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Theories of Development
Development is the series of age-related changes that happen over
the course of a life span. Several famous psychologists, including Sigmund Freud, Erik Erikson, Jean
Piaget, and Lawrence Kohlberg, describe development as a
series of stages. A stage is a period in development in which
people exhibit typical behavior patterns and establish particular
capacities. The various stage theories share three assumptions:
- People pass through stages in a specific order, with each stage building on capacities developed in the previous stage.
- Stages are related to age.
- Development is discontinuous, with qualitatively different capacities emerging in each stage.
Sigmund Freud’s Theory of Personality
The Austrian psychiatrist Sigmund Freud first described personality
development as a series of stages. Of these stages, Freud believed that early
childhood was the most important. He believed that personality developed by
about the age of five.
Freud’s theory of personality development is described in more detail on
pages 268-–273 of Chapter 13, “Personality.”
Erik Erikson’s Theory of Psychosocial Development
Like Freud, Erik Erikson believed in the importance of early childhood.
However, Erikson believed that personality development happens over the entire
course of a person’s life. In the early 1960s, Erikson proposed a theory that
describes eight distinct stages of development. According to Erikson, in each
stage people face new challenges, and the stage’s outcome depends on how people
handle these challenges. Erikson named the stages according to these possible
outcomes:
Stage 1: Trust vs. Mistrust
In the first year after birth, babies depend completely on adults for
basic needs such as food, comfort, and warmth. If the caretakers meet these
needs reliably, the babies become attached and develop a sense of security.
Otherwise, they may develop a mistrustful, insecure attitude.
Stage 2: Autonomy vs. Shame and Doubt
Between the ages of one and three, toddlers start to gain independence
and learn skills such as toilet training, feeding themselves, and dressing
themselves. Depending on how they face these challenges, toddlers can
develop a sense of autonomy or a sense of doubt and shame about themselves.
Stage 3: Initiative vs. Guilt
Between the ages of three and six, children must learn to
control their impulses and act in a socially responsible way. If they
can do this effectively, children become more self- confident. If not,
they may develop a strong sense of guilt.
Stage 4: Industry vs. Inferiority
Between the ages of six and twelve, children compete with peers in
school and prepare to take on adult roles. They end this stage with either a
sense of competence or a sense of inferiority.
Stage 5: Identity vs. Role Confusion
During adolescence, which is the period between puberty and adulthood,
children try to determine their identity and their direction in life.
Depending on their success, they either acquire a sense of identity or
remain uncertain about their roles in life.
Stage 6: Intimacy vs. Isolation
In young adulthood, people face the challenge of developing intimate
relationships with others. If they do not succeed, they may become isolated
and lonely.
Stage 7: Generativity vs. Self-Absorption
As people reach middle adulthood, they work to become productive
members of society, either through parenting or through their jobs. If they
fail, they become overly self-absorbed.
Stage 8: Integrity vs. Despair
In old age, people examine their lives. They may either have a sense
of contentment or be disappointed about their lives and fearful of the
future.
Erikson’s theory is useful because it addresses both personality
stability and personality change. To some degree, personality is stable,
because childhood experiences influence people even as adults. However,
personality also changes and develops over the life span as people face new
challenges. The problem with Erikson’s theory, as with many stage theories
of development, is that he describes only a typical pattern. The theory
doesn’t acknowledge the many differences among individuals.
| Stage | Conflict Faced | Typical Age Range | Major Challenge(s) |
| 1 | Trust vs. mistrust | First year of life | Having basic needs met, attaching to people |
| 2 | Autonomy vs. shame and doubt | 1–3 years | Gaining independence |
| 3 | Initiative vs. guilt | 3–6 years | Acting in a socially responsible way |
| 4 | Industry vs. inferiority | 6–12 years | Competing with peers, preparing for adult roles |
| 5 | Identity vs. role confusion | Adolescence | Determining one’s identity |
| 6 | Intimacy vs. isolation | Early adulthood | Developing intimate relationships |
| 7 | Generativity vs. self-absorption | Middle adulthood | Being productive |
| 8 | Integrity vs. despair | Old age | Evaluating one’s life |
Piaget’s
Theory of Cognitive Development
While conducting intelligence tests on children, Swiss psychologist
Jean Piaget began to investigate how children think. According to
Piaget, children’s thought processes change as they mature physically
and interact with the world around them. Piaget believed children
develop schema, or mental models, to represent the world.
As children learn, they expand and modify their schema through the
processes of assimilation and accommodation. Assimilation is the broadening of an existing schema to include new information. Accommodation is the modification of a schema as new
information is incorporated.
Piaget proposed that children go through four stages of cognitive
development:
Stage 1: Sensorimotor Period
In this stage, which lasts from birth to roughly two years, children
learn by using their senses and moving around. By the end of the
sensorimotor period, children become capable of symbolic
thought, which means they can represent objects in terms of mental
symbols. More important, children achieve object permanence in this stage. Object permanence is the ability to recognize that an
object can exist even when it’s no longer perceived or in one’s sight.
Stage 2: Preoperational Period
This stage lasts from about two to seven years of age. During this
stage, children get better at symbolic thought, but they can’t yet reason.
According to Piaget, children aren’t capable of conservation during this
stage. Conservation is the ability to recognize that measurable
physical features of objects, such as length, area, and volume, can be the
same even when objects appear different.
Piaget argued that children are not capable of conservation during the
preoperational stage because of three weaknesses in the way they think. He
called these weaknesses centration, irreversibility, and egocentrism:
- Centration is the tendency to focus on one aspect of a problem and ignore other key aspects. In the example above, the three-year-old looks only at the higher juice level in the bottle and ignores the fact that the bottle is narrower than the tumbler. Because of centration, children in the preoperational stage cannot carry out hierarchical classification, which means they can’t classify things according to more than one level.
- Irreversibility is the inability to mentally reverse an operation. In the example, the three-year-old can’t imagine pouring the juice from the tumbler back into the bottle. If she poured the juice back, she’d understand that the tumbler holds the same amount of liquid as the bottle.
- Egocentrism is the inability to take someone else’s point of view. Animism, or the belief that even inanimate objects are living, results from egocentrism. Children assume that since they are alive, all other things must be too.
Stage 3: Concrete Operational Period
From the age of seven to about eleven, children become capable of
performing mental operations or working through problems and ideas in their
minds. However, they can perform operations only on tangible objects and
real events. Children also achieve conservation, reversibility, and
decentration during this stage:
- Reversibility is the ability to mentally reverse actions.
- Decentration is the ability to focus simultaneously on several aspects of a problem.
Furthermore, children become less egocentric during this stage as they
start to consider simultaneously different ways of looking at a problem.
Stage 4: Formal Operational Period
In this stage, which begins around eleven years of age and
continues through adulthood, children become capable of applying
mental operations to abstract concepts. They can imagine and reason
about hypothetical situations. From this point on, people start to
think in abstract, systematic, and logical ways.
Critiques of Piaget’s Theories
Although Piaget made important contributions to the research on
cognitive development, his theory has come under attack for several reasons:
- Recent research has shown that he greatly underestimated children’s capabilities. For example, researchers have shown that babies achieve object permanence much sooner than Piaget said they do.
- Children sometimes simultaneously develop skills that are characteristic of more than one stage, which makes the idea of stages seem less viable.
- Piaget ignored cultural influences. Research has shown that children from different cultures tend to go through Piaget’s stages in the same order, but the timing and length of stages vary from culture to culture.
- Some people never develop the capacity for formal reasoning, even as adults.
| Stage | Age | Important Features | |
| 1 | Sensorimotor | First two years of life | Object permanence, symbolic thought |
| 2 | Preoperational | 2–7 years | Centration, irreversibility, egocentrism, and animism |
| 3 | Concrete operational | 7–11 years | Reversibility, decentration, decrease in egocentrism, conservation |
| 4 | Formal operational | 11 through adulthood | Abstract thought |
Kohlberg’s Theory of Moral Development
Lawrence Kohlberg focused on moral reasoning, or why
people think the way they do about right and wrong. Influenced by Piaget,
who believed that moral reasoning depends on the level of cognitive
development, Kohlberg proposed that people pass through three levels of
moral development. He divided each level into two stages.
Level 1: The Preconventional Level
At this level, children ascribe great importance to the authority of
adults. For children in the first stage of this level, an action is wrong if
it’s punished, whereas in the second stage, an action is right if it’s
rewarded.
Level 2: The Conventional Level
In the next level, children value rules, which they follow in order to
get approval from others. In the first stage of this level, children want
the approval only of people who are close to them. In the second stage,
children become more concerned with the rules of the broader society.
Level 3: The Postconventional Level
In the final level, people become more flexible and consider what’s
personally important to them. In the first stage of this level, people still
want to follow society’s rules, but they don’t see those rules as absolute.
In the second stage, people figure out right and wrong for themselves, based
on abstract ethical principles. Only a small proportion of people reach this
last stage of moral reasoning.
Critiques of Kohlberg’s Theories
Research supports key parts of Kohlberg’s theory. People do tend to
progress in order through Kohlberg’s stages, and cognitive and moral
development do affect each other. However, critics of Kohlberg’s theory have
two main concerns:
- People often show the reasoning characteristic of several different levels simultaneously. For instance, in one situation, a person might reason as if he is at a conventional stage, and in another situation, he might use reasoning typical of a postconventional stage.
- Kohlberg’s theory of moral development favors cultures that value individualism. In other cultures, highly moral people may base their reasoning on communal values rather than abstract ethical principles.
| Level | Stage | What Determines Right and Wrong | |
| 1. | Preconventional | 1 | Punishment by adults |
| 2 | Reward by adults | ||
| 2. | Conventional | 3 | Rules set by close people |
| 4 | Rules set by society | ||
| 3. | Postconventional | 5 | Rules set by society, judged by what’s personally important |
| 6 | Rules based on abstract ethical principles |
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