Kathleen Stassen Berger
Part VI
Chapter Eighteen
Emerging Adulthood: Cognitive Development
Postformal Thought
Morals and Religion
Cognitive Growth and Higher
Education
Prepared by Madeleine Lacefield
Tattoon, M.A.
1
Cognitive Development in Emerging Adulthood
• Cognitive development can be described as
the…
– stage approach
• evaluates whether a new stage or level is reached—
postformal stage of thinking and reasoning in adulthood
– psychometric approach
• analyzes intelligence by means of IQ tests and other
measures
– information-processing approach
• studies how the brain encodes, stores, and retrieves
information
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Postformal Thought
• The Practical and the Personal: A Fifth
Stage?
– Postformal thought
• a proposed adult stage of cognitive
development
• following Piaget’s fourth, a stage that goes
beyond adolescent thinking by being more
practical, more flexible, and more dialectical
• more capable of combing contradictory
elements into a comprehensive whole
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Postformal Thought
• The Practical and the Personal: A Fifth
Stage?
– Really a Stage?
• Piaget considered formal operations to be the
final cognitive stage
• brain researchers report that the prefrontal
cortex is finally developed by age 20
• non-western cultures describe adult though as
qualitatively different from adolescent thought
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Postformal Thought
• The Practical and the Personal: A Fifth
Stage?
– Really a Stage?
• in Hinduism a stage of social embeddedness
(similar to problem finding) lasts through middle
age, then a new stage appears at which people
are expected to be less engaged in immediate
social concerns
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Postformal Thought
• The Practical and the Personal: A Fifth Stage?
– Really a Stage?
• stages that are neurologically based do not appear in
adulthood
• many scholars find a “qualitative” and “quantitative”
change in cognitive functioning through the adult life span
– may be a misnomer
• a new cognitive level
• reached if adult life circumstances allow it
• adults think different than adolescents
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Postformal Thought
• The Fifth Stage
– self-protective—high in self-involvement,
low in self-doubt
– complex—valuing openness and
independence above all
– dysregulated—fragmented, overwhelmed
by emotions or problems
– integrated—able to regulate emotions and
logic
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Postformal Thought
• Combining Subjective and Objective
Thought
– subjective thought
• rises from the personal experiences and
perceptions of an individual
– objective thought
• devalues subjective feelings, personal faith,
and emotional experience while overvaluing
objective, logical thinking
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Postformal Thought
• Consolidating Emotions and Logic
– complex problem solving is the crucial
intellectual accomplishment of
adulthood
– combining affect (emotion) and logic
(cognition)
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Postformal Thought
• Cognitive Flexibility
– the ability…
• to be practical
• to predict
• to plan
• to combine objective and subjective
mental processes
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Postformal Thought
• Cognitive Flexibility
– plans can go awry:
• corporate restructuring
• failure of birth control
• parent’s illness
– adults with cognitive flexibility avoid
retreating into either emotions or
intellect
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Postformal Thought
• Working Together
– cognitive flexibility
• problem-solving
• talking through problems with others
• changing your mind once you made a
mistake
• behavioral changes
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Postformal Thought
• Working Together
– cognitive flexibility
• adults are more likely than children to
imagine several solutions for every
problem and then choose the best one
• research on problem-solving abilities
concludes that emerging adults are
better problem solvers than both
adolescents and the oldest adults
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Postformal Thought
• Countering Stereotypes
– cognitive flexibility
• to change one’s childhood assumptions
• younger adults hold less gender-stereotyped
views
– stereotype threat
• the possibility that one’s appearance or
behavior will be misread to confirm another
person’s oversimplified prejudiced attitudes
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Postformal Thought
• Dialectical Thought
– a most advanced cognitive process,
characterized by the ability to consider a
thesis and its antithesis simultaneously and
thus to arrive at a synthesis
– makes possible an ongoing awareness of pros
and cons, advantages and disadvantages,
possibilities and limitations
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Postformal Thought
• Dialectical Thought
– thesis
• a proposition or statement of belief; the
first stage of the process of dialectical
thinking
– antithesis
• a proposition or statement of belief that
opposes the thesis; the second stage of
the process of dialectical thinking
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Postformal Thought
• Dialectical Thought
– synthesis
• a new idea that integrates the thesis and
its antithesis, thus representing a new
and more comprehensive level of truth;
the third stage of the process of
dialectical thinking
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Postformal Thought
• A “Broken” Love Affair
– nondialectical thinker
• likely to believe that each person has
stable, independent traits
• concludes that one partner is at fault
• a mistake from the beginning – “bad
match”
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Postformal Thought
• A “Broken” Love Affair
– dialectical thinkers:
• see people and relationships as
constantly evolving
• partners are changed by time as well as
by their interaction
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Postformal Thought
• Culture and Dialectics
– researchers believe that background affects
cognitive processes
• Greek philosophy led Europeans to use analytic
absolution logic
– to take sides in a battle between right and wrong, good
and evil
• Confucianism and Taoism led the Chinese to
seek compromise - “Middle Way”
– to think holistically, the whole rather than the parts
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Postformal Thought
• Culture and Dialectics
– Respond to the following;
• Mary, Phoebe, and Julie all have daughters.
Each mother has held a set of values that has
guided her efforts to raise her daughter. Now
the daughters have grown up, and each of them
is rejecting many of her mother's values. How
did it happen and what should they do?
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Postformal Thought
• Culture and Dialectics
– Respond to the following;
• Suppose you are the police officer in charge
of a case involving a graduate student who
murdered a professor… As a police officer,
you must establish motive.
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Postformal Thought
• Culture and Dialectics
– dialectical thought affects priorities and
values
– researchers agree that notable
differences in culture are the result of
nature, not nurture
– “cognitive differences have ecological,
historical, and sociological origins"
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Morals and Religion
• adult responsibilities, experiences,
and education affect moral reasoning
and religious beliefs.
• maturation of values appears first in
emerging adulthood and continues
through middle age.
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Morals and Religion
• one stimulus for young adults in
moral reasoning is college education
– discussions of moral issues or required
subtle ethical decisions (i.e., law and
medicine)
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Morals and Religion
• Which Era? What Place?
– morals and culture
• morals
– affected by circumstance, including national
background, culture, and era
• culture
– determines whether a particular practice is a
moral issue
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Morals and Religion
• Which Era? What Place?
– the power of culture makes if difficult to
assess whether adults morality changes
with age
– moral thinking improves with age
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Morals and Religion
Dilemmas for Emerging Adults
– sex
– sexuality
– reproduction
– relationships
– contraception
– abortion
– drugs
– education
– vocation
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Morals and Religion
• Measuring Moral Growth
– …shifts were seen as young adults
incorporated human social
concerns…young adults became
dialectical, reaching a new level…
(Kohlberg,Chapter 23—Labouvie-Vief, 2006)
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Morals and Religion
• Measuring Moral Growth
– Defining Issues Test (DIT)
• a series of questions developed by
James Rest and designed to asses
respondents’ level of moral development
by having them rank possible solutions
to moral dilemmas
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Morals and Religion
• Stages of Faith – James Fowler
– Stage 1: Intuitive projective faith
– Stage 2: Mythic-literal faith
– Stage 3: Synthetic-conventional faith
– Stage 4: Individual-reflective faith
– Stage 5: Conjunctive faith
– Stage 6: Universalizing faith
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Morals and Religion
• Stages of Faith – James Fowler
– …faith progresses from a simple, selfcentered, one-sided perspective to a
more complex, altruistic (unselfish) and
many-sided view.
– …faith is one way people combat stress,
overcome adversity, and analyze
challenges.
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Cognitive Growth and
Higher Education
• college graduates seem to be not
only healthier and wealthier as well
as deeper and more flexible thinkers.
• scientists view these conclusions with
suspicion.
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Cognitive Growth and
Higher Education
• The Effects of College
– students attend college
• to secure better jobs, learn specific skills
• general education
– college correlates with
•
•
•
•
•
better health
less smoking
better eating
more exercise
longer life
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Cognitive Growth and
Higher Education
• Changes in the College Context
– the fact that colleges and universities are
designed to foster cognitive growth does not
necessarily mean that they succeed
• Changes in the Student
– students and social structures change over time
• Changes in the Institutions
– current colleges offer more career programs and
hire more part-time faculty
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Cognitive Growth and
Higher Education
• Evaluating the Changes
– what do today’s students get out of
attending college?
– colleges no longer produce the “great
intellectual flexibility” that earlier
research found
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Cognitive Growth and
Higher Education
• Evaluating the Changes
– Diversity and Enrollment
• evidence on cognition suggests that
interactions with people of different
backgrounds and various views lead to
intellectual challenges and deeper
thought
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Cognitive Growth and
Higher Education
• Evaluating the Changes
– Graduates and Dropouts
• if postformal thinking—the ability to cope
with the complexities of personal
emotions and logical decision making—
is the result of higher education…then
are the college students who dropout
leaving before reaching this level of
cognition?
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Cognitive Growth and
Higher Education
• Evaluating the Changes
– Graduates and Dropouts
• many young students lack the cultural
knowledge or cognitive maturity to
acquire the “social know-how” needed to
navigate through college
• some “adapt to complexities better as
they proceed through college…”
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