On Wed, 20 May 2009 16:28:26 -0700, William Scott wrote in response: >Mike Palij wrote: >>The New Yorker article is a good, enjoyable read. The question, I think, >>is whether one should treat it as fiction or non-fiction. > >It is clearly non-fiction and does a good job of laying out Mischel's work >and would be a good read for students.
I would tend to agree with you though I admit that I only have a passing familiarity with Mischel's work. I presume that if there were any glaring errors or misrepresentations in the article someone here would point them out. With respect to the "fiction or non-fiction" issue, I was referring to the theoretical explanation provided not with the empirical results. In many areas of psychology we have empirical results that are readily replicable but the explanation is unclear (e.g., the Brown-Peterson memory distractor task, any version of a levels of processing task, etc.). In these cases the theoretical explanations border on speculative fiction. >As someone who has argued against Mischel at every turn, I agree >with all your points. If true, though, it would be interesting to find that >the scans of brains of adults could be predicted by childhood behaviors, >even if only by correlations. True. The correlations would be very interesting but puzzling. Would we have to make a version of the delayed gratification task that could be used with newborns (in the spirit of the Frantz visual perception work)? -Mike Palij New York University [email protected] --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly ([email protected])
