Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [229]
The consequences of behavior may “feed back” into the organism. When they do so, they may change the probability that the behavior which produced them will occur again… When changes in behavior extend over longer periods, we speak of the independent variable as the age of the organism. The increase in probability as a function of age is often spoken of as maturation.5
Happily, a far more sophisticated approach to developmental research and a correspondingly more profound theory would soon transform the field. These were the work of the man who asked the five-year-old boy to teach him how to play marbles.
A Giant, and a Giant Theory
Jean Piaget (1896–1980), most developmentalists agree, was the greatest child psychologist of the twentieth century; without him, said the distinguished British developmental psychologist Peter Bryant, “child psychology would have been a meager thing.”6 In the 1920s, when Piaget was a young man, his early contributions revolutionized child psychology in France and Switzerland, and thirty years later the products of his mature years did so in America. What made his work so influential was in part the beauty and explanatory power of his theory, and in part the many remarkable discoveries, made through painstaking research, on which he based it.
“Painstaking” is an understatement. From the days when he was a tall, slender young man with bangs on his forehead until his eighties, when he was white-haired, stooped, and portly, Piaget spent a great deal of his time watching children play and playing with them, telling them stories and listening to theirs, asking them innumerable questions about why things work the way they do (“When you go walking, why does the sun move with you?”, “When you dream, where is the dream and how do you see it?”), and inventing puzzles and problems for them to solve. Through these activities, Piaget made a number of what the developmental psychologist Jerome Kagan of Harvard has called “amazing discoveries…a host of fascinating, hardy phenomena which were under everybody’s nose but which few were talented enough to see.”7
One of them: Piaget would show a baby a toy, then put his beret over it. Until about nine months of age, the baby would forget the toy the moment it disappeared, but at about nine months would realize that it still existed under the beret. Another: Piaget would show a child two identical wide beakers containing equal amounts of water, pour the water from one into a tall thin vessel, and then ask the child which container had more. A child under seven would almost always say the tall thin one, but a child of seven or more would recognize that although the shape had changed, the quantity had not. Piaget made many such discoveries, most of which, despite later modifications, have held up; child psychology, says Kagan, “had never possessed such a covey of sturdy facts.”8
To account for his findings, Piaget constructed a complex theory made up of his own concepts of cognitive processes plus others from biology, physics, and philosophy. (He also explored but made little use of Freudian and Gestalt psychologies.) His basic message was that the mind, through its interaction with the environment, undergoes a series of metamorphoses. It does not merely accumulate experiences but is changed by them, achieving new and more advanced kinds of thinking, until by about age fifteen it is the sort of mind we think of as characteristically human. And so modern developmental psychology was born.
What was he like, this man who could sit with and listen to children for sixty years but who also had the intellectual might to transform a major area of psychology?9 The unlikely answer: gentle, dignified, benign, friendly, and warm. His colleagues and co-workers all referred to him affectionately as le patron (the boss), he never aroused vicious opposition, he almost always responded mildly to criticism of his work, and none of his close associates ever broke with him. Pictures of Piaget in his later