Gender Roles In Early Developmental-Social Psychology
A debate has existed for almost as long as developmental-social psychology has been around. In early developmental-social psychology, two views were proposed, both different approaches and both with their own supporters. On one side, there was the uni-directional model, with Watson’s “blank-slate” theory being well summed up in his book Behaviorism “Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I’ll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select … regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, vocations, and race of his ancestors” (Watson, 1924, page 104) This shows the child as a passive learner in the adults’ world. Freud’s theories on
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He tested children’s abilities to understand ideas such as the constancy of fluid volumes (a child’s ability to understand the constancy of one volume of water in two different sized containers), and his research showed that most children were unable to learn things before a certain age, despite having the concept demonstrated to them by adults. This came soon after Watson’s blank slate model and it was perceived by much of the scientific community as radical. Most of Piaget’s work deals with the child as an individual, learning to understand the world around him through experimentation, and doesn’t give the idea of a child learning through interaction the credit it obviously deserves. In one of his works however, he did look into the importance of peer interaction in the reasoning on social topics (Piaget, 1932a). The importance of research into this element of social-development was picked up on by a group known as the “new Genevians” who continued Piaget’s work with the developmental stages children go through, but also showed that children could learn from their peers. The findings bring ideas from the blank-slate model into Pigetian thinking, showing that children can learn from mimicking (Doise, Mugny and Perret-Clermont, 1975), however they produced evidence that clearly goes against a strict adherence to blank-slate
He tested children’s abilities to understand ideas such as the constancy of fluid volumes (a child’s ability to understand the constancy of one volume of water in two different sized containers), and his research showed that most children were unable to learn things before a certain age, despite having the concept demonstrated to them by adults. This came soon after Watson’s blank slate model and it was perceived by much of the scientific community as radical. Most of Piaget’s work deals with the child as an individual, learning to understand the world around him through experimentation, and doesn’t give the idea of a child learning through interaction the credit it obviously deserves. In one of his works however, he did look into the importance of peer interaction in the reasoning on social topics (Piaget, 1932a). The importance of research into this element of social-development was picked up on by a group known as the “new Genevians” who continued Piaget’s work with the developmental stages children go through, but also showed that children could learn from their peers. The findings bring ideas from the blank-slate model into Pigetian thinking, showing that children can learn from mimicking (Doise, Mugny and Perret-Clermont, 1975), however they produced evidence that clearly goes against a strict adherence to blank-slate