Jean Piaget was a Swiss scholar who argued that children are not little adults. Also, he believed that everyone is born with a natural tendency to organize the world meaningful by constructing mental models of the world called schemata. Schemata are mental models of the world that we use to guide and interpret our experiences (Nairne, 2014) Piaget’s primary contributions was to demonstrate that children’s reasoning errors can provide a window into how the schema construction process is proceeding. As the children's brains and bodies mature, they use the experience to build more sophisticated and a correct mental model of the world. Piaget also suggested that two adaptive psychological processes, assimilation, …show more content…
Kohlberg would give people a moral dilemma by asking them to solve it, and use their reasoning to help identify their state of moral development. Kohlberg also believed that people can be classified into stages of moral development based on how they answer such moral problems. He proposed six stages of moral development, but Nairne focused on three main levels: preconventional, conventional, and postconventional. The lowest level of the moral development is preconventional which decisions about right and wrong are made primarily in terms of external consequences. The conventional stage is which actions are judged to be right or wrong based on whether they maintain or disrupt the social order. The highest level of moral development is postconventional which moral actions are judged based on a personal code of ethics that is general and abstract and that may not agree with societal …show more content…
He believed that our sense of self is shaped by series of psychosocial crises that we confront at characteristic stages in development.
Infancy to childhood, first years of life, babies are largely at the mercy of others of their survival. Erikson believed this overwhelming dependency leads to our first true psychosocial crisis, usually in the first year of life: trust versus mistrust. It’s through social interactions, learning who to trust and who not to trust, that the newborn ultimately resolves the crisis and learns how to deal more effectively with the environment. During the “terrible twos” the child struggles with breaking his or her dependence on parents. It is autonomy versus shame or doubt. Between age 3 and 6, the crisis turns to initiative versus guilt. Around age 6 to age 12, the struggle is for a basic sense of industry versus inferiority.
Adolescence and young adulthood. At adolescence ages, we are mature enough to begin thinking abstractly about our own personal qualities, and concerned with testing roles and finding the identity. Young adulthood is marked by the crisis of intimacy versus isolation which causes to question the meaning of relationships with