Jean Piaget
Psychologist · 1896-1980 · Psychology, stage 3: Meet the psychologists
Treated children's mistakes as evidence that their thinking is organised differently, not merely less well informed.
Overview
Jean Piaget began as a biologist and came to psychology through work standardising intelligence tests, where he noticed that the children's wrong answers were more interesting than their right ones: children of the same age made the same errors, which suggested a shared underlying organisation rather than random ignorance. From this he built a stage theory in which thinking is reorganised qualitatively at each step, and he described the mechanism as a balance between assimilation, fitting new information into existing structures, and accommodation, changing the structures to fit. His methods were informal by later standards, with small samples that included his own three children and flexible clinical interviews rather than standardised procedures. The broad sequence of his stages has held up reasonably well; the ages have not, because experiments using looking time rather than reaching and talking show infants understanding object permanence and number far earlier than he concluded. Start with The Child's Conception of the World, which shows the interview method directly.
Where to start reading
The Language and Thought of the Child 1923
His first major study, on how children's speech serves their own thinking before it serves communication.
The Child's Conception of the World 1926
Interviews probing what children believe about dreams, names, life, and causation; the clearest display of his clinical method.
The Origins of Intelligence in Children 1936
The sensorimotor stage worked out in detail from close observation of infants, including his own.
Part of
Sources
- Jean Piaget Wikipedia
- Piaget's theory of cognitive development Wikipedia
- The Philosophy of Childhood Stanford Encyclopedia of PhilosophySets out the main criticisms of the stage model, including the underestimation of infants.
