He studied under Richard Solomon at Harvard and contributed several important ideas about conditioning, including the "blocking effect".

While a graduate student, Kamin was subpoenaed by the Jenner anti-Communist Senate committee, but he refused to name others who had been (or might have been) Communists and cited his Fifth Amendment rights.

As department chair at Princeton and then Northeastern, Kamin’s achievements included the creation of programs to recruit and support graduate students of color.

[4] Kamin co-authored the controversial book Not in Our Genes (1984) with geneticist Richard Lewontin and neurobiologist Steven Rose.

[1] In March 1972 an invitation from the Princeton Psychology Department (which Kamin chaired at the time)[citation needed] to Richard Herrnstein (who had a few months earlier published a contentious article about race, gender, class, and intelligence[6]) sparked controversy and threats of protest.

[15] However, Soto (2018) has questioned this conclusion arguing that they come as a consequence of the type of stimuli used in these studies, and shows how contemporary models of associative learning can predict these results on the basis of this observation.