YOUR DEVELOPMENTimagine what the scene would look like from different perspectives – for
example, they might be asked to select the photo that best showed the
view from a position opposite to where they were sitting. What Piaget
found was that children younger than four didn’t understand the task,
kids aged four to six understood it but were not very good at it, whereas
seven-year-olds and upwards were far more successful. Piaget said this
was because children younger than seven reason in an “egocentric” way,
Jean Piaget (1896–1980)
Swiss-born Piaget is the second most highly cited psychologist of all
time, behind Freud. He was an academic prodigy, publishing his first
paper at the tender age of eleven, on the topic of the albino sparrow.
Hundreds more research papers and more than 75 books would follow
in a long and prolific career. His most influential works include The
Origins of Intelligence in Children, The Construction of Reality in the Child,
and Play, Dreams, and Imitation in Childhood. Early in his career, Piaget
worked briefly with the famous psychoanalyst Carl Jung and later with
the intelligence-test pioneer Alfred Binet (1857–1911). He married in
1923 and, like all self-respecting developmental psychologists, studied
his own children Jaqueline, Lucienne and Laurent.
Influenced by evolutionary theory, Piaget founded a new area of
academic enquiry known as genetic epistemology, which drew parallels
between the developmental trajectory of a person’s knowledge and
the way that species adapt to their environmental circumstances. He
is famous for arguing that thought develops through childhood in
a series of a discrete, qualitatively distinct stages, which are always
completed in fixed order. These are: the sensorimotor stage (from
birth to about two years), the pre-operational stage (two to seven
years), the concrete operational stage (seven to twelve years) and the
formal operational stage (reached only by children in technologically
advanced societies).
Piaget believed that a child at a given stage of cognitive develop-
ment thinks differently from adults and from children in other stages,
and that the stage a child is at can be revealed by the errors they make
on certain tasks. Older children and adults understand that if nothing
is added or taken away, then – despite appearances – the amount
of something will not have changed. Piaget showed, however, that
children in the pre-operational stage are still lacking in logical powers
and overly reliant on appearances, and so can be tricked into thinking
there is more of something if it takes up more space. Piaget called this
“errors of conservation”. You can test this with children under the age
of five. Pour some water from a short, stubby glass into a tall, thin glass
and they are quite likely to think there is more water in the second
glass simply because the water level is higher.