The first developmental psychologist was not Jean Piaget, but an American, James Mark Baldwin, born in 1861.  Educated at Princeton and at several German universities, he held professorships at Toronto, Princeton, Johns Hopkins University, and the National University of Mexico.  He projected five hierarchical levels of consciousness, starting with the Pre-logical, in which:

Presentation and its reality [are] not distinguished.  [There is] only an incipient perception of persons as different from things.

In the next level, the Quasi-logical, the person learns to differentiate between the inner and outer worlds and becomes aware of feelings shared by others.  Further up, in the Logical level, the person learns to differentiate truth and falsity, dealing critically with ideas and realities.  But the logical life is not the highest, for beyond is the Extra-logical level in which the person learns to judge good and bad and experience “development of the ideal aspect of experience in practical reason.” Hyper-logical is the highest level:

The self reads itself into experience, interpreting the generality of cognition through the singularity of sentiment.  The immediacy of feeling is restored, and the personal and concrete enter back into the scientific and theoretical, so that experience attains an aesthetic unity and becomes complete in itself while the real undergoes an expansion beyond the logical or scientific.  There is a complete reconciliation of the dichotomies: actual/ideal, knowledge/value, objectivity/intimacy, and producer/spectator. (Broughton 1982)

Notice how Baldwin has established that in this level the storms of Romanticism and the rebellion of bohemianism are solved in the reconciliation of dichotomies, expanding understanding beyond the logical or scientific rather than negating them.

It was from this beginning that Piaget developed his hierarchical system for explaining child cognitive development.  Beginning with sensorimotor (birth to 2 years) in which the child is developing its sensorimotor functions, the ability to interact with the environment and learn to move, he added preoperational, (2 years to 7 years) learning language and the ability to analyze limited, static information, concrete operational, (7 years to 11 years) learning to analyze more complex situations, handle transformations, and formal operational, (11 years and above) beginning to develop the ability to imagine the possibilities in a situation.

In Maslow’s related system, consciousness is expressed as a response to a hierarchy of needs.  First, a person must first satisfy her physiological needs: for food, water, rest, and sex.  Then she will be ready to deal with her safety needs: for security, comfort, and freedom from fear.  With safety needs taken care of, she will be able to deal with her belongingness needs, then self-esteem, then self-actualization, then self-transcendence. 

Arnold Mitchell developed and popularized Maslow’s needs hierarchy in The Nine American Lifestyles and the Values and Lifestyles program (VALS) at Stanford Research Institute.  People were defined by their lifestyles, “need-driven,” “outer-directed,” or “inner-directed.”  Writing in 1980, Mitchell found that about 11 percent of the population was need-driven, 67 percent outer-directed, and 20 percent inner-directed.  Another two percent were “Integrated.”  After the death of Mitchell, the VALS program was continued at SRI and modified into VALS2.  For VALS2 the old VALS lifestyles were juggled around and grouped by “Resources.”  The high resource group possessed “the full range of psychological, physical, demographic, and material means and capacities that people have to draw upon.”  Lifestyles included Actualizers in the high resource group, Strugglers in the low-resource group, and Fulfilleds, Believers, Achievers, Strivers, Experiencers, Makers in the medium resource group.

Lawrence Kohlberg developed a stage theory of moral development that tracks with Piaget’s theory of cognitive development.  The first stage is the preconventional.  The child does the right thing to avoid punishment, but is unable to consider the interests of others.  The second stage is conventional, living up to what other people expect of people in a specific role of son, sister, or friend.  People have an understanding that other peoples’ expectations take primacy over individual interests.  The third stage is post-conventional, or principled.  People understand that most values and rules are relative to a particular group; they learn to follow self-chosen ethical principles.

Jane Loevinger developed an ego stage theory in Ego Development.  It begins at birth with the Presocial stage, where the person lacks an ego, but learns to differentiate himself from the world and realize that there is a stable world of objects.  In the Symbiotic stage the baby learns to differentiate itself from mother, and by learning language to further differentiate itself as a separate person.  In the Impulsive stage, differentiation proceeds still further, with the beginnings of moral judgment, where “good” primarily means “good-to-me” and “bad” means “bad-to-me.”  The Self-protective stage is the first step towards control of impulses where the child learns to anticipate short-term rewards and punishments and understand the concept of rules.  But the main rule is “don’t get caught.” 

In the Conformist stage, the child begins to identify its own welfare with the welfare of the group, the family, or the peer group.  For this stage to be successful, the child must develop a sense of trust.  The Conformist values niceness and cooperation with others but sees behavior in terms of externals instead of internals, doing the right thing rather than feeling the right thing.  Belonging makes the Conformist feel secure.

The Self-aware level is the transition from Conformist to Conscientious and, according to Loevinger, “probably the modal level for adults in our society.”  Whereas the Conformist lives in a simple world in which the same thing is right always and for everyone, the Self-aware person sees alternatives, but still in stereotypic “categories like age, sex, marital status, and race, rather than in terms of individual differences in traits and needs.” 

At the Conscientious stage, the internalization of rules is completed.  The Conscientious person evaluates and chooses rules for himself, yet feels himself his brother’s keeper.  He aspires to achievement, but in his own terms.  There is a deepening understanding of other peoples’ viewpoints.

| <<prev | 1 | (2) | 3 | 4 | 5 | next>> |

print view

Click for Chapter 11: A Likely Story

Your comments are welcome. Please e-mail to Christopher Chantrill at mailto:chrischantrill@gmail.com, and take the RMC test here.

©2005 Christopher Chantrill