Week 2 Post 1

When reading through Chapter 2 I noticed a lot of familiar information that we learned in Psychology 100. Being that I took that class last semester most of the information was a review. However, I did find interesting learning more about how these scientists came about their theories. I especially found interesting Piaget’s Cognitive Theory. The Cognitive Theory is much closer to my “personal theory” from part 1 of our discussion post this week. This is because Piaget believed “to understand human behavior, one must understand how a person thinks.” A reoccurring thought in my personal theory was that human nature or behavior is more of an individually based concept. Piaget is saying something similar in that our thoughts govern almost every aspect of our personalities and behaviors, and only by looking at how people’s thoughts affect their behaviors can we understand behavior on a more universal level. I also was intrigued when the book (Berger, 2011) explained how Piaget came upon his theory and in the margin where it said “Would You Talk to This Man?”. From the description we are given of Piaget he seemed like a very intuitive and attentive person. He thought in a very different way than others. For example, when he was hired to test the norms and validate standardized testing (IQ test) they asked him to study what the children know and when. Instead Piaget asked why they thought the way they did and how they concluded those answers. In my opinion, the fact that he studied children so intently and, according to the book, the children enjoyed talking to Piaget shows that he really was successful with his work, experiments, observations, and ending theory. So to answer the question “Would You Talk to This Man?” my answer would be absolutely. Finally, I was interested in his devised periods of cognitive development. While I don’t support placing ages on “stages” or periods that a “normal” child should achieve, I found myself agreeing with his characteristics and major gains in each period.