Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [239]
—Piaget said that children acquire the concept of causality gradually over a period of years. Later researchers say that he came to this conclusion because he asked children to explain what causes wind and rain, how machines work, and other processes beyond their ken. If, instead, one tests them on things they are familiar with, the results are different. In one such experiment, children saw a ball roll down an incline in a box and disappear, at which point a jack-in-the-box popped up. Then the box, which was actually made in two parts, was pulled apart, and the ball, seen rolling down into one part, obviously could not reach the other part—out of which, nonetheless, the puppet popped up. When it did, children of four and five laughed, giggled, wriggled, and said things like “It’s a trick, right?,” clearly indicating that they sensed that it should not have happened.37
—On the basis of many experiments, a number of psychologists maintain that human intellectual growth is not accomplished in the clear-cut stages depicted by Piaget; there is much more overlapping or gradual change than his model depicts. There is also some evidence that at times children perform—or can be trained to perform—certain mental tasks of an advanced stage before completely mastering the stage they are in; the sequence of steps of mental development is not invariant. Moreover, children can sometimes be trained to think beyond their present stage.
—When psychologists began using Piaget’s tasks to study cognitive development in children in other cultures, they often failed to find evidence of the stage of formal operations. In his later years, Piaget himself began to think that what he had characterized as formal relations relied more on the type of science education children received than on a predetermined psychological growth process.38
This was a foretaste of cultural psychology, one of the two new psychological specialties mentioned earlier that have recently modified and enriched developmental theory far more than all the above-mentioned (and many other) Piagetian-type studies.
Cultural psychology: This minor specialty (also known as cross-cultural psychology) has been bringing a broader and deeper perspective to development theory. We all know, of course, that people in other cultures behave and evidently think and feel anywhere from a bit differently to vastly differently from ourselves (“honor killing” by family members of women in Pakistan who have had an illicit sexual relationship is a “vastly different” example, as is, on a more amiable note, the “wife-lending” of the Inuit of Alaska and the Tupi-Kawahib of central Brazil). But although we are all aware of cultural differences, the great majority of psychological research studies have been conducted with American undergraduates in psychology courses, surely not a representative sample of humanity; generalizations drawn from such studies may be valid for that kind of sample but not necessarily for other people in other countries.39
Relatively few psychologists are devoting themselves to this new discipline, but it has made a number of significant contributions to the field of developmental psychology, these being notable examples:
—Children’s cognition has been shown to develop in whatever way enables them to perform functions valued in their society; the tasks Piaget had his children perform were those he found appropriate and valuable, but, as one researcher has pointed out, if those same children had been evaluated with respect to their grasp of the cognitive complexities of weaving, they would likely have seemed retarded compared to Mayan children in Guatemala.40
—Many Americans never think seriously about their dreams unless they are in therapy or are students of psychology.