends, which teachers or class that person is with, etc. I realize that children’s stories you collected are words, and words can reveal new truths. BUT one cannot assume that the surface meaning of a sentence, spoken by a child to an unfamiliar older adult in a school setting, reveals an important fact. It is necessary to look at the whole interview, how the words were spoken, and find consistencies and inconsistencies that lead to new discoveries. That is what a wise therapist or judge does. Though difficult, when all you have are answers to emotional queries that touch important personal issues, it is the only way to proceed. This is not an interview simply about one’s diet or daily work routine— it touches the child’s identity. Listen to the tape recordings of the interview for clues (pauses, soft voice, quality, delays, etc.). Failure is just a word, no different than “happiness”, “love”, or “sad”.  It means nothing at this abstract level. We need to focus on the very concrete phenomenon, rather than an abstract word definition. For instance, right now, from the responses, students all seem to focus on grades, social relationship, social perception, etc. We need to nail into the phenomenon, rather than defining what is considered success or failure.”

• Specify Tasks, Setting, and Subjects that You Study: Jerry maintained that research studies will have a stronger impact on theory and practice if researchers are specific about the tasks and settings from which their findings are derived.  During one of his critiques, Jerry said, “in general, people learn more from success than failure. One must specify the task on which failure occurs and identify specific tasks one fails and learns from.  I do not profit from failure on many tasks, including: typing too fast on emails, making errors in fixing broken furniture, arranging a table in my study neatly so I can find things, buying on Amazon, etc., because I do not care enough about these failures. Failure needs a target. The sentence ‘subjects do not profit from failure’ is ambiguous; it is no different than the sentence ‘Mary thought about…’ That is why this paper is nonsense. You are having a hard time appreciating the error most psychologists make— namely assuming a predicate generalizes broadly. It does not. Before we conclude either people learn or not learn from failures in general, we’d better know what kind of people, the degree of caring or not caring about what kind of tasks or situations they fail on, and what specific issues they have learned from the failure experiences… people vary greatly in the degree profiting from failure on select tasks. Similarly, I do not see the value of using MTurk subjects.   You have no idea of the setting in which the subject is responding to the experimenters’ questions or tasks, nor do you know much about personal traits or temperament or backgrounds. I am not in favor of using these subjects over internet that you have never met and you can’t see them in action.”

• Do Not Rely Primarily on Self-Report as Data; Use Physical and Behavioral Measures Whenever You Can: Can medical doctors trust and use patients’ verbal report as the sole basis for treatment? Will any court in the United States trust people’s verbal report without any physical or behavioral evidence?  Regarding this point, Jerry wrote, “The paper we just read together is silly because it does not  involve any behavioral measures at all. It is based only on verbal reports to artificial conditions, so its conclusions that people learn from success and not failures are not valid, mainly because the source of data were so narrow and superficial. It is rare for anyone to not alter their behavior after failing on a task they cared about. Do you know any such rare person?  I do not. Years ago, I found that 6-year-olds who made an error on a difficult perceptual task slowed down on the next item and revisited what they did previously, back and forth. Their behaviors showed that they wanted to figure out the errors they made on task, but verbally, they reported otherwise. It is also true that many children are not aware of their actions. In my opinion, 90% of all youth treat school failure as a threat, because it implies a defect in mental ability. So that is a good domain to study, but we have to use behavioral measures to detect these threats rather than completely relying on the verbal report. In conclusion, don’t mix good data with bad data. That will yield nonsense.”

We once argued with Jerry that he used children interviews and children’s stories as data to generate results. He responded: “It is true.  But we were always careful with our questions. For instance, I do not think that asking them why they chose a certain strategy will be useful, because very often, people don’t know why they did something, and sometimes even are unaware of the actions they took; in these cases, they often will make up an answer for you to hear. In addition, some youth do not have the vocabulary to describe the feeling they had before a decision and so they choose to invent some explanation on the spot. However, if you ask questions such as, “How did you come to this decision? What steps did you take to finally come to this decision?”, you will receive more trustworthy information than asking “why”. In addition, people are more accurate in remembering specific events that happened to them and what actions they took, rather than how they felt in those situations. People’s memories of their emotions are less accurate, because feelings are hard to recall after a long interval. For example, can you recall how you felt, (not the words but the feelings) when a failure of 10 years ago occurred? Probably not. Thus, these self-reports are not valid indexes of subjects’ beliefs, partly because many do not know what they believe, and others are reluctant to reveal to a stranger what they think they believe. This whole genre of using self-report as the main source of data to measure beliefs deserves serious debate in the field.”

As you can see, Jerry was a great source of wisdom to all of us in EPIC and the field. In addition to his wisdom and passion for science and the new knowledge he offered us, he provided a great spirit, generosity, kindness, and frankness. He was never selfish with his time and wholeheartedly supported new researchers. EPIC was blessed to have received some of his unique wisdom and advice. He will be deeply missed and remembered with great gratitude and fondness by all of us.