![Kenneth Kaye](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/87/Kenneth_Kaye.jpg)
Kenneth Kaye (January 24, 1946 – May 26, 2021) was an American psychologist and writer whose research, books, and articles connect the fields of human development, family relationships and conflict resolution.
Life
Although spanning several professional disciplines, the substantial body of Kaye’s work is characterized by family systems theory and by a search for observable, reproducible processes rather than stopping at generalizations about formal properties, for example, of stages in mental or social development.
Kaye was educated at
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher le ...
(A.B. in English and American Literature, 1966; Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology and Education, 1970). Following a Visiting Fellowship at
King's College, Cambridge
King's College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge. Formally The King's College of Our Lady and Saint Nicholas in Cambridge, the college lies beside the River Cam and faces out onto King's Parade in the centre of the city ...
(UK), he taught at the
University of Washington
The University of Washington (UW, simply Washington, or informally U-Dub) is a public research university in Seattle, Washington.
Founded in 1861, Washington is one of the oldest universities on the West Coast; it was established in Seattle a ...
(1970–71) and the
University of Chicago
The University of Chicago (UChicago, Chicago, U of C, or UChi) is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois. Its main campus is located in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood. The University of Chicago is consistently ranked among the b ...
(Department of Education and Committee on Human Development, 1971–81). From 1982 to 2007 he was an Adjunct Faculty member in the Department of Psychiatry,
Northwestern University
Northwestern University is a private research university in Evanston, Illinois. Founded in 1851, Northwestern is the oldest chartered university in Illinois and is ranked among the most prestigious academic institutions in the world.
Charte ...
Medical School.
In later years, Kaye published six books of fiction under the name Ken Kaye.
Research and principal publications
Early human development
Beginning with his doctoral dissertation and continuing through the University of Chicago years, 22 of Kaye's published articles addressed the fundamental question, What gives ''
Homo sapiens
Humans (''Homo sapiens'') are the most abundant and widespread species of primate, characterized by bipedalism and exceptional cognitive skills due to a large and complex brain. This has enabled the development of advanced tools, culture, ...
'', uniquely among all other creatures, the ability to learn through imitation, language, and consciousness of a reflecting self? His principal mentors were the social-cognitive psychologist
Jerome S. Bruner, British ethologist M.P.M. Richards, and pediatrician
T. Berry Brazelton. Elaborated most fully in his book
''The Mental and Social Life of Babies: How Parents Create Persons'', Kaye theorized and demonstrated that those distinguishing psychological powers, rather than developing intrinsically from innate capacities of the human infant biologically reorganizing themselves (
Piaget Piaget () may refer to:
People with the surname
* Édouard Piaget (18171910), a Swiss entomologist
* Jean Piaget (18961980), a Swiss developmental psychologist
* Paul Piaget (disambiguation), several people
* Solange Piaget Knowles (born 1986) ...
), are shaped gradually by interactions due to the co-evolution of infant behavior and human adult behavior.
Specifically, he traced the development of
turn-taking
Turn-taking is a type of organization in conversation and discourse where participants speak one at a time in alternating turns. In practice, it involves processes for constructing contributions, responding to previous comments, and transitioning ...
beginning with instinctive maternal responses to physiological/neurological bursts and pauses in neonatal activity, through transactions in which adults adjust to babies' perceived (projected) intentions, to true dialogue which makes symbolic language possible.
''
The Mental and Social Life of Babies
''The Mental and Social Life of Babies'' is a 1982 book by Kenneth Kaye. Integrating a contemporary burgeoning field of research on infant cognitive and social development in the first two years of life with his own laboratory's studies at the Uni ...
'' appeared in Spanish, Italian, and Japanese editions. Kaye's innovative microanalytic studies of parent-infant interaction in the 1970s have been discussed continuously to the present in hundreds of scholarly papers and books on diverse psychological topics.
The IQ controversy
In the mid-1970s, he published 6 articles and book reviews on the controversy triggered by
Arthur Jensen
Arthur Robert Jensen (August 24, 1923 – October 22, 2012) was an American psychologist and writer. He was a professor of educational psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. Jensen was known for his work in psychometrics an ...
's famous ''Harvard Educational Review'' article on the
heritability of IQ
Research on the heritability of IQ inquires into the degree of variation in IQ within a population that is due to genetic variation
Genetic variation is the difference in DNA among individuals or the differences between populations. The multiple ...
. Kaye's message: "Educational revolution will not come until after educational psychology makes a paradigm shift. Psychology has sold society a dogmatic set of assumptions that preclude beliefs in the educability of children, the potential of curriculum, and the accountability of schools."
The science of human behavior
Mainly growing out of his research methods in the work on infancy, 6 publications dealt with methodological rigor and interpretive issues in the science of human behavior.
Family therapy and parenting
Beginning in 1981, Kaye became a licensed clinical psychologist and served on the faculty of the Family Institute of Chicago for several years. His 1984 book ''Family Rules: Raising Responsible Children''. was republished in a mass market edition by St. Martin’s Press and an updated edition in 2005.
Family business systems and conflict resolution
In 1986, Kaye began to specialize his practice in consulting to families who were in business together. He was among the first psychologists to do so, phasing out his general clinical practice by the mid-1990s. By 2009, his published articles in this field equalled in number those in his earlier, academic career. Kenneth Kaye's books in this field are ''Workplace Wars: Turning Personal Conflict to Productive Teamwork'' (1994) and ''The Dynamics of Family Business'' (2005).
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Kaye, Kenneth
1946 births
American psychologists
Living people
Harvard University alumni