Erik Erikson and Jean Piaget's Theory of Development - Assignment Example

 Erik Erikson and Jean Piaget's Theory of Development Abstract Piaget and Erikson are still cited as child psychology experts. Their theories have been around for a long time but still garner recognition and inspire research. Both men attempted to adequately describe the processes each person goes through that results in personality development. Both men have detractors but still contributed useful knowledge to the field of child psychology. Introduction Both Jean Piaget and Erik Erikson contributed theories of childhood development to the study of psychology. Their theories, in effect, describe the progression of knowledge acquirement that children go through. While their theories differ in some ways, they also have many similarities in common. Both Piaget and Erikson introduces a method of describing and explaining the reason children learn in the ways that the do. They also provide a way to understand why so many variations on personality exist. Piaget Piaget developed the Cognitive Development theory of child psychology. As a biologist, he was interested in how organisms adapt to environments, or intelligence and behavior. He hypothesized that a child was born with “mental organizations called schemes” that employed intelligence and behavior in order to navigate through life. Piaget’s biological term for this adaptation is equilibration generated by inherent need to have equilibrium between schemes and environment. “Piaget hypothesized that infants are born with schemes operating at birth that he called ‘reflexes.’ In other animals, these reflexes control behavior throughout life. However, in human beings as the infant uses these reflexes to adapt to the environment, these reflexes are quickly replaced with constructed schemes” (Huitt & Hummel, 2003). He thought the processes continued throughout life. Piaget said the difference between the thinking of adults and that of children is qualitative and not quantitative. He asserted that the development of cognition occurs in distinctive, quantifiable, and discernible stages and that the stages always follow the same sequential order. Piaget thought that developmental growth did not depend on a child’s experience so much as on biological progression. He believed the stages happened at the same time for every child regardless of the child’s circumstances. Piaget’s theory is very broad, and includes the sensorimotor stage, preoperational stage, concrete operational stage and formal operational stage. Knowledge develops through these stages from sensory data, through language development, to reasoning in the concrete, and finally to reasoning in the abstract. Piaget thought that the motivation to learn was something inherited. Because of his beliefs could be so easily organized and universally applied, educators and parents used them in their teaching and parenting strategies. One area Piaget contributed to was language development theory. His ideas about language acquisition, which he called Language Acquisition Device (LAD), were widely accepted. LAD theorized that the ability to acquire a language was innate and that a child would go through that process at the correct time regardless of the extraneous factors affecting him/her. Regardless of the respect Piaget gained in the field of cognitive development, he still had detractors.  Many could not reconcile the belief that one stage not gone through successfully did not have an effect on the next stage or later stage. “There are said to be good grounds for hope among Piaget's detractors that the whole embarrassing specter of developmental emergents, and other such qualitative leaps so dear to the hearts of structuralists such as Piaget, are all at risk of collapsing on to the same dimensionless vanishing point” (Chandler, 2009, p. 226). While most detractors are not as snarky as Chandler imagines them to be, there are some legitimate criticisms of Piaget’s theory. Specifics include the beliefs that children do not think as consistently as Piaget’s stages suggest, infants and young children are better able to negotiate their world in a reasonable way than Piaget thought they could, and his theory diminishes the role of the environment on a child’s cognitive development. Overall, many believe that Piaget was better at describing the stages than he was at explaining how they take place. Erikson One person who agreed with Piaget that cognitive development was done in sequential stages is Erik Erikson. His stages of development, or crises as he would call them, take the form of a duality of negative and positive. For instance, according to Erikson, early childhood is characterized by initiative versus guilt. During this time children discover who they are, try new things, hopefully forget failures quickly and move on to new areas of interest. Other stages include trust vs. mistrust, autonomy vs. shame and doubt, industry vs. inferiority, identity vs. role confusion, intimacy vs. isolation, generativity vs. absorption, and integrity vs. despair. Erikson’s theory explains that in every stage, depending on which of the dualities a person is drawn to, a positive or a negative attitude or virtue might be developed. The development depends on several factors including environment, the events that transpire at the time of the development, the person’s physical health, and so forth. This explains the wide variety of personalities in the same family and why people change throughout their lives. Erikson, like Piaget, did not think that a child had to successfully complete each stage to be able to move on to the next. He does believe that not completing one stage satisfactorily does “aggravate” the next stage (crisis) though and makes subsequent stages more difficult to navigate successfully. He said, “A new life task presents a crisis whose outcome can be a successful graduation, or alternatively, an impairment of the life cycle which will aggravate future crises” (Atalay, 2007, p. 16). Erikson is best known for recognizing what is now known as an identity crisis, what he thought was an inevitable conflict that accompanies the growth of a sense of identity in late adolescence. “This idea may have stemmed from a personal identity crisis he experienced at a young age. He once wrote, ‘No doubt my best friends will insist that I needed to name this crisis and to see it in everybody else in order to really come to terms with it myself" (Erikson, 1975)” (Cramer, Flynn, & LaFave, 1997). Erikson has some legitimate insights into human cognitive development, but he is not without criticism. Conclusion Many say that, like Piaget, Erikson’s belief that personality traits are strictly biological, such as gender differences for Erikson, is flawed. Some even claim that Erikson’s theory applies to males more than it does to females. Also, the fact that people may progress through the stages of development at different rates yet just as successfully as those who go through them in the prescribed time frame is not considered by either Erikson or Piaget. Factors such as a physical handicap can slow the progression but not harm it. Both men’s theories are difficult to test as they span all the years of a human life and take into account so many variables about the human psyche that no definitive answer could ever be reached. Instead, as many variations on personality and the way it developed as the people who possess the personality exist, and that is what Piaget and Erikson attempted to describe and explain. Psychology owes both men a tribute for taking on the task of thinking and writing about something as elusive as personality development. References Atalay, M. (2007). Psychology of Crisis: An Overall Account of the Psychology of Erikson. Ekev Academic Review , 11 (33), 15-34. Chandler, M. J. (2009). Piaget on Piaget. British Journal of Psychology , 100, 225-228. Cramer, C., Flynn, B., & LaFave, A. (1997). Erik Erikson's 8 Stages of Psychosocial Development. Retrieved December 6, 2011, from Cortland.edu: http://web.cortland.edu/andersmd/ERIK/welcome.HTML Huitt, W., & Hummel, J. (2003). Piaget's Theory of Cognitive Development. Retrieved December 7, 2011, from Edpsychinteractive: http://www.edpsycinteractive.org/topics/cogsys/piaget.html Read More