Jean Piaget is the second most referenced psychologist of the 20th century second
only to B.F. Skinner and slotting in just above Sigmund Freud. The Swiss psychologist
is responsible for the most studied theory of human development in the history of
psychology. Piaget charted the development
of the child from infancy to adolescence and distinguished four critical phases in human
growth. These phases have been tested and retested with everyone from Amazonian
tribes and Swedish school children to Iranians, Zambians and Australian Aborigines.
After decades of intense cross-cultural research, there is a wealth of evidence pointing
to the universal and cross-cultural nature of these stages. In reviewing this evidence,
one group of authors state in their textbook that cultural settings sometimes alter the
rate of development, or an emphasis on certain aspects of the stages but not the
stages themselves or their cross-cultural validity.
The exception to this is the fourth stage formal operational; it seems that not all
individuals reach this stage of development.
This is the stage associated with rationality and hypotehtico-deductive
thinking and thus understandably this stage might not be as emphasised across all cultures.
In this episode we are going to give a basic overview of this system as it will be a
system of reference that we will be pointing to again and again in future videos. Piaget
has laid the foundation for all developmental psychology and his success is one of the
testaments to the success of the field. Given the weight of evidence behind it and the
universal subject matter it is more than worthy of investigation.
The first stage that lasts from the ages of 0-2 years is called sensorimotor. Another
way of thinking of this stage is as the time between birth and the acquisition of
language. At the sensorimotor stage the experience of
the infant is one of total dissolution in the environment. There is nothing that is not the
child; the physical world and the self are one. This is why the game of peek-a-boo is so
exciting for infants because when you hide your face you are genuinely not
there. You have literally disappeared from the world since the world is just everything that the
child is experiencing through their senses.
The work of the sensorimotor phase is the slow and steady separation of the physical
self from the environment. As Piaget puts it It is through a progressive differentiation
that the internal world comes into being and is contrasted
with the external. Piaget Between the fourth and ninth month,
this state of total dissolution gives way to the emergence of a physical body-self. The infant
bites her thumb and it hurts; she bites the blanket and it doesn t. The infant is
mapping out the boundaries between their body and the physical world.
As these two realms of the self and other become distinct they begin as Piaget says:
by remaining very close to each other: the world is still conscious and
full of intentions, the self is still material, so to speak, and only slightly
interiorized. At every stage there remain in the conception of nature
what we might call adherences, fragments of internal experience
which still cling to the external world. These magical holdovers are called adherences
by Piaget and include thing like animism and anthropocentrism.
These adherences hang on long after the sensorimotor phase has faded away. Even
children of 7 or 8 take it for granted that the clouds, the sun and the moon are following us
about on our walks. It never crosses their minds, (because thinking from the
perspective of others doesn t develop till later)
that the heavenly bodies must also follow other people around.
The defining characteristic of these adherences is egocentrism the child s inability
to transcend their own perspective and understand that they are not the centre of the
world. The course of development then is a slow progression from the dissolved
egocentrism of sensorimotor to the ever broadening capacity to take other
perspectives in the later stages. The magical worldview of the infant
doesn t disappear overnight but becomes progressively less and less as development
continues through the stages beyond sensorimotor. But if all goes well by the end
of two years, the infant is moving beyond the sensorimotor stage having arrived
at object permanence the understanding that physical objects exist independently of them.
And with that the game of peek-a- boo loses its allure.
The second stage is the preoperational stage also known as preop and this is usually
when the child is between 3 and 7 years of age. It s called preoperational because even though
the child now has a mental world of language they are still unable to perform
operations mentally. They can t understand concrete logic and they can t mentally
manipulate information. Consequently they have trouble seeing things from different points
of view i.e. their thinking is still egocentric.
The preoperational stage has two phases. The first is called the symbol function
substage. In this substage, the child can think in images and symbols. They develop the
ability to hold objects in their mind that aren t present. If you ask them to think of a
pink elephant they can now do that. The second substage of preop is the intuitive
thought substage; this is the stage when the child s curiosity goes crazy, they starting
asking why a lot as they try in earnest to understand the world.
According to Piaget, magical thinking continues to dominate the entire early preop
period between the ages of 2 and 4: Up to the age of 4 5, [the child] thinks
that he is forcing or compelling the moon to move;
the relation takes on an aspect of dynamic participation or of magic. From 4 to 5 he
is more inclined to think that the moon is trying to follow him:
the relation is animistic. Closely akin to this participation
is magical causality: the subject regards his gestures, his thoughts, or the objects
he handles, as charged with efficacy Thus a certain word
acts upon a certain thing; a certain gesture will protect one from a certain danger;
a certain white pebble will bring about the
growth of water lilies, and so on. As the child moves from this early preop
phase of 2-4 years into late preop from 4-7 years old, this belief in magic rapidly falls
away. The child loses faith that they can control the world; this belief doesn t disappear
however but is projected onto authority figures. I can t change the world but
Daddy or God or the Volcano Spirit can. No longer do the clouds obey us at a distance,
now they move because god or other men make them move.
The stage that follows Preoperational is called Concrete Operational which usually
occurs between the ages of 7 and 11. The conop stage gets its name from the
child s developing ability to do concrete operations in their mind. This means that the
child is beginning to use logical thought. The concrete in concrete operational
refers to the fact that this newfound logic can only be applied to physical objects. The ability
to think abstractly will only emerge in the next stage with formal operational.
Children at this conop stage are capable of using inductive logic but not deductive
logic. That is to say that they can reason from specific events to a general principle but
they can t figure out what s going to happen in a specific moment based on a general
principle. This means that the conop child is going to
use trial and error to solve a problem while the adolescent at formal operational is more
likely to use hypotheses and abstract logic i.e. deductive reasoning.
The other big step forward at conop is the ability to take multiple perspectives. And
with this leap forward the child moves from an egocentric perspective into a
sociocentric one in which they appreciate that other people have their own thoughts
and perspectives even if at this stage they are unable to know what that perspective
might be. The Three Mountains task is one of Piaget
s famous experiments that displays just this development:
The reserachers took a group of kids between four and twelve years old and they
showed them a play set that had a toy doll and three clay mountains each one a
different colour. Then they asked the kids some simple questions:
what do you see? What does the doll see?
The typical response of a child at the second stage Preop was to say that the doll
was seeing the same thing as they were. They would say this even if the child was
looking at the green mountain and the doll was looking at the red one.
The preop child doesn t understand that there are different perspectives involved. As
we move further into preop we see the ability to take multiple perspectives developing
the child will realise that the doll has a different perspective though they will be
unable to tell you what that is. This capability develops fully with conop;
the child at this stage will tell you I am looking at all three mountains but the doll
is only looking at the green one . This task and ones like it confirm the
general conclusion: it is with the emergence of
concrete operation thought that the child can transcend their egocentric perspective
and take the perspective of the other. ?
The final stage of Piaget s developmental sequence is known as the formal operational
stage which we find in children over 11 entering adolescence. And with this stage we
see the flowering of Reason. The nature of formop reasoning
transcends the concrete thinking of conop. The formop child/adolescent can now perform mental
operations not just on concrete physical objects but on abstractions.
This is the emergence of rigorous reason the use of deductive reasoning, of hypothesising.
The Formop individual is experimental and relies on evidence to settle issues.
The ability to take multiple perspectives into account also take major leaps forward.
The formop individual can now take multiple perspectives fully into account and can
grapple with relativity as we see in another one of Piaget s experiments:
In a set of experiments, a snail moves along a board, which itself is
moving along a table. Only children at the formal operations stage can
understand the distance which the snail travels relative to the board and
to the table. Here we find the intellectual equipment necessary for
conceptions of relativity that time taken or space travelled cannot be
absolute, but must be measured relative to some arbitrary point.
Along with this increased breadth of thinking capacity we see a broadening of the
identity in formop as well as moving fully away from the egocentric and ethnocentric
identity of the earlier stages and into a more global pluralistic perspective. Formop is
non-anthropocentric. It is this shift from the egocentric
and ethnocentric view that we see in the stereotypical idealistic adolescent who is
passionate about combating issues of global importance. They have moved away from identity
with their family and their tribe and they are beginning to take a broader
perspective and to question who they are and what their place is in the world.
? These are the basics of Jean Piaget
s psychological developmental sequence. His theories have been immensely influential in the
field of psychology even if he is no longer centre stage.
His work has been developed by many more theorists in many more fields. Many of
these theorists have gone beyond Piaget in proposing post formal operational levels.
The most notable example of this is the MHC or Model of Hierarchical Complexity
developed by Michael Commons which simplified and expanded Piaget s stages into a
mathematical measure of task complexity. The MHC posits another four levels
beyond Formop: Systematic Meta-Systematic, Paradigmatic and Cross-Paradigmatic.
As well as this there is the work of Lawrence Kohlberg who mapped out the moral
development of children off of Piaget s work and looked at the development of
morality from pre-conventional to conventional and finally post-conventional stages.
The you have the work of people like Ken Wilber who not only synthesises the work of
many thinkers in positing a number of levels beyond formop but also works with the
ontogenetic vs phylogenetic distinction. Which is to say that he looks at the analogous
historical development of humanity and maps over the Piaget s stages onto it so you
have the emergence of Formop with the scientific revolution and before that you have
the mythic conop thinking of medieval society and so on back to the tribal past of
humanity. We will be looking at Wilber s take on
Piaget in the next episode as we look at how he applies the work of Piaget to argue that spiritual
experiences are post-formal Piagetian stages of development.
That s everything that I wanted to cover on this episode of the living philosophy. If
you ve enjoyed this episode please give it a thumbs up down below and subscribe. And
if you any thoughts insights or feedback I d love to hear from you down in the
comments otherwise I shall see you next time thanks for watching.