3

What is a Theory?

Theories are simply an explanation of something and can be valuable tools for understanding human behavior.  In fact, developmental theories offer explanations about how we develop, why we change over time and the kinds of influences that impact development. Theory is usually the first step of conducting research. Theories help guide and interpret research findings by providing researchers with help putting together various research findings. Think of theories as a story that is used to both explain behaviors and to guide research.  Each time a researcher conducts an experiment to test the validity of a theory another page is being added to the story.  The instructions can help one piece together smaller parts more easily than if trial and error are used.

Historical Theories of Development

Today, children are widely seen as vulnerable individuals who need protection and care. Child labor is considered unacceptable, and society generally believes that children should be nurtured. However, this view has changed over time. Historically, children were viewed as “little adults”—they wore miniature versions of adult clothing and were expected to take on adult responsibilities. Their developing bodies and limited strength were not seen as reasons for extra care but rather as flaws. This perspective began to shift in the 18th century, as people started to recognize childhood as a distinct and important stage of development.

John Locke(1632-1704) ^[1]

John Locke, a British philosopher, refuted the idea of innate knowledge and instead proposed that children are largely shaped by their social environments, especially their education as adults teach them important knowledge. He believed that through education a child learns socialization, or what is needed to be an appropriate member of society. Locke advocated thinking of a child’s mind as a tabula rasa or blank slate, and whatever comes into the child’s mind comes from the environment. Locke emphasized that the environment is especially powerful in the child’s early life because he considered the mind the most pliable then. Locke indicated that the environment exerts its effects through associations between thoughts and feelings, behavioral repetition, imitation, and rewards and punishments (Crain, 2005). Locke’s ideas laid the groundwork for the behavioral perspective and subsequent learning theories of Pavlov, Skinner and Bandura.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778)^[2]

Like Locke, Rousseau also believed that children were not just little adults. However, he did not believe they were blank slates, but instead developed according to a natural plan which unfolded in different stages (Crain, 2005). He did not believe in teaching them the correct way to think but believed children should be allowed to think by themselves according to their own ways and an inner, biological timetable. This focus on biological maturation resulted in Rousseau being considered the father of developmental psychology. Followers of Rousseau’s developmental perspective include Gesell, Montessori, and Piaget.

Contemporary Theories of Development

Psychoanalytic Theories

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) and Psychoanalytic Theory^[3]

While sometimes controversial, Freud has been a very influential figure in the area of development; his view of development and psychopathology dominated the field of psychiatry until the growth of behaviorism in the 1950s. His assumptions that personality forms during the first few years of life and that the ways in which parents or other caregivers interact with children have a long-lasting impact on children’s emotional states have guided parents, educators, clinicians, and policy-makers for many years. We have only recently begun to recognize that early childhood experiences do not always result in certain personality traits or emotional states. There is a growing body of literature addressing resiliency in children who come from harsh backgrounds and yet develop without damaging emotional scars (O’Grady and Metz, 1987). Freud has stimulated an enormous amount of research and generated many ideas. Agreeing with Freud’s theory in its entirety is hardly necessary for appreciating the contribution he has made to the field of development.

Freud’s Theory of the Mind

Freud believed that most of our mental processes, motivations and desires are outside of our awareness. Our consciousness, that of which we are aware, represents only the tip of the iceberg that comprises our mental state. The preconscious represents that which can easily be called into the conscious mind. During development, our motivations and desires are gradually pushed into the unconscious because raw desires are often unacceptable in society.

Freud’s Theory of the Self

As adults, our personality or self consists of three main parts: the id, the ego and the superego. The id is the part of the self with which we are born. It consists of the biologically driven self and includes our instincts and drives. It is the part of us that wants immediate gratification. Later in life, it comes to house our deepest, often unacceptable desires such as sex and aggression. It operates under the pleasure principle which means that the criteria for determining whether something is good or bad is whether it feels good or bad. An infant is all id.  The ego is the part of the self that develops as we learn that there are limits on what is acceptable to do and that often, we must wait to have our needs satisfied. This part of the self is realistic and reasonable. It knows how to make compromises. It operates under the reality principle or the recognition that sometimes need gratification must be postponed for practical reasons. It acts as a mediator between the id and the superego and is viewed as the healthiest part of the self.^[4]

The superego’s function is to control the id’s impulses, especially those which society forbids, such as sex and aggression. It also has the function of persuading the ego to turn to moralistic goals rather than simply realistic ones and to strive for perfection.

The superego consists of two systems: The conscience and the ideal self. The conscience can punish the ego through causing feelings of guilt. For example, if the ego gives in to the id’s demands, the superego may make the person feel bad through guilt.

The ideal self (or ego-ideal) is an imaginary picture of how you ought to be, and represents career aspirations, how to treat other people, and how to behave as a member of society.

Behavior which falls short of the ideal self may be punished by the superego through guilt. The super-ego can also reward us through the ideal self when we behave ‘properly’ by making us feel proud.  If a person’s ideal self is too high a standard, then whatever the person does will represent failure. The ideal self and conscience are largely determined in childhood from parental values and how you were brought up.^[5]

Freud’s Levels of Consciousness in Relation to the Id, Ego, and Superego

Freud’s description of personality shows that the ego operates primarily at the conscious level, but also operates somewhat at both the preconscious and unconscious level as does the superego. However, the superego operates mostly at the unconscious level whereas the id totally functions at the unconscious level.^[6]

Psychosexual Stages

Freud’s psychosexual stages of development are presented in the table below. At any of these stages, the child might become “stuck” or fixated if a caregiver either overly indulges or neglects the child’s needs. A fixated adult will continue to try and resolve this later in life. Examples of fixation are given after the presentation of each stage.

Freud’s Psychosexual Stages

Strengths and Weaknesses of Freud’s Theory

Freud’s theory has been heavily criticized for several reasons. One is that it is very difficult to test scientifically. How can parenting in infancy be traced to personality in adulthood? Are there other variables that might better explain development? The theory is also considered to be sexist in suggesting that women who do not accept an inferior position in society are somehow psychologically flawed. Freud focuses on the darker side of human nature and suggests that much of what determines our actions is unknown to us. So why do we study Freud? As mentioned above, despite the criticisms, Freud’s assumptions about the importance of early childhood experiences in shaping our psychological selves have found their way into child development, education, and parenting practices. Freud’s theory has heuristic value in providing a framework from which elaborate and modify subsequent theories of development. Many later theories, particularly behaviorism and humanism, were challenges to Freud’s views.

Erik Erikson (1902-1994) and Psychosocial Theory^[7]

Erikson suggested that our relationships and society’s expectations motivate much of our behavior in his theory of psychosocial development. Erikson was a student of Freud’s but emphasized the importance of the ego, or conscious thought, in determining our actions. In other words, he believed that we are not driven by unconscious urges. We know what motivates us and we consciously think about how to achieve our goals. He is considered the father of developmental psychology because his model gives us a guideline for the entire life span and suggests certain primary psychological and social concerns throughout life.

Erikson expanded on his Freud’s by emphasizing the importance of culture in parenting practices and motivations and adding three stages of adult development (Erikson, 1950; 1968).

He believed that we are aware of what motivates us throughout life and the ego has greater importance in guiding our actions than does the id. We make conscious choices in life and these choices focus on meeting certain social and cultural needs rather than purely biological ones. Humans are motivated, for instance, by the need to feel that the world is a trustworthy place, that we are capable individuals, that we can make a contribution to society, and that we have lived a meaningful life. These are all psychosocial problems.

Erikson divided the lifespan into eight stages. In each stage, we have a major psychosocial task to accomplish or crisis to overcome. Erikson believed that our personality continues to take shape throughout our lifespan as we face these challenges in living. Here is a brief overview of the eight stages:

Erik Erikson’s Psychosocial Theory

These eight stages form a foundation for discussions on emotional and social development during the life span. Keep in mind, however, that these stages or “crises” can occur more than once. For instance, a person may struggle with a lack of trust beyond infancy under certain circumstances. Erikson’s theory has been criticized for focusing so heavily on stages and assuming that the completion of one stage is prerequisite for the next crisis of development. His theory also focuses on the social expectations that are found in certain cultures, but not in all. For instance, the idea that adolescence is a time of searching for identity might translate well in the middle-class culture of the United States, but not as well in cultures where the transition into adulthood coincides with puberty through rites of passage and where adult roles offer fewer choices.

Behaviorist

While Freud and Erikson looked at what was going on in the mind, behaviorists  rejected any reference to mind and viewed overt and observable behavior as the proper subject matter of psychology. Through the scientific study of behavior, it was hoped that laws of learning could be derived that would promote the prediction and control of behavior.

Ivan Pavlov (1870-1937) and Classical Conditioning^[8] and Classical Conditioning with Animals

Ivan Pavlov was a Russian physiologist interested in studying digestion. As he recorded the amount of salivation his laboratory dogs produced as they ate, he noticed that they began to salivate before the food arrived as the researcher walked down the hall and toward the cage. One possible explanation for this phenomenon would be that the dog learned that food comes after the bell.

Pavlov began to experiment with this concept of classical conditioning. He began to ring a bell, for instance, prior to introducing the food. Sure enough, after making this connection several times, the dogs could be made to salivate to the sound of a bell. Once the bell had become an event to which the dogs had learned to salivate, it was called a conditioned stimulus. The act of salivating to a bell was a response that had also been learned, now termed in Pavlov’s jargon, a conditioned response. Notice that the response, salivation, is the same whether it is conditioned or unconditioned (unlearned or natural). What changed is the stimulus to which the dog salivates. One is natural (unconditioned) and one is learned (conditioned).

Summary of Classical Conditioning Process (Animals)

Pavlovian Conditioning of a dog to salivate upon hearing a bell.

To summarize, classical conditioning (later developed by Watson, 1913) involves learning to associate an unconditioned stimulus that already brings about a particular response (i.e., a reflex) with a new (conditioned) stimulus, so that the new stimulus brings about the same response.

he unconditioned stimulus (or UCS) is the object or event that originally produces the reflexive /natural response.  The response to this is called the unconditioned response (or UCR). The neutral stimulus (NS) is a new stimulus that does not produce a response.  Once the neutral stimulus has become associated with the unconditioned stimulus, it becomes a conditioned stimulus (CS). The conditioned response (CR) is the response to the conditioned stimulus.^[9]

Now, let’s think about how classical conditioning is used on us. One of the most widespread applications of classical conditioning principles was brought to us by the psychologist, John B. Watson.^[10]

John B. Watson (1878-1958) and Classical Conditioning^[11] and Classical Conditioning in Humans

Watson believed that most of our fears and other emotional responses are classically conditioned. He had gained a good deal of popularity in the 1920s with his expert advice on parenting offered to the public.  He tried to demonstrate the power of classical conditioning with his famous experiment with an 18-month-old boy named “Little Albert”. Watson sat Albert down and introduced a variety of seemingly scary objects to him: a burning piece of newspaper, a white rat, etc. But Albert remained curious and reached for all of these things. Watson knew that one of our only inborn fears is the fear of loud noises so he proceeded to make a loud noise each time he introduced one of Albert’s favorites, a white rat. After hearing the loud noise several times paired with the rat, Albert soon came to fear the rat and began to cry when it was introduced. Watson filmed this experiment for posterity and used it to demonstrate that he could help parents achieve any outcomes they desired, if they would only follow his advice. Watson wrote columns in newspapers and in magazines and gained a lot of popularity among parents eager to apply science to household order. ^[12]

Summary of Classical Conditioning Process (Humans)

Watson’s conditioning of Little Albert to fear a white rat. ^[13]

Operant conditioning, on the other hand, looks at the way the consequences of a behavior increase or decrease the likelihood of a behavior occurring again. So, let’s look at this a bit more.^[14]

B.F. Skinner (1904-1990) and Operant Conditioning^[15] and Operant Conditioning in Animals and Humans

Skinner (1904-1990), who brought us the principles of operant conditioning, suggested that reinforcement is a more effective means of encouraging a behavior than is punishment. By focusing on strengthening desirable behavior, we have a greater impact than if we emphasize what is undesirable.

Reinforcement is the process by which a consequence increases the probability of a behavior that it follows. A reinforcer is a specific stimulus or situation that encourages the behavior that it follows. Intrinsic or primary reinforcers are reinforcers that have innate reinforcing qualities. These kinds of reinforcers are not learned and satisfy a biological need. Water, food, sleep, shelter, sex, pleasure, and touch, among others, are primary reinforcers. Swimming in a cool lake on a very hot day would be innately reinforcing because the water would cool the person off (a physical need), as well as provide pleasure.  Extrinsic or secondary reinforcers have no inherent value and only have reinforcing qualities when linked with primary reinforcers.  They can be traded in for what is ultimately desired.  Praise, when linked to affection, is one example of a secondary reinforcer.  Another example is money, which is only worth something when you can use it to buy other things—either things that satisfy basic needs (food, water, shelter—all primary reinforcers) or other secondary reinforcers.   Extrinsic or secondary reinforcers are things that have a value not immediately understood.

Positive reinforcement occurs when the addition of a stimulus strengthens behavior.  For example,  positively reinforcing a child with the addition of a cookie for cleaning up will likely make encourage that behavior in the future.  Negative reinforcement, on the other hand, occurs when removing a desired stimulus (or preventing access to it) strengthens behavior. For example, an alarm clock makes a very unpleasant, loud sound when it goes off in the morning. As a result, one gets up and turns it off.  Therefore, getting up from bed is negatively reinforced through the termination of the aversive sound.

Punishmentis the process by which there decrease in the probability of behavior as a result of the consequence that follows it.  Positive punishment occurs when the addition of an unpleasant or painful stimulus weakens behavior.  For example, if a child is naughty and receives a spanking, the child will be less likely to misbehave in the future.   Negative punishment, on the other hand, weakens a behavior through the removal of a desirable stimulus or preventing access to it.  For example, a child who misbehaves and as a result has their favorite toy will be less likely to misbehave in the future.   Punishment is often less effective than reinforcement for several reasons. It doesn’t indicate the desired behavior, it may result in suppressing rather than stopping a behavior, (in other words, the person may not do what is being punished when you’re around, but may do it often when you leave), and a focus on punishment can result in not noticing when the person does well.

Examples of Operant Conditioning Using Positive and Negative Reinforcement and Positive and Negative Punishers

Not all behaviors are learned through association or reinforcement. Many of the things we do are learned by watching others. This is addressed in social learning theory.^[16]

Schedules of Reinforcement

Imagine a rat in a “Skinner box.” In operant conditioning, if no food pellet is delivered immediately after the lever is pressed then after several attempts the rat stops pressing the lever (how long would someone continue to go to work if their employer stopped paying them?). The behavior has been extinguished.

Behaviorists discovered that different patterns or schedules of reinforcement had different effects on the speed of learning and extinction. Ferster and Skinner (1957) devised different ways of delivering reinforcement and found that this had effects on

1. The Response Rate – The rate at which the rat pressed the lever (i.e., how hard the rat worked).
2. The Extinction Rate – The rate at which lever pressing dies out (i.e., how soon the rat gave up).

Skinner found that the type of reinforcement which produces the slowest rate of extinction (i.e., people will go on repeating the behavior for the longest time without reinforcement) is variable-ratio reinforcement. The type of reinforcement which has the quickest rate of extinction is continuous reinforcement.

^[17]

Graphic Representation of Schedules of Reinforcement

Each dash indicates the point where reinforcement is given. ^[18]

Albert Bandura (1925-2021) and Social Learning Theory^[19] and Social Learning Theory

Albert Bandura is a leading contributor to social learning theory. He calls our attention to the ways in which many of our actions are not learned through conditioning; rather, they are learned by watching others (1977). Young children frequently learn behaviors through imitation.

Sometimes, particularly when we do not know what else to do, we learn by observing others model their behavior and then imitating or copying that behavior. A kindergartner on his or her first day of school might eagerly look at how others are acting and try to act the same way to fit in more quickly. Adolescents struggling with their identity rely heavily on their peers to act as role-models. Sometimes we do things because we’ve seen it pay off for someone else. They were operantly conditioned, but we engage in the behavior because we hope it will pay off for us as well. This is referred to as vicarious reinforcement (Bandura, Ross and Ross, 1963).

Bandura (1986) suggests that there is interplay between the environment and the individual. We are not just the product of our surroundings, rather we influence our surroundings. Parents not only influence their child’s environment, perhaps intentionally through the use of reinforcement, etc., but children influence parents as well. Parents may respond differently with their first child than with their fourth. Perhaps they try to be the perfect parents with their firstborn, but by the time their last child comes along they have very different expectations both of themselves and their child. Our environment creates us, and we create our environment. ^[20]

^[21][22]

Cognitive Developmental Theories

Jean Piaget (1896-1980) and Theory of Cognitive Development^[23]

Jean Piaget is one of the most influential cognitive theorists, and in the later modules we will discuss his work and his legacy in much more detail. Piaget was inspired to explore children’s ability to think and reason by watching his own children’s development. He was one of the first to recognize and map out the ways in which children’s thought differs from that of adults. His interest in this area began when he was asked to test the IQ of children and began to notice that there was a pattern in their wrong answers. He believed that children’s intellectual skills change over time through maturation. Children of differing ages interpret the world differently.

Piaget believed our desire to understand the world comes from a need for cognitive equilibrium. This is an agreement or balance between what we sense in the outside world and what we know in our minds. If we experience something that we cannot understand, we try to restore the balance by either changing our thoughts or by altering the experience to fit into what we do understand. Perhaps you meet someone who is very different from anyone you know. How do you make sense of this person? You might use them to establish a new category of people in your mind or you might think about how they are similar to someone else.

A schema or schemes are categories of knowledge. They are like mental boxes of concepts. A child has to learn many concepts. They may have a scheme for “under” and “soft” or “running” and “sour”. All of these are schema. Our efforts to understand the world around us lead us to develop new schema and to modify old ones.

One way to make sense of new experiences is to focus on how they are similar to what we already know. This is assimilation. So, the person we meet who is very different may be understood as being “sort of like my brother” or “his voice sounds a lot like yours.” Or a new food may be assimilated when we determine that it tastes like chicken!

Another way to make sense of the world is to change our mind. We can make a cognitive accommodation to this new experience by adding new schema. This food is unlike anything I’ve tasted before. I now have a new category of foods that are bitter-sweet in flavor, for instance. This is accommodation. Do you accommodate or assimilate more frequently? Children accommodate more frequently as they build new schema. Adults tend to look for similarity in their experience and assimilate. They may be less inclined to think “outside the box.”

Piaget suggested different ways of understanding that are associated with maturation. He divided this understanding into the following four stages which will be discussed in much more detail in Chapter 7:

Piaget’s Stages of Cognitive Development^[24]

Criticisms of Piaget’s Theory

Piaget has been criticized for overemphasizing the role that physical maturation plays in cognitive development and in underestimating the role that culture and interaction (or experience) plays in cognitive development. Looking across cultures reveals considerable variation in what children are able to do at various ages. Piaget may have underestimated what children are capable of given the right circumstances.^[25]

Lev Vygotsky (1896-1934) and Sociocultural Theory^[26]

Lev Vygotsky was a Russian psychologist who wrote in the early 1900s but whose work was discovered in the United States in the 1960s but became more widely known in the 1980s. Vygotsky differed with Piaget (this difference will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 7) in that he believed that a person not only has a set of abilities, but also a set of potential abilities that can be realized if given the proper guidance from others. His sociocultural theory emphasizes the importance of culture and interaction in the development of cognitive abilities. He believed that through guided participation known as scaffolding, with a teacher or capable peer, a child can learn cognitive skills within a certain range known as the zone of proximal development.^[27]

Have you ever taught a child to perform a task? Maybe it was brushing their teeth or preparing food. Chances are you spoke to them and described what you were doing while you demonstrated the skill and let them work along with you all through the process. You gave them assistance when they seemed to need it, but once they knew what to do-you stood back and let them go. This is scaffolding and can be seen demonstrated throughout the world. This approach to teaching has also been adopted by educators. Rather than assessing students on what they are doing, they should be understood in terms of what they are capable of doing with the proper guidance. You can see how Vygotsky would be very popular with modern day educators.^[28]

Comparing Piaget and Vygotsky

Vygotsky concentrated more on the child’s immediate social and cultural environment and his or her interactions with adults and peers. While Piaget saw the child as actively discovering the world through individual interactions with it, Vygotsky saw the child as more of an apprentice, learning through a social environment of others who had more experience and were sensitive to the child’s needs and abilities.  We will elaborate on the two theories in later modules ^[29]

Information Processing

Information Processing is not the work of a single theorist but based on the ideas and research of several cognitive scientists studying how individuals perceive, analyze, manipulate, use, and remember information. This approach assumes that humans gradually improve in their processing skills; that is, cognitive development is continuous rather than stage-like. The more complex mental skills of adults are built from the primitive abilities of children. We are born with the ability to notice stimuli, store, and retrieve information. Brain maturation enables advancements in our information processing system. At the same time, interactions with the environment also aid in our development of more effective strategies for processing information.^[30]

Urie Bronfenbrenner (1917-2005) and  Ecological Systems Theory^[31]

Bronfenbrenner offers us one of the most comprehensive theories of human development. Bronfenbrenner studied Freud, Erikson, Piaget, and learning theorists and believed that all those theories could be enhanced by adding the dimension of context. What is being taught and how society interprets situations depends on who is involved in the life of a child and on when and where a child lives.  Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems model explains the direct and indirect influences on an individual’s development.^[32]  The individual is impacted by several systems including:

• Microsystem includes the individual’s setting and those who have direct, significant contact with the person, such as parents or siblings. The input of those is modified by the cognitive and biological state of the individual as well. These influence the person’s actions, which in turn influence systems operating on him or her.
• Mesosystem includes the larger organizational structures, such as school, the family, or religion. These institutions impact the microsystems just described. The philosophy of the school system, daily routine, assessment methods, and other characteristics can affect the child’s self-image, growth, sense of accomplishment, and schedule thereby impacting the child, physically, cognitively, and emotionally.
• Exosystem includes the larger contexts of community. A community’s values, history, and economy can impact the organizational structures it houses. Mesosystems both influence and are influenced by the exosystem.
• Macrosystem includes the cultural elements, such as global economic conditions, war, technological trends, values, philosophies, and a society’s responses to the global community.
• Chronosystem is the historical context in which these experiences occur. This relates to the different generational time periods previously discussed, such as the baby boomers and millennials.

In sum, a child’s experiences are shaped by larger forces, such as the family, schools, religion, culture, and time period. Bronfenbrenner’s model helps us understand all the different environments that impact each one of us simultaneously. Despite its comprehensiveness, Bronfenbrenner’s ecological system’s theory is not easy to use. Taking into consideration all the different influences makes it difficult to research and determine the impact of all the different variables (Dixon, 2003). Consequently, psychologists have not fully adopted this approach, although they recognize the importance of the ecology of the individual.^[33]

Bronfenbrenner’s Ecological Systems Theory^[34]

Conclusion

Many early theories of human development were created and popularized in the early 1900s. These are referred to as stage theories because they present development as occurring in stages. The assumption is that once one stage is completed, a person moves into the next stage and that stages tend to occur only once. Some examples of stage theories that we will be studying include Freud’s psychosexual stages, Erikson’s psychosocial stages, and Piaget’s stages of cognitive development, to name a few.

These theories are appealing in a way because they provide the ability to predict what will happen next and they allow us to attribute behavior to a person’s being ‘in a stage’. These theories offered the security of understanding human behavior in a time of rapid change during industrialization in the early 1900s. Science seemed to be laying a predictable groundwork we could rely upon. But these early theories also implied that those who did not progress through stages in the predictable way were delayed somehow and this led to the idea that development had to occur in a patterned way.

Today we understand that development does not occur in a straight line. Sometimes we change in many directions depending on our experiences and surroundings. For example, there can be growth and decline in cognitive functioning at any age depending on nutrition, health, activity, and stimulation. And that both nature (heredity) and nurture (the environment) shape our abilities throughout life. Some things about us are continuous such as our temperament or sense of self, perhaps. And we may revisit a stage of life more than once. For instance, Erikson suggests that we struggle with trust as infants and then begin to focus more on independence or autonomy. But if we are in circumstances in which our independence is jeopardized, such as becoming physically dependent, we may struggle with trust again. Keep these thoughts in mind as we explore stage theories in our next lesson.

The study of human development is based on research. The next chapter looks at some of the different types of research methods used to understand development. In other words, how do we know what we know?^[35]