in thoughts...
Thursday, April 15, 2004
ain't much better than kids...
my developmental psych paper is tomorrow. i can so die for it. but feel like blogging about something i read while studying for it - eh, it was one of the assigned tutorial readings but erm i think i missed it... somehow.. HAHA..
anyway... developmental psych... basically starts off with forming of a new life, newborn, infant, toddler, child, adolescent, adult, old adult... yak yak yak.. so supposedly we're all supposed to mature as we grow... adults are supposed to be more mature than a young child for instance.
yeah, like duh, I hear you say.
hah.
The article was about how children are not as egocentric as Piaget thought - egocentric basically means, they see the world from their point of view and can't see it from others' point of view. His 3 mountains task basically asks children to tell him the view of the 3 mountains as seen by someone sitting in another position.
so supposedly, humans progress in these cognitive developmental stages... yet sometimes... we're not much better than kids in our thinking.. ;)
I found this bit of the reading very interesting. gonna just type excerpts here - but even then it's still quite long.. haha.. but finish it.. the end is good...
***
Adults are capable of more complex mental operations than children, but we do not always operate at the highest level. We may beg traffic lights to change when we are in a hurry and curse and kick machines that refuse to work.
Like little chidren, adults often at some gut level do not believe in chance. The gambler believes he can influence the dice or roulette wheel...
...As mature rational adults, we scoff at superstition and magic, but we may walk around ladders, "knock on wood", and feel uncomfortable if we break a mirror. Baseball pitchers and other athletes are notorious for using good luck charms and special gestures to help them win games.
...we are always in danger of failing to differentiate our own point of view from another person's. If I do not like a certain movie, or if I feel very cold in a room, I am likely to feel that the movie simply is a bad movie, and that the room is cold. If you come along and tell me you like the movie, and feel too warm, I may have trouble understanding how you can possibly misperceive reality that way. And you are likely to feel the same about my reactions.
Sometimes it is a lack of knowledge or experience that makes us egocentric. It is hard for a white middle-class person to know what it is like to grow up poor or black, or for men to know what it is like to be a woman, and vice versa. It is hard for adults in the prime of life to remember what the world looks like through the eyes of a child, or to imagine what it looks like to an 80-year-old. It is possible to overcome the barriers of class, race, nationality, gender, age - good fiction helps us do this - but we never truly escape from the prison of our own experience. At the end of life, egocentrism is total: as someone once observed, the death of any single person ends a whole world.
Skolnick, A. Psychology of Human Development.
***
"Maturity means reacquiring the seriousness one had as a child at play."
Friedrich Nietzche
yeah man, I need the seriousness to study!! haha...
anyway... developmental psych... basically starts off with forming of a new life, newborn, infant, toddler, child, adolescent, adult, old adult... yak yak yak.. so supposedly we're all supposed to mature as we grow... adults are supposed to be more mature than a young child for instance.
yeah, like duh, I hear you say.
hah.
The article was about how children are not as egocentric as Piaget thought - egocentric basically means, they see the world from their point of view and can't see it from others' point of view. His 3 mountains task basically asks children to tell him the view of the 3 mountains as seen by someone sitting in another position.
so supposedly, humans progress in these cognitive developmental stages... yet sometimes... we're not much better than kids in our thinking.. ;)
I found this bit of the reading very interesting. gonna just type excerpts here - but even then it's still quite long.. haha.. but finish it.. the end is good...
***
Adults are capable of more complex mental operations than children, but we do not always operate at the highest level. We may beg traffic lights to change when we are in a hurry and curse and kick machines that refuse to work.
Like little chidren, adults often at some gut level do not believe in chance. The gambler believes he can influence the dice or roulette wheel...
...As mature rational adults, we scoff at superstition and magic, but we may walk around ladders, "knock on wood", and feel uncomfortable if we break a mirror. Baseball pitchers and other athletes are notorious for using good luck charms and special gestures to help them win games.
...we are always in danger of failing to differentiate our own point of view from another person's. If I do not like a certain movie, or if I feel very cold in a room, I am likely to feel that the movie simply is a bad movie, and that the room is cold. If you come along and tell me you like the movie, and feel too warm, I may have trouble understanding how you can possibly misperceive reality that way. And you are likely to feel the same about my reactions.
Sometimes it is a lack of knowledge or experience that makes us egocentric. It is hard for a white middle-class person to know what it is like to grow up poor or black, or for men to know what it is like to be a woman, and vice versa. It is hard for adults in the prime of life to remember what the world looks like through the eyes of a child, or to imagine what it looks like to an 80-year-old. It is possible to overcome the barriers of class, race, nationality, gender, age - good fiction helps us do this - but we never truly escape from the prison of our own experience. At the end of life, egocentrism is total: as someone once observed, the death of any single person ends a whole world.
Skolnick, A. Psychology of Human Development.
***
"Maturity means reacquiring the seriousness one had as a child at play."
Friedrich Nietzche
yeah man, I need the seriousness to study!! haha...
posted by Sodium-squared at 4/15/2004 09:14:00 PM
<< Home