Chapter 2 Development

Developmental psychology deals with foundational questions

  • morality and the origin of moral thought. Two very different views:
    • we start off as immoral or at best amoral
    • we’re basically good then we can be corrupted (Jean-Jacques Rousseau). In contemporary discussions, we talk about prejudice and racism, and they’ll insist that we’re not naturally, prejudice or racist. We can become that way is because of the corrupting influence of culture.
  • The extent to which the way we are right now, was sort of set in stone. Either when we were born, because of our genes, or at least but a time or two or three. It’s an interesting question for instance, how much an interview with a three-year-old can predict the way the three-year-old would turn out. It turns out that when studies are done, a 90-minute interview for three-year-old does predict personality on certain standard scales, the quality of their personal relationships, whether or not they have a job, criminal behavior, and so on.
  • how much of what we know now we’re born with, and how much we have to learn? Psychologists, developmental psychologists talk about three different views,
    1. empiricism, which is we start off empty and then we learn and learn and learn and learn. You’ve seen this in the last lecture and discussions of behaviors and this was the behaviors idea.
    2. Nativism, which is associative Noam Chomsky, rejects the idea that learning plays a critical role and it says, we actually are born with rich powerful structure systems in our brain.
    3. constructivist (John Piaget) I’m going to talk about this in the next two sections and you’ll see that it shares with the empiricist view. The idea of learning, interaction dealing with the environment, makes us who we are. But it shares with the nativist view, the idea that the mind is actually quite complex, and the course of learning is not merely the accumulation of information, let alone the accumulation of conditioned responses, but rather something far more interesting and far more elegant.