Development
Cognitive Development
Piaget and Cognitive Development
• Jean Piaget (1896-1980) Swiss Psychologist.
• He was intrigued by the fact that children of
different ages made different kinds of mistakes
while solving problems.
• They are not “little adults”.
• He believed that children move
through 4 cognitive stages.
The Four Stages
1. SENSORIMOTOR
Birth-2 years
Experience world through actions
(touch-sight) and on innate motor
responses to stimuli.
Very little thinking involved.
Object Permanence- The realization
that an object continues to exist even
if you can’t see or touch it.
Object Permanence
Object Permanence
2. Preoperational 2-6 years
2. preoperational 2-6 years
Representing things with words & images but no
logical reasoning.
Pretend Play
Egocentrism- The tendency to view the world
from one’s own perspective without recognizing
that others may have different points of view.
(3 mountains problem)
They do not understand conservation - The
understanding that physical properties of an object
remain unchanged despite changes in appearance.
The 3 Mountains Experiment
3. Concrete Operational 6-11 years
Children can perform
mental operations on
tangible objects or
events & begin logically
reasoning, but still is
incapable of abstract
thought.
4. FORMAL OPERATIONAL
11-adulthood
Abstract reasoning
PSYCHOSOCIAL DEVELOPMENT
Erik Erikson proposed that humans develop a personality in
eight psychosocial, or psychological and social, stages.
During each stage, we experience a particular psychosocial
crisis that will be resolved either positively or negatively, and
each outcome will have an effect on our ability to deal with the
next one.
PSYCHOSOCIAL DEVELOPMENT
The most important “crisis” to solve is the
“Identity Crisis” that occurs
during adolescence.
Erikson argued that in order to come to a
sense of identity, teens must engage in
exploration.
They must try out new ways
of thinking and behaving.
This explains the many
"phases" that teens go through
as their attempts at exploration.
morals
Concerned with the principles of right
and wrong behavior and the goodness
or badness of human character.
moral development
Lawrence Kohlberg
believed...and was able to
demonstrate through
studies...that people progressed
in their moral reasoning (their
bases for ethical behavior)
There are 3 main Levels.
Pre-conventional, Conventional &
Post-conventional
moral development
the heinz dilemma
A woman was near death from a special kind of cancer. There was
one drug that the doctors thought might save her. It was a form of
radium that a druggist in the same town had recently discovered.
The drug was expensive to make, but the druggist was charging ten
times what the drug cost him to produce. He paid $200 for the
radium and charged $2000 for a small dose of the drug. The sick
woman's husband, Heinz, went to everyone he knew to borrow the
money, but he could only get together about $1,000 which is half of
what it cost. He told the druggist that his wife was dying and asked
him to sell it cheaper or let him pay later. But the druggist said: "No, I
discovered the drug and I'm going to make money from it." So Heinz
got desperate and broke into the man's store to steal the drug for his
wife.