Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [231]
From then on he occupied a succession of important academic and research posts. In his twenties he was director of research at the Rousseau Institute in Geneva for five years; for the next five, professor of philosophy at the University of Neuchâtel; then back to Geneva as co-director, and later director, of the Rousseau Institute and professor at the university; later still, professor at the Sorbonne; and from 1956 on, director of the newly formed Center for Genetic Epistemology at the University of Geneva. (“Genetic epistemology,” a term of his, has nothing to do with genetics; it means intellectual development.)
In all these posts as well as on sidewalks, in parks, and in his own home with his three children—he had married one of his students at the Rousseau Institute—Piaget conducted endless research, focusing now on one age, then on another, until eventually he had pieced together a complete picture of mental development from the first weeks of life to adolescence. In a steady outpouring of articles and books (couched, unfortunately, in exceptionally ponderous prose) he presented the world of psychology with a plethora of remarkable discoveries, a mass of valuable data, and the theory that transmuted the field of child study into developmental psychology. He became world famous, was (and still is) cited more often in psychological literature than anyone but Skinner and Freud, received honorary degrees from several great universities, and won the American Psychological Association’s award for his distinguished contribution to psychology.
All that, without any systematic training or degree in psychology.
Piaget amplified and modified his theory over the years, but we need look only at the final product.
Behaviorists held that development takes place through conditioning and imitation, hereditarians that it is the automatic result of maturation. Piaget differed with both. He held that mental development requires both experience and maturation but is the result of an ever-changing interaction between organism and environment. In that interaction the mind adapts to an experience, is then able to interact in a different fashion with the environment, and adapts still further, undergoing a series of metamorphoses until it reaches the adult state. An infant’s digestive system can at first handle only milk, but later, having developed thanks to the milk, can digest solid food. In similar fashion, the intellect is at first a simple structure that can absorb and utilize only simple experiences but, nourished by them, becomes more advanced, competent, and able to handle more complex ones.
A four-month-old baby, according to Piaget’s research, does not recognize that the toy is under Piaget’s beret; at that stage of mental development, the mind has only current perceptions, not stored images, and a concealed object is as good as nonexistent. But by the latter part of the first year, after accidentally finding the toy under the beret a few times, the baby has modified the reaction to seeing it covered over.
In another classic experiment, the child who has not yet learned to count says that six buttons spaced out in a line are “more” than six buttons bunched together in a line. When he learns to count, he discovers otherwise and his mind’s way of handling such perceptions is transformed.
Both experiments exemplify the two crucial processes of mental development in Piaget’s theory: assimilation and accommodation. The child assimilates the experience of counting the buttons—ingests it, so to speak, as if it were like previous experiences when what looked bigger was indeed bigger. But the new experience produced by counting is discordant with that assumption; the mind, to restore its equilibrium, accommodates (reorganizes) sufficiently to incorporate the new experience, and from then on sees and interprets sets of objects in a way better adapted to reality.10
Piaget once recounted the story of a mathematician friend