206 Developmental Psychology
emphasis on behaviorist and normative development, its
focus on experimental child psychology and social learning
theory, was a sharp departure from the origins of the field.
What Cairns noted two decades ago is still true today: “An
overview of the past suggests that today’s investigators are as
much determined by history as they are makers of it. The
major issues of the present appear to be, in a large measure,
the same ones that thoughtful contributors to the science have
addressed in the past” (Cairns, 1983, p. 90).
Why are we returning to the concerns of our distant past?
One reason is that our forebears were wise in their choice of
questions and raised enduring issues. Another reason is that,
in the middle period, developmentalists took some detours
away from the original goals of the field in their enthusiasm
for establishing a separate science on the basis of positivistic
principles. The field’s behavioristic focus promoted a prolif-
eration of excellent methods and technological advances but
ignored basic questions of biology, consciousness, and cogni-
tion. Today, as the beneficiaries of both the early and the
middle eras, we are in a position to ask again the old ques-
tions and address them in more methodologically sophisti-
cated ways.
THE BEGINNING YEARS (1880–1914)
The beginning years of the field of development can be char-
acterized in two ways. One way is to describe the figures who
first forged the field; the other way is to describe their posi-
tions in terms of modern theoretical distinctions.
The Founders
When the field of child psychology was established as a sep-
arate and distinctive field, two sets of influential individuals
were involved. One group provided the institutional and or-
ganizational support for the new discipline of psychology;
the second group provided ideas and methods for the new sci-
ence of developmental psychology. G. Stanley Hall led the
first group; James Mark Baldwin, Sigmund Freud, and Albert
Binet formed the second.
The intellectual figure who anticipated the emergence of
the distinctive field of developmental psychology and who in-
fluenced the thinking of all these early figures was not a psy-
chologist, however, but the biologist, naturalist, and architect
of evolutionary theory, Charles Darwin (1809–1882). Darwin
provided the intellectual foundation for a science of develop-
ment by arguing that human development was governed by
a set of discoverable natural laws. This central thesis, in
combination with Darwin’s own early experimental studies of
infants’ emotional and perceptual abilities, paved the way for
later scientific analysis of children’s development.
G. Stanley Hall (1844–1924) was a cofounder and first
president of the American Psychological Association and the
founder of the first professional journal on development,
Pedagogical Seminary. In 1909, Hall, as president of Clark
University, invited Sigmund Freud to an international con-
ference involving American and European psychologists and
psychoanalysts. This was a landmark meeting; it introduced
Freud and his psychoanalytic ideas to an American audi-
ence, and those ideas shaped the thinking of developmental
scholars in the United States for the next half century. As a
theorist and methodologist, Hall made more limited contri-
butions (see Ross, 1972; White, 1992). He did introduce the
questionnaire as a way to explore the contents of children’s
minds—in fact, between 1894 and 1914 he published 194
questionnaires (White, 1992)—but his nonrandom sampling
strategies, his imprecise wording of questions, and his non-
standardized mode of administering the questionnaires made
the work more suggestive than definitive. Hall and his con-
temporaries at the turn of the century had limited knowledge
of sampling techniques and issues of generalizability, and
they chose samples of convenience; unfortunately, these
highly selected samples were of unknown representative-
ness. Hall is perhaps best known for his recognition that
adolescence is a unique period of development with a vari-
ety of concomitant shifts in biology, cognition, and social
relationships (Hall, 1904).
Hall’s contemporary, James Mark Baldwin (1860–1934),
was less of a facilitator but more of a theorist. He held posi-
tions at the University of Toronto, where he established the
first experimental psychology laboratory in North America,
and later at Princeton University and Johns Hopkins Univer-
sity. Although he was a talented experimentalist, it was his
theoretical work that secured his position in the history of
developmental psychology. In his extensive theoretical
writings, he articulated a variety of themes, which in retro-
spect appear surprisingly contemporary (Baldwin, 1894,
1895, 1897). First, he developed a stage theory of develop-
ment, which was remarkably similar to Piaget’s. As Piaget
would later do, Baldwin set out a series of stages of develop-
ment for mental processes, which were to a substantial extent
based on observations of his own children. Even more than
Piaget, he recognized the interplay between social and cogni-
tive development and championed the study of the self and
the need to examine different units of analysis (individual,
dyad, and group). Unfortunately, Baldwin’s contribution was
limited because of the short duration of his career, which