The SIMPOL Solution by John Bunzl

Author:John Bunzl
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781633883949
Publisher: Prometheus Books

THINKING ABOUT CHANGES IN THINKING

The great daddy of developmental psychology was the Swiss clinical psychologist Jean Piaget, who was born in 1896 and died in 1980. Piaget conducted pioneering research in how children develop their cognitive capacities over time. In particular, Piaget's model of development accounts for cumulative thinking based on earlier identifiable building blocks. Through repetition of research, Piaget demonstrated how children progressively enlarge their understanding by acting on and reflecting on the effects of their own previous knowledge. In this way they learn to organize their knowledge in increasingly complex structures. Piaget's system, called “genetic epistemology,” attempted to address what he later called “the central problem of intellectual development.” His model evolved into a global theory of cognitive-developmental stages where individuals exhibit identifiable patterns of thinking and cognition in predictable periods of development contained in a hierarchical structure.4

Clare W. Graves was a professor of psychology in Schenectady, New York. He built on the work of Piaget, but he was also influenced by Max Weber, Abraham Maslow and Jane Loevinger, and his research and writing focused rather on the processes of human psychological maturation. His main interest was not in early development but how humans evolved new “bio-psycho-social coping systems” to solve existential problems and cope with changes in their environment. Graves saw that coping systems were related to evolving human culture and individual development and could be traced at the individual, cultural and even species levels. He proposed that our brains would adapt and evolve to our changing world, that human nature was not a set thing; it was ever-emergent, an open not a closed system.5

Graves argued that humans respond to external conditions by thinking and creating systems in a hierarchical framework subject to both progression and regression. Movement would continue in leaps, bounds and descents over time to stretch human consciousness into further expansion, as he explained:

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