Measure for measure …

… Book Review: Psychology's Ghosts - WSJ.com. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Mr. Kagan's latest effort, "Psychology's Ghosts," might be called "Four Seductive Ideas," since it consists of his assessment of four problems in psychological theory and clinical practice. The first problem is laid out in the chapter "Missing Contexts": the fact that many researchers fail to consider that their measurements of brains, behavior and self-reported experience are profoundly influenced by their subjects' culture, class and experience, as well as by the situation in which the research is conducted. This is not a new concern, but it takes on a special urgency in this era of high-tech inspired biological reductionism.