by Marie Burks, Harvard University Undergraduate Student and Student Intern Brazelton Institute, Children's Hospital, Boston

Q. When you were a little boy (he laughs), did you imagine yourself where you are today?
A: No!

Q: Did your parents encourage you to pursue a life of academia?
A: No, they encouraged me to do well in school, and try to do good things in the world, but they didn't particularly encourage me to be a scientist or a professor though.

Q: Did you have any siblings?
A: I have a younger brother. We're very different, very different.

Q: What do you think might account for those differences?
A: Temperament, ordinal position. Those two things.

Q: So did your parents play any role in creating those differences?
A: Sure. I mean, the first born tends to get a little bit more attention, the later-born feels a little jealous, and that was probably influential in shaping my brother's personality.

Q: And yours!
A: And mine.

Q: What drew you to psychology?
A: I think what normally draws people to psychology... is that people differ — and it's quite mysterious — people differ in what aspect of either nature or society turns them on. It's quite mysterious. Those people become cosmologists. They report in their memoirs that they would stay up late at night and just look at the stars, and have very strong emotional experiences through that. The starts didn't interest me. Linus Pauling, who won a Noble Prize in chemistry, he found rocks very interesting. Some people find music interesting. But for me as well as for many other people the human mindÉthe mysteries and complexities of the human mind... that's what awed me. So if that is what you're interested in, obviously you're gonna to think of being a psychologist, right?

Q: Now, when did you first become interested in the human mind?
A: I think probably very early. Probably as a young adolescent. Oh yeah?

Q: So were you always interested in temperament?
A: No!

Q: So what led you to research that?
A: Three things. Uh, in the early 1960s, I was finishing a big project at the Fels Institute in Ohio with Howard Moss, which became the book Birth to Maturity. We were assessing a large number of 20 to 25-year-olds on whom a great deal of longitudinal data had been gathered prospectively, ever since they were born, cuz the institute, one of its main projects was this longitudinal study. And when the results were coming, we saw in 1960-61 — that's 45 years ago — that some children who were very timid and cautious in the first three years of life preserved that quality. Well, those who had a complementary set of properties preserved theirs, and that shocked me. I thought everything is environmental. So that stuck with me. But I didn't investigate it because I was interested more in the effects of the environment than I was in the effects of temperament. I should have pursued it then but I didn't because of biases. So the next event occurred in the late 70s, which is about 18 years later, when Richard Kearsley, Phillip Zelazo and I were conducting a very large study on the effect day care on infants. Because in the late 70s, before you were born, believe it or not, the United States government was thinking of funding daycare centers so that women who were now going to work at a very high rate could have a place for their infants. And so that was controversial (it isn't now).Wow, people thought, this is bad for infants. You're going to ruin their development. People were worried that this was not a good idea. Of course, Congress never voted, but they were close to doing it. So we received a very large grant from NIH to do a study that said okay, suppose you put infants in daycare and compare them with control infants who are not in daycare who are matched on class and ethnicity — are there any differences? Now we ran it in a working-class neighborhood behind the Prudential Center, and for political reasons we enrolled both Chinese infants from Boston's Chinatown and Caucasian infants who lived in the neighborhood. Now we were interested in the effects of daycare, so we had a control group, from other families who did not attend a daycare center. But the big result was not the effect of daycare, it was the effect of being an Asian or a Caucasian child. It had to be temperament because the infants differed as early as twelve weeks of age. When I thought of that and then thought about these earlier studies in Ohio, and now the work of Chess and Thomas had become more popular, and the idea of temperament was in the air. So that's when I decided that we were gonna study temperament.

Q: Your discussion of the differences between Asian and Causcasian infants raises and interesting question about race and science. You say in Galen's Prophecy that "science is not to be used as the sole basis for our laws or morality." Is this just an ideal? Do you think that in practice the discovery of a temperament gene would yield negative social consequences?
A: No, because every reproductively isolated group — Caucasians, Africans, Asians — has some genes which facilitate their adaptation to this complex society and some not. So if the account is balanced — there's no reproductively isolated group that has genes that are all debilitating — so then it's all balanced, and therefore no.

Q: So do you believe that one temperament is more desirable than the other?
A: Yeah, of course. Just like in the 17th century chubby women were attractive. In 2004 thin women are attractive. So it depends on the culture you live in. In our current culture, because of mobility, youth going away to college, youth leaving their families to work a thousand miles away, history has created a society in the West where a child who has a temperamental bias to not become unusually uncertain, anxious of leaving his or her family and confronting new experiences, that's a bit more adaptive in our society. That wouldn't be true in 18th-century American, right? At the moment, it's a little more adaptive, but that bias does have some costs, because we also live in a society with a great deal of temptations for high-risk behavior — unprotected sex, driving at high speeds, being indifferent about your diet. Well, that temperamental type is more likely to engage in that, so they put themselves at high risk, so again the account is balanced, while the inhibited temperament, which is a little more reluctant to leave home and seek challenges. But on the other hand that child is less likely to become a delinquent, less likely to take drugs, and so that child has advantages, too. So in the end the account's balanced — there are advantages and disadvantages to each temperament. And in our society, it's not possible to say which one is better. They each have advantages and they each have some costs... If you're gonna choose as a vocation a trial lawyer, salesman, bank official, CEO [an uninhibited personality] is more adaptive. If you want to be a poet, computer programmer, lab scientist, it's not more adaptive. So in our culture, which needs people who like to work alone — like writers, humanists — it's more adaptive to have an inhibited temperament. It depends on what life itinerary the person's going to follow.

Q: Do you think that life itinerary is determined by the person's temperament?
A: A little bit. I think most adolescents, as you contemplate your career, you're thinking what are my faults, what are my strengths? You're not going to pick a vocation that think you don't have the talent for. I mean, suppose when you were ten you wanted to be an opera singer, and now you say, well, my voice isn't good enough, that would be stupid for me to devote ten years to studying opera when I know I wouldn't be a success. So a youth who likes to travel and move is not going to decide to become a historian sitting in the library. And a person who doesn't like interacting with crowds and doesn't like travel says you know the life of a computer programmer, that's a great life. So you do pick a vocation that matches what your properties are. Now some people make mistakes, and then they end up under some stress that they picked a life journey that's not matching their temperament.

Q: Should parents make accommodations for a child's temperament?
A: Well, if you don't make it too extreme, then my answer is yes. For example, suppose this pair of parents were given a low-reactive infant with no fear. Then they should know that this child is probably not going to get overly anxious when criticized or punished and is going to be a little harder to socialize. Then, the high — reactive infant: so then maybe they should give a little more leeway, suppose they are parents who have very strict demands — make your bed, keep your clothes clean, obey what I say you should do — you may wanna relax those standards so you don't frustrate the child all the time. So in that sense we're not saying that parents should totally change their value system, of course not, but yes you accommodate a little bit to fit the child. And indeed, that's what parents do. Parents do that! If they see their child cries every time they yell at it, they stop yelling! Most parents don't have to be told to adjust their behavior, they do it automatically.

Q: Do you think there's a stigma attached to shyness in our society? Do you think a lot of parents who are faced with raising a shy child try to bring that child out of his or her shell?
A: If they conceptualize it as shyness. But a lot of parents do not categorize it that way — they categorize it as sensitivity. They say, you know, my daughter is very sensitive. Sensitivity is a good thing. So if you categorize it with a desirable adjective, then it's not a stigma. If you don't want a shy child and you categorize it as shyness, then there's a stigma. But most of our parents have not stigmatized their child. Most parents view their children through a halo, no matter what the child is, it's a beautiful thing.

Q: So usually parental biases work in favor of the child's well-being?
A: Absolutely.

Q: You've been in the field for about fifty years now, is that right?
A: I got my degree in '54 — fifty years! Absolutely!

I: Wow, that's quite an accomplishment!
A: That's a lot of years.

Q: So how has the field changed since you entered it?
A: Oh, oh, dramatically. In 1954 almost all developmental psychologists, as well as most psychology, was committed to Locke's notion that, essentially, babies come into the world with very few biologically prepared properties and their experiences — first in the family, until school entrance, and then after school entrance, family and peers shape you. I believed that, and I think 99% of psychologists believed that. So no one was interested in the brain in part because you couldn't measure the brain. You couldn't do fMRI, you couldn't do EEG, you couldn't do event-related potentials, there was no easy cortisol assay. So you're not gonna be interested in biology because you can't study it. So you emphasize behavior and how it's acquired, how it's learned. Then things changed — genetics took off, neuroscience took off, Chomsky wrote about language as being an innate module of the brain — and so for the last twenty years we've turned the field upside down to an equally dangerous bias that experience is unimportant, and after all it's all your biology, both what's universal (language, reasoning), and the variation. And that's just as incorrect as the view my cohort was taught that everything was learned. It's obviously a combination. But it has changed.

Q: Obviously you're one of the leading researchers in developmental psychology. Who else do you consider to be a major contributor to the field?
A: That's a long list! You want that list?

I: As many as you can name off the top of your head...
A: Well, Eleanor Maccoby of Stanford, Emeritus, made very important contributions to socialization. Marshall Haith, Emeritus, made very important contributions to infant cognitive functioning. Leslie Cohen at Texas, very important contributions to infant cognition. Michael Rutter of London — very important contributions to social behavior, autism. In the younger cohort: our two professors here, Susan Carey and Elizabeth Spelke are making important contributions to cognitive development. Nathan Fox at the University of Maryland on temperament. Charles Nelson, Children's Hospital Boston and Harvard Medical school the contribution of event-related potentials in understanding early cognitive development. I mean, it's a long list!

Q: In Galen's Prophecy, you write: "I suspect that most temperaments will be traceable to physiological differences derived from neurochemistry." Has your suspicion proven true? Is the field any closer to understanding the physiological underpinning of temperament?
A: We're closer. In twenty years, the cohort of younger investigators will discover what is the defining neurochemical profile for the temperaments that are in Galen's Prophecy, and then they will be a very important part of the definition. No question. But we're closer than we were 30 years ago, but we're not there yet. So right now temperament has to be defined behaviorally. A good example would be Down syndrome. Before anyone knew about chromosomes, Down syndrome was defined by appearance and behavior. That's how we define temperament. But once we discovered that there was an extra chromosome, now how is Down syndrome defined? By a trisomy. It's not defined by your appearance. That's what'll happen to temperament. We'll say, oh this neurochemistry, that sets you up for this bias, now we'll go see what the behavior's like. Remember, everybody with a trisomy doesn't have the same behavior.

Q: You make many connections between physical traits and temperament in Galen's Prophecy, including blue eyes and ectomorphic body build. Do you think it's possible to tell something about a person's temperament simply by looking at a person?
A: You have blue eyes. Were you shy as a child?

I: Yeah. I'm still shy!
A: There you go! No. It's wrong. You can't do it because these external traits like eye color or body build, they're out at the periphery, and they're only correlates. You wouldn't want to say that everybody with an epicanthal eye fold has Down syndrome.

Q: Do you think people would be tempted to infer something about a person's disposition based on his or her appearance?
A: No, because... we have been talking about this for twenty years and no one's saying, oh, cuz you have blue eyes... No, I think people realize that it is only a small correlate.

I: Sort of like the correlation between myopia and intelligence.
A: Right... it's so low... statistically significant but not useful enough. I mean, it would be like using gender. Now would you want to say in the modern world, oh, a female, well they're not gonna ever run anything! You'd be wrong 80% of the time. So, no, you can't do that. And no one's doing it... But there's a danger here. In twenty years, a mother — if she wants to spend a hundred dollars — will be able to ask for a genomic profile of her newborn infant. And she's just given birth to a beautiful, blue-eyed, blonde little girl. What a wonderful baby this is! And then the doctor comes in the next day before she leaves the hospital. She says, "Uh, you know that genomic profile you ordered? Well, we have the results. Would you like to know the results?" [The mother] says, "Yes, what are the results?" She says, "Well, Mrs. Jones, I'm afraid I have to tell you that your little girl, nice as she is, she has the genes that put her at risk for schizophrenia." And suddenly this beautiful girl looks less beautiful. It's very dangerous.

Q: So how do we prevent against something like that?
A: I think that most parents won't order the genomic analysis. Here, I'll put it to you personally. If tomorrow morning, you were offered, authentically, free, a complete genomic analysis that'll tell you, when you're 60, what diseases you will have, would you like to know that?

Q: But I dare say there are many people out there who would like to know... A: But just as many who wouldn't order it. Some pregnant women don't even want to know what gender child they're carrying.

Q: So you put faith, then, in humankind to not carry things to that extent?
A: At the moment. I think the average parent will say, well what do I want to know that for, since it's probabilistic? What can I do with that? It spoils my perception of my infant.

Q: In disseminating information about temperament to parents, you should also stress the fact that one temperament is not inherently better than the other?
A: We do. We do that every time we write. I've never written that one temperament is better than the other.

Q: It is admirable that you can establish the crucial role of biology in the development of temperament in Galen's Prophecy while still maintaining a decidedly humanistic attitude. You write: "The premise that many adults do not have the power to control their behavior is dangerous." Do you believe, then, that human will ultimately trumps biology?
A: Absolutely. Of course. Otherwise, the frequency of rape would not be 1%. Of course! I mean, my God! What proportion of times when someone is really angry do they strike the person they're angry at? Very few. Because... because we're not animals. We were given a frontal cortex, and this frontal cortex is powerful, and in the 19th century the concept of will was very important. It said I have the power to control my actions. So, no.

Q: So although temperament may be biologically determined, it's still constrained by social conventions.
A: And your will. That's right. That's why, for some kid to claim that the reason why he committed a crime was because he watched television or because his parents were abusive, is ridiculous. That's totally ridiculous.

Q: In Galen's Prophecy, you write that an uninhibited child whose aggression is checked early on at home and/or in school will likely go on to become a surgeon or a lawyer, whereas an uninhibited child whose behavior goes unchecked is at risk for delinquency. Could a better understanding of temperament ultimately reduce crime rates?
A: Only if the family is willing to socialize. We say to a pair of parents who we have learned are not gonna be effective socializers, we say, "Mrs. Smith, you should know that your boy Max has an unhibited temperament, so socialize him." This doesn't mean they're gonna do it. You can't force them. Some parents will respond to that, but not all. I think the greater therapeutic intervention is less permissiveness at the level of the society toward aggression. We're too permissive about aggression, much too permissive. That's where you make the change.

Q: Isn't that a much harder change to make?
A: I'm not so certain. I think it's easier... Let me give you an example: smoking among the middle class. Twenty years ago 80% of middle class people smoked cigarettes. Now it's down to what, 5%? That wasn't parental socialization, that was at a societal level. We said, smoking is bad for you. And we passed laws — you can't smoke in any building in the university. Suddenly people aren't smoking. Oh, societal changes are profound. I mean, take the illegitimate pregnancies of 15-, 14-year-old girls. That's because society is so permissive. I mean, in the high schools of America, girls and boys feel in order to be adults they better engage in sexual behavior. That's on a societal level, that's not coming from parents. So the societal power is much more influential than what the parents do. The information in the culture has much more power than the parents in changing behavior. Not necessarily values, but behavior.

Q: So do you think it's important for parents to guard their children from potentially harmful forms of media? Some parents do it to a much larger extent than others (for example, not allowing their children to watch the nightly news versus not allowing them to watch violent drama). Is that the kind of intervention you see fit?
A: No, because then they go to school and meet all those who have watched the media. The society has to cooperate. If the society is going to be split... This is an old story but true. A former graduate student of mine (this is many years ago) decided with his first-born son, aggression is bad, no TV, no Christmas presents of soldiers or guns. Now, for the first five years of life this boy was beautiful — gentle, kind. Then he went to school, and he started to be bullied by the other boys. And the teachers told the parents, you know, your son is being bullied, he's got to defend himself. So the parents say well, what we told you is true, but I'm afraid you have to defend yourself. I mean, you can't isolate yourself from your culture. So it has to happen at the societal level.

Q: So how do you ultimately see temperament functioning at the societal level? What do you expect your research to contribute to society?
A: Oh, wow. Uh, I guess two potential contributions. One, to alleviate a little bit the guilt of the parents who have an unusually bold or fearful child, while simultaneously telling parents be sensitive to your child's temperament and accommodate. The second contribution is to psychiatry, because right now all the DSM-IV categories are just defined by symptoms. And in that category, whether it's social phobia or animal phobia, or many types, only one of which is temperamental, and the temperamental type should get a different treatment. So a person who's a social phobic who acquired it because they're homely, not well-educated, feels they're a member of a minority group but have no special temperamental bias, they should be treated differently than a social phobic who inherited a high reactive temperament. That will happen in the future. The social phobics will be split on whether they developed their phobia because they began life with a bias or they didn't begin life with any bias toward social phobia. Those are the two contributions that I see.

Q: Obviously you have very practical ideals about how your research can be applied on a broader scale.
A: I do, but that's not why I did it. I mean, most research is just to enhance our understanding. Our government spent billions of dollars to put a rover on Mars. That has no practical implications whatsoever. So we celebrated because we enhance our understanding of the universe in which we live. So most research in the social sciences enhances understanding; its practical implications are really quite minimal. If you were gonna ask what are the practical implications of the articles that are in refereed journals, you'd be very unhappy. It's why we have libraries. Research is like libraries. They're to enhance the depth of understanding of our citizens.

Q: So knowledge for the sake of knowledge?
A: Well, that has a negative connotation. Humans feel better when they think that their conception of a domain is richer, more correct. So we're ennobling humans. That's really the main purpose of research. Now that bothers a lot of people, who say well that's a lot of tax money we're spending. If there aren't any practical implications, it should be of secondary importance. But if you really applied that to everything our society does, you'd start closing down a lot of things. You'd close down museum, you'd close down aquaria, you'd close down concerts, you'd close down a lot of universities. So watch it, if you're going to apply a practical criterion and apply it very seriously, you wouldn't like the society that resulted.

Q: So after all these years of research, are you still satisfied that the scientific method — that laboratory research — is the best means of studying child development?
A: No, I never said that.

Q: But you certainly use it.
A: Yeah, but that's a matter of taste. Some people like Monet, some people like Paul Klee, some people like Jackson Pollack. We need all kinds of scientists. You do science for three or four different reasons. They give you a high. One is aesthetic. You get aesthetic satisfaction because of the beauty of the result. Second, you get a virtuous satisfaction because this knowledge is relevant to a practical problem that society faces. You do it, some science you do, because of its exquisite elegance — you get a yes/no answer. Those are three reasons. Now, people differ because of their background, their childhood, their culture, everything, and which of those is more important. So for me, for reasons I don't understand (I don't think most scientists understand why they picked the criterion they picked) if this is how much ambiguity you can tolerate (he motions to an imaginary continuum on his desktop), from here, which is the historian, where everything is ambiguous, through anthropology, sociology, observational psych — where you observe children in natural contexts, in schools — laboratories, now open up their brains, look at their nerve cells, look at their genes. I don't get joy from this, and I don't get enough joy here. So I'm stuck here, and that's why I study children in laboratories. I don't think it's the best way to study children.

Q: It's just the way you prefer.
A: It's the way I prefer. I go to the gallery where Goya is. I don't go to the gallery where Picasso is. So it's a matter of taste.

Q: I've heard that you really get to know each of your subjects. Do you think this kind of intimacy should be upheld as a model for psychological research? Why is it important to get to know each one of your subjects?
A: Because if you don't know more about a subject (their class, their ethnicity, what they were like earlier, other parts of their personality) then if you're given a number, a score on the test, that score could be produced by different forces. You don't know what it means. A hundred years ago, or maybe less, a very famous biochemist named Krebs discovered the Krebs cycle. The guy who was supposed to discover it everybody thought was a chemist, and so a reporter said to Dr. Krebs, "Professor Krebs, why did you make this discovery, rather than this scientist, who was a chemist?" And his answer was something like this: because I viewed the cycle as happening in a whole organism. And he saw it as happening in a test tube. If someone had brought Darwin (he didn't want to leave England), had brought him the specimens (tortoises and finches) to his home in England, but he didn't see the islands, the ecology in which those specimens lived, he never would've invented evolution. You have to see the feature, the datum, in its larger context. Very important. Otherwise you're not gonna make any important discoveries, because in psychology every datum is ambiguous. It has no fixed meaning.

Q: Do you believe that it's possible to determine a child's temperament at birth?
A: No, no, it's too early. You might be able to get a little bit of a clue as to whether the probability is .5 rather than .2 that the baby might develop this way, but there will be a lot of ambiguity. You can learn a little bit about the newborn, absolutely. Every natural phenomenon is like an onion with layers, right? So if we say for psychology the public layer is your behavior, that's the easiest to change. Next layer — your usual feeling states. Little harder to change. Next layer — the profile of excitability of your limbic system. That's hard to change, and that came from your genes. Impossible to change. So, in this cascade there's a lot of slippage between the genes and you behavior. What layer are we talking about? Behavior is the easiest to change. So in our work that we're publishing in the fall we found that a good proportion of our high reactive infants, who were fearful and shy at age 2, at age 11 are not shy at all, at all! But when you measure their biology and you see that they still have their temperament. The word changes its meaning. Right now because of the immaturity of methods temperament refers to behavior. When, as we said earlier, when, twenty years from now, temperament will be defined by a biological profile, then it will have a different meaning. Let's make something up. Right now we define a high-reactive temperament by the child's motor activity and crying to a set of unfamiliar stimuli. Now it's 20 years from now, and someone has discovered that if you put an infant in a scanner and measure the profile of (and I'm gonna make it up) the profile of GABA in the limbic system, this profile produces a high-reactive infant or child. Well now to say a high-reactive temperament is your GABA profile — that's a different meaning! And when that happens, then you say, okay I start with this GABA profile, it's very hard to change, and I see what happens to all the children who have this particular GABA profile. That's like the variation among the cognitive abilities of Down Syndrome — everyone has the same trisomy. Or, identical twins where one's schizophrenic and one isn't — they have the same genes. So they both have the same risk for schizophrenia, but one came down with schizophrenia and the other didn't. So you have to view it that way — as cascades and probabilistic changes. And that's what's not appreciated. But that's true in biology too. You start with two identical fertilized eggs, they start developing in different ways. So it's a story, and every time the chapter changes, you lose a little determinism. Every time one chapter ends it means you're leaving one level and going to the next level. ItÕs discontinuity. The only thing that doesn't change in a good novel is the deep themes. But the superficial stuff changes a lot. Right. And the context in which you live. If I take two identical twins — they're both high-reactive, right — and I put this one in a small town in Maine, and I put this one in Chicago, and I go back at age 20 — they're going to be very different. Just changing the context in which they live! That's why our constructs should combine... always be in a context. But notice in psychology that's not true. We talk about hyperactive children, or anxious children, or smart children... there's no mention of the context, and so it's a half sentence... we don't know what that means. It's like I said to you, "You know, I read the word 'run.'" You don't know if I'm talking about water, a cat, or an elephant. That's the problem with constructs in the social sciences. They're all de-contextualized. They're verbs without nouns and without objects. Well, that's meaningless. You can't do anything with that. There's a very famous philosopher named Frege who said that the unit of meaning is a full sentence, full proposition. An agent, a function, and a context. And any word alone has no meaning. That's really profound! Now, biologists understand that. When they use the word meiosis, everyone knows only one thing has meiosis — germ cells. Nothing else has meiosis. When they use the word bleach, they mean the pigment cells in you retina. Kidneys don't bleach, right? Now let's go to psychology. Ready? Remember (chuckles)! What's remembering? Who's remembering? What are they remembering? Perceive! Infer! Ah! Evaluate! These are of no use.

Q: So is that a problem?
A: Fundamental problem with the social sciences.

Q: So you think the social sciences could use more specificity in their language?
A: A lot more specificity, absolutely.

Q: Finally, what would you consider your most important accomplishment, achievement, experience, over the course of your career, professional or personal?
A: Uh... I would say four, four gave great joy. The first one was the work at Fels study Birth to Maturity, which was my first research project, where we found that in general you didn't get much preservation of persona until school entrance. Now no one, I didn't know that was gonna happen. That's when things really got stable. I think that was a very important discovery. Second, was the work where we showed, in the first year of life, that separation anxiety occurs in all children in all cultures at the same age, because it's a function of the maturity of your prefrontal cortex. Oh, that was a great discovery. That was really important. That was beautiful. Everyone was saying separation anxiety is a function of your attachment to your mother, but then we had data from the Kung San bushmen, from Guatemalan Indians, from daycare children — they all showed separation anxiety at the same time around 7,8, 9 months. That was beautiful. And that's the second. The third was the work on the second year, where we saw that infants' moral sense and self-awareness came in between 15 and 18 months. That was terrific. And the last is the work on temperament. Those four. Not bad... not bad for one lifetime.

I: Not bad at all.