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Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development
Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget began to investigate how children think when he was giving them intelligence tests. According to Piaget, the way children think changes as they mature physically and interact with the world around them. Piaget identified four periods of development: sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational.
Stage 1: Sensorimotor Period(birth to roughly age two): During this stage, children learn by using their senses and moving around. The main achievement of this stage is object permanence, which 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 PeriodExample: If a three-month-old baby sees a ball, she’ll probably be fascinated by it. But if someone hides the ball, the baby won’t show any interest in looking for it. For a very young child, out of sight is literally out of mind. When the baby is older and has acquired object permanence, she will start to look for things that are hidden because she will know that things can exist even when they can’t be seen.
(age two to seven): During this period, children keep getting 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.
Stage 3: Concrete Operational PeriodExample: Suppose a researcher gives a three-year-old girl two full bottles of juice. The girl will agree that they both contain the same amount of juice. But if the researcher pours the contents of one bottle into a short, fat tumbler, the girl will then say that the bottle has more. She doesn’t realize that the same volume of juice is conserved in the tumbler.
(age seven to eleven): During this period, children start to become capable of performing mental operations or working problems and ideas through in their minds. However, they can perform operations only on tangible objects and real events.
Stage 4: Formal Operational PeriodExample: If a mother tells her four-year-old, “Your Aunt Margaret is my sister,” he may say, “No, she’s not a sister, she’s an aunt!” An eight-year-old is capable of grasping that Margaret can be both sister and aunt, as well as a daughter, wife, and mother.
(age eleven through adulthood): During this period, children become capable of applying mental operations to abstract concepts. They can imagine and reason about hypothetical situations. From this point on, they start to think in abstract, systematic, and logical ways.
Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive DevelopmentExample: A teenager is motivated to organize a donation drive at his school for flood victims in Bangladesh because he is capable of imagining the plight of the Bangladeshis and empathizing with them. He is also capable of setting up the structures necessary to solicit and collect donations.
Stage
Age
1. Sensorimotor
birth–2 years
2. Preoperational
2–7 years
3. Concrete Operational
7–11 years
4. Formal Operational
11 through adulthood
Kohlberg’s Theory of Moral Development
Lawrence Kohlberg was interested in moral reasoning, or why people think the way they do about what’s right and wrong. Influenced by Piaget, who believed that the way people think about morality depends on where they are in terms of cognitive development, Kohlberg proposed that people pass through three levels of moral development:
- The preconventional level: Children ascribe great importance to the authority of adults.
- The conventional level: Children want to follow rules in order to get approval.
- The postconventional level: People are more flexible and think in terms of what’s personally important to them. Only a small proportion of people reach this last stage of moral reasoning.
Psychologist Carol Gilligan argues that Kohlberg’s theory was inaccurate because he studied only boys. Gilligan posits that girls look beyond the rules of morality to find the caring thing to do, even if that action breaks a preexisting rule. Girls and women are also less likely to judge an individual’s actions as wrong because they see the complexities in relationships better than men do.
Criticisms of Development Theories
Each of the theories of development has flaws. Freud’s theories have always been controversial and are criticized today because they seem very male-centered. Piaget’s theory of cognitive development is useful, but not all people reach the formal operational stage. Likewise, not all people reach Kohlberg’s postconventional level of moral reasoning.
Agents of Socialization
People, groups, and experiences that influence our behavior and self-image are agents of socialization. Common agents of socialization for children include family, school, peer groups, and the mass media.
Family
The family is the agent of socialization with the most impact. From infancy through the teen years, most children rely almost solely on their parents or primary caregivers for basic necessities, nurturing, and guidance. The family determines a child’s race, language, religion, class, and political affiliation, all of which contribute heavily to the child’s self-concept.
School
Schools introduce children to new knowledge, order, bureaucracy, and students from family backgrounds different from their own. The school experience also often pressures children to conform to gender roles.
Peer Groups
A peer group is a social group in which members are usually the same age and have interests and social position in common. By becoming part of a peer group, children begin to break away from their parents’ authority and learn to make friends and decisions on their own. Peer groups have a large impact on a child’s socialization. Pressure from peers to engage in behavior forbidden by parents, such as skipping school or drinking alcohol, can be difficult to resist.
Mass Media
The mass media are methods of communication that direct messages and entertainment at a wide audience. Newspapers, magazines, television, radio, the internet, and movies are all forms of mass media. Numerous sociological studies attest to the profound influence of mass media on children. Racial and sexual stereotypes, violent and sexually explicit images, and unrealistic or even unhealthy beauty standards that appear in the mass media shape the way children think about themselves and their world.
Conflicting Agents of Socialization
Different agents of socialization often teach children conflicting lessons. For example, in the family, children usually learn to respect their elders. Among their friends, however, children may learn that respecting adults makes them unpopular.
Isolated Children
Children raised in isolation, cut off from all but the most necessary human contact, do not acquire basic social skills, such as language and the ability to interact with other humans. Two of the most famous cases are Anna and Isabelle, both of whom were isolated from other human beings but had enough of their physical needs met to survive.
The Case of Anna
Anna was born in Pennsylvania to an unwed mother. The mother’s father was so enraged at Anna’s illegitimacy that the mother kept Anna in a storage room and fed her barely enough to stay alive. She never left the storage room or had anything but minimal contact with another human for five years. When authorities found her in 1938, she was physically wasted and unable to smile or speak. After intensive therapy, Anna did make some progress. She eventually learned to use some words and feed herself.
The Case of Isabelle
Isabelle was discovered in Ohio in the 1930s at the age of six. She had lived her entire life in a dark attic with her deaf-mute mother, after her grandfather decided he couldn’t bear the embarrassment of having a daughter with an illegitimate child. He had banished both of them to the attic, where they lived in darkness and isolation. When Isabelle was discovered, she couldn’t speak. After about two years of intensive work with language specialists, Isabelle acquired a vocabulary of about 2,000 words and went on to have a relatively normal life.
Isolated Monkeys
In the 1960s, psychologists Henry and Margaret Harlow subjected rhesus monkeys to various conditions of social isolation. The behavior of rhesus monkeys is strikingly similar to the behavior of human beings in many ways. The Harlows found that monkeys placed in complete isolation for more than six months were unable to function normally once returned to the group. These monkeys were nervous and anxious. Their findings mirrored findings about isolated children such as Anna.
Institutionalized Children
Children raised in institutions such as orphanages often have difficulty establishing and maintaining close bonds with other people. Such children often have their physical needs met, but little else. They are fed, diapered, and kept warm but are deprived of significant contact with nurturing adults. They are not played with, cuddled, or spoken to. Such children tend to score lower on intelligence tests than children who were not only raised but also nurtured, and their interactions with other people reflect the fact that their emotional needs were not met.
