The Story of Psychology by Morton Hunt

Author:Morton Hunt
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780307568304
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 1987-10-14T10:00:00+00:00

Social Development

“Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways and be wise.” The formicine activity that Solomon (or whoever wrote Proverbs 6) would like us to emulate concerns gathering and putting by food in good times. But the social cooperation of ants is far more remarkable. From the moment they emerge from the larval stage, they are perfectly socialized, their minuscule nervous systems programmed to respond automatically to the chemical signals and touches of their fellows with appropriate social behaviors—food gathering, housekeeping, defensive combat, and the tending of larvae and the queen. We, in contrast, need fifteen to twenty years to become relatively socialized and even then are not done but must adapt our behavior as our roles change throughout life.

For well over half a century, developmentalists have been using a variety of techniques to gather evidence about the processes of human social development. Clipboard on knee and stopwatch in hand, they have observed babies and toddlers at home and in nurseries, preschoolers and schoolchildren on playgrounds and in classrooms; interviewed parents and plied them with questionnaires; recorded and analyzed volumes of child conversations; told children the beginnings of stories and asked what they thought happened next; designed hundreds of experimental situations to measure the level of social development at different ages; and calculated the correlations between blood hormone levels and sex-typed behavior.

From all this (and much more) they have gleaned a mass of findings. Some lend support to the psychoanalytic view of development, others to the social-learning view, others to the cognitive-developmental view, others to the cultural psychology view, and, finally, still others to the evolutionary psychology perspective. We need not sort them out but merely glance at a sample of the more interesting highlights.

Turn taking: The earliest lessons in social behavior are learned in the family, where in addition to the fundamental one of trusting another human being, infants learn the lesson, crucial to social relationships, of taking turns when communicating. Parents talk to the infant, wait until the infant responds with a sound or smile, and then talk again; the infant senses the pattern and, by the age of toddlerhood, even before uttering a word, will carry on with another toddler in turn-taking fashion. In the following bit of dialogue from a study of this process, Bernie, thirteen months old, has been watching Larry, fifteen months, mouthing a toy. He finally “speaks”:

BERNIE: Da…da.

LARRY:(Laughs very slightly as he continues to look)

BERNIE: Da.

LARRY:(Laughs more heartily this time)

The same sequence is repeated five more times. Then Larry looks away and offers an adult a toy. Bernie pursues him.

BERNIE:(Waving both hands and looking directly at Larry) Da!

LARRY:(Looks back at Bernie and laughs again)

After nine more such interchanges, Bernie gives up and toddles away.82

Play: The developmentalists L. Alan Sroufe and Robert G. Cooper saw play as the “laboratory” where the child learns new skills and practices old ones.83 Infants cannot play together; that requires emotional and cognitive skills that take two to three years to develop. Two toddlers, put close together, usually just stare at each other, watch each other play, or play side by side.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.