Conscience - Jean Piaget

Piaget, Jean (1896-1980)

Swiss polymath biologist, philosopher, and developmental psychologist, responsible for the most comprehensive theory of intellectual development (cognitive development). Trained as a biologist with an interest in the evolution of organisms, he moved into child psychology when he realized that intellectual abilities slowly evolve in the child. 

While working in Binet's Paris laboratory he became fascinated by the errors children make in intelligence tests, and proceeded to study the development of logical thinking. He began with the preschool child's knowledge of the physical environment, especially through the 'conservation' tasks, which test understanding of properties such as number, volume, or mass. The pre-school child fails to understand that such properties remain constant despite surface transformations in appearance. 

Piaget proposed a universal series of stages of intellectual development from a sensorimotor stage in infants, in which knowledge is expressed through action, through to a formal operational stage characterizing adulthood when reasoning becomes possible with respect to hypothetical situations. Piaget's ideas about the stage-like development of a child's intellect and discovery-based learning have been influential in education and the design of curricula. - Excerpted from The Oxford Interactive Encyclopedia.

Piaget is best known to students of Child Development. He argued that children develop their intellectual powers through interaction with the world. This development takes place in stages, throughout which the child constructs an understanding of the world in which it lives.

The Schemata

The child develops internal representations of mental and physical actions. Some schemata are already present in a newborn, such as sucking, gripping or crying. Others are developed as the child grows and matures.

These schemata are built through two processes:

• 1. Assimilation – fitting newly acquired knowledge into what the child already knows.
• 2. Accommodation – as new experiences occur which do not fit into existing schemata, the child adapts them to fit, or creates new ones.

Assimilation > Equilibrium > New Situation > Disequilibrium > Accommodation > Back to Assimilation and so on

• This process is carried through whenever the child encounters something that is unfamiliar.
• The child applies an existing schema to the situation, but is not successful.
• It therefore modifies the schema to suit, and the cycle returns to the assimilation stage.

Piaget explains that children move through this cycle constantly as they encounter new and unfamiliar situations. He recognised four stages of cognitive development in the children he had been observing.

• 1. The Sensorimotor Stage (0-2yrs) - This is where the infant only knows its immediate surroundings. It learns through its senses, and is unaware of anything beyond itself.
• 2. The Pre-operational Stage (2-7yrs) - The child is beginning to be aware of a world beyond itself. However, it is still unconcerned about other people, and cannot perform activities involving reason.
• 3. Concrete Operational Stage (7-11yrs) - The child develops a greater cognitive awareness. It is less self-centred. However, the child often needs something physical to assist in feats of logic or cognitive processing (such as addition or subtraction).
• 4. Formal Operational Stage (11+yrs) - The child can now internalise complex mental processes. The child can manipulate complex ideas in the head, and abstract concepts can be thought through without concrete examples. Thinking skills are beginning to develop.

Piaget believed that moral sense is developed alongside other cognitive attributes. He saw stages in moral reasoning linked to the child’s general cognitive development, with two stages in moral development:

1. Heteronomous Morality (Generally demonstrated by 5-11yr olds) – The child looks beyond itself for moral authority. This is symptomatic of the pre-operational cognitive stage. Rules are obeyed, with an expectation of swift punishments for lapses (immanent justice). Immoral acts are judged by observable consequences.

2. Autonomous Morality (Generally demonstrated by 10+yr olds) – The child begins to develop a personal code of conduct, based on perceptions of socially acceptable behaviour patterns. Motive becomes more important, and moral situations are recognised for their complexity.

Piaget believed that most adults use a mixture of these two approaches. When the individual becomes less dependent on the views and opinions of others, they move from the heteronomous to the autonomous levels.

Many psychologists have criticised Piaget’s approach – several experiments have been claimed to have discredited his “Stages of Cognitive Development”, arguing that he took no notice of cultural characteristics. Most of the criticisms are procedural – they argue that Piaget’s findings were based on flawed data because his experiments failed to take various factors into account.