Stephanie Hurt
A Swiss psychologist named Piaget as a theory that all people pass in a fixed sequence
through a series of universal stages of cognitive development. The four stages in the theory are
sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational. In this theory, the
movement form one stage to the next happens when a person reaches a certain level of physical
maturation and is exposed to relevant experiences. If the person doesn’t go through the
experiences they are assumed to be incapable of reaching there cognitive potential. Other theory
talk about the content of children’s knowledge about the world but Piaget focuses on the quality
of children’s and adolescent knowledge and understanding as they move from one stage to the
next.
Piaget talks about how a human thinking is arranged into schemes. Schemes are
organized mental patterns that represent behaviors and actions. As a person ages the schemes
become more abstract and sophisticated. They go from sucking as an infant to playing
instruments. Piaget talks about the two principles that associate with the growth in schemes. The
first one is assimilation and the second one is accommodation.
Assimilation is the process by which people understand an experience in terms of their
current stage of cognitive development and way of thinking. This occurs when a stimulus is
acted on, perceived and understood threw patterns of thought. Accommodations are changes in
existing ways of thinking that occur in response to encounters with new stimuli or events. An
example of this would be moving from using a tricycle to a bicycle. They are similar enough that
you can use the information you know from the tricycle to help you use a bicycle. It may be
difficult to learn how to balance on the bicycle because that wasn’t an element with the tricycle
but with maturity and experience the person will ride smoothly in no time.
Adolescence goes through the formal operational stage. In this stage, people develop the
ability to think abstractly. According to Piaget, it starts when a person reaches the start of
adolescence around the age of 12. Using formal principles to solve problems benefits the
adolescent because they now think abstractly rather than in concrete terms. With this skill
adolescence are able to test their understanding by systematically carrying out basic experiments
on problems and situations and observing what their experimental interventions. This stage in
Piaget’s theory uses hypotheticodeductive reasoning. This means they start with a basic theory
about what makes a certain outcome and then deduce explanations for specific situations in
which they see that outcome. Basically, it like in science class when you have a theory and then
you test it out to see if it has the outcome you thought it would have.
During this formal operational stage, propositional thought occurs. This is reasoning that
uses abstract logic in the absence of concrete examples. Piaget makes an interesting point that
when an adolescent starts this stage all of the capabilities don’t just appear. They develop slowly
and appear through a combination of physical maturation and environmental experiences. That’s
why 21 years olds are more mature mentally then a 12 year old but it depends on the person.
Some people aren’t mature and have the mental capacity of at 12 years old when they are 16.
Another interesting thing Piaget said is that some people don’t fully develop this until
later and some don’t use it at all. Some people don’t use formal operational thinking constantly.
One reason for that is that people are lazy and rely on intuition and mental shortcuts rather than
formal reasoning. People are also more eager to use thinking abstractly to something familiar to
them because people find unfamiliar situations more difficult to apply formal operations.
Another interesting aspect Piaget talks about is that adolescence differs in their use of
formal operational because of the culture in which they were raised. Andre lives in a
neighborhood where he sees acts of violence every day. That is his cultural norm. Adolescence
that live in isolated areas lack scientific orientation and have barely any formal education is less
likely to perform at a formal operational level than an educated person living in a culture with a
lot of technology. When adolescence transition to this stage they become more argumentative.
They find happiness using abstract thinking to poke holes into people’s explanations. That’s why
when parents tell them not to cuss and then the parents cuss the adolescent never lets them forget
it.
This ability can be a good thing and a bad thing. Bad because it can drive the parent,
teacher, and/or supervisor crazy because they are questioning all the time. Good because it can
make the adolescent more interesting, actively seeking to understand the values and justifications
that they encounter in their lives.
In this case study, 15 year old Andre was recently arrested for armed robbery. He
believed that adults would follow him home and harm his grandparents and siblings He decided
that the only way his family would not be harmed was if he left home but he needed money to
leave home, so he robbed a cab driver. In his head, protecting his family justified robbing
someone. Adolescence has egocentrism. This is a state of self-absorption in which the world is
viewed from one’s own point of view. The adolescent develops capabilities to introspect and
examine their own thinking. The video state of mind that Andre has is he’s developing what is
called an imaginary audience. This is a fictitious observer who pays as much attention to
adolescent’s behavior as they do themselves. This involves the adolescent’s egocentrism first
hand. An example of this would be Andre believing that adults would follow him home and
harm his family. That was just the first distortion adolescents can have and the second is called a
personal fable. A personal fable is the view held by some adolescents that what happens to them
is unique, exceptional, and shared by no one else. In Andre’s case, this would be his thought that
no one has been in a situation where they need money so much and it’s ok for me to rob a cab
driver because of it. He hasn’t fully developed the ability to make an abstract decision/thought
so I think the court’s assessment of his guilt should differ to less.