Kagan, Jerome

Kagan, Jerome

(1929–  ) psychologist; born in Newark, N.J. Educated at Rutgers and Yale, he did research in developmental psychology at Ohio's Fels Institute (1957–64) before taking up his teaching career at Yale. He conducted extensive research on child development, documented in such books as Personal Development (1971), Growth of the Child (1978), and The Nature of the Chilld (1982). He suggested that both sides involved in the nature/nuture controversy were too rigid—that the parameters of personality formation were still obscure.

The Cambridge Dictionary of American Biography, by John S. Bowman. Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1995. Reproduced with permission.