Theories of Social Development

How Children Develop (3rd ed.) Siegler, DeLoache & Eisenberg Chapter 9

Guiding Questions

 What do various theories say about the social development of children?

 What do ethological and evolutionary theories say about the process by which children develop socially?

 How can the major theoretical perspectives of children’s social development be applied to everyday observations and interactions with children?

Theories of Social Development: The Goal



Theories of social development attempt to account for important aspects of development:

 Emotion, personality, attachment, self, peer relationships, morality, and gender 

Such theories must:

 Explain how children’s development is influenced by the people and individuals around them  Examine the ways that human beings affect each other

Major Theoretical Perspectives of Children’s Social Development



Psychoanalytic Theories

 

Learning Theories Theories of Social Cognition



Ecological Theories of Development

Major Psychoanalytic Theories



Freud’s Theory of Psychosexual Development



Freud’s Theory of Personality Structure



Erikson’s Life-Span Developmental Theory

Central Themes of the Psychoanalytic Perspective

 Concept that early experiences shape later development emphasizes the continuity of individual differences  Also emphasize discontinuous aspects of development with stage theories outlining abrupt shifts in development  Emphasis on biological drives (especially Freud) but also interaction with the environment

Sigmund Freud

 Neurologist interested in the origins of mental illness  Greatly impacted Western culture and on thinking about social and personality development  Concluded many emotional problems were rooted in childhood experiences

Freud’s Theory of Psychosexual Development

 Proposes a series of universal stages in which psychic energy becomes focused in different erogenous zones  Psychic energy: the biologically based, instinctual drives that energize behavior, thoughts, and feelings  Erogenous zones: areas of the body that become erotically sensitive in successive stages of development

Freud’s Personality Structure

Id

   The biological drives with which the infant is born The earliest and most primitive personality structure Unconscious and operates with the goal of seeking pleasure

Ego

  Emerges in the first year The rational, logical, problem-solving component of personality

Superego

  Develops during the ages of 3 to 6 Based on the child’s internalization (or adoption as his or her own) of the parents’ attributes, beliefs, and standards

Stages of Psychosexual Development

Stage Oral

(first year)

Anal

(1-3 years)

Phallic

(3-6 years)

Latency

(6-12 years)

Genital

(12+ years)

Description

The primary source of satisfaction and pleasure is oral activity. During this stage, the mother is established as the strongest love-object.

The primary source of pleasure comes from defecation.

Characterized by the localization of pleasure in the genitalia.

Characterized by the channeling of sexual energy into socially acceptable activities.

Sexual maturation is complete and sexual intercourse becomes a major goal.

If fundamental needs are not met during any stage, children may become fixated on these needs, continually attempting to satisfy them.

Superego Development

 

For boys, the path to superego development is through the resolution of the Oedipus complex , a psychosocial conflict in which a boy experiences a form of sexual desire for his mother and wants an exclusive relationship with her

  Freud argued that the son’s desire for his mother and hostility toward his father is so threatening that the episode is repressed and infantile amnesia results.

The complex is resolved through the boys’ identification with his father.

Freud thought that girls experience a similar but less intense conflict, the Electra complex , involving erotic feelings toward the father, resulting in their developing a weaker conscience than boys do.

Erik Erikson’s Life-Span Developmental Theory

 Successor to Freud’s theory, has also been influential  Erik Erikson accepted the basic constructs of Freud’s theory, but enlarged the theory to include other factors such as culture and contemporary issues.



Eight age-related stages (five during childhood and adolescence)

  Each stage is characterized by a specific crisis that the individual must resolve.

If the dominant issue of a stage is not successfully resolved before the next stage begins, the person will continue to struggle with it.

The Early Developmental Process According to Erikson

Stage Trust vs. Mistrust

(first year)

Autonomy vs. Shame and doubt

(1 –3½ years)

Initiative vs. Guilt

(4 –6 years)

Industry vs. Inferiority

(6 –puberty)

Identity vs. Role Confusion

(adolescence – early adulthood)

Description

Developing trust in other people is the crucial issue.

The challenge is to achieve a strong sense of autonomy while adjusting to increased social demands.

Resolved when the child develops high standards and the initiative to meet them without being crushed by worry about not being able to measure up.

The child must master cognitive and social skills, learn to work industriously, and play well with others.

Adolescents must resolve the question of who they really are or live in confusion about what roles they should play as adults.

Current Perspectives



The most significant of Freud’s contributions to developmental psychology were:

  His emphasis on the importance of early experience and emotional relationships His recognition of the role of subjective experience and unconscious mental activity 

Erikson’s emphasis on the search for identity in adolescence has had lasting impact.

Major Learning Theories



Behaviorism



Operant conditioning



Social learning theory

Central Themes of the Learning Perspective

 Greatly emphasize the role of the environment (external factors) on the developing child  More contemporary learning theorists emphasize the importance of cognitive factors and the active role children play in their own development  Emphasize continuity in development, proposing that the same principles operate throughout life and that there are no stages  Focus on mechanisms of change (i.e., learning principles) and argue that individual differences arise because of different histories of reinforcement and observation

Watson’s Behaviorism

 John Watson is the founder of behaviorism  Believed that children’s development is determined by their social environment and that learning through conditioning was the primary mechanism of development   Demonstrated the power of classical conditioning with famous “Little Albert” experiment Exclusive focus on conditioning is now widely considered overly simplistic 

However, his approach to extinguishing fear has been widely used to rid people of phobias.

 This approach, known as

systematic desensitization

, is a form of therapy based on classical conditioning in which initially debilitating responses to a given stimulus are gradually deconditioned.

Skinner’s Operant Conditioning



B. F. Skinner conducted research on the nature and function of reinforcement.



His discoveries include the importance of attention as a powerful reinforcer, and the difficulty of extinguishing behavior that has been intermittently reinforced (i.e., responded to inconsistently).



Skinner’s work on reinforcement also led to a form of therapy known as behavior modification , in which reinforcement contingencies are changed to encourage more adaptive behavior.

Social Learning Theory



Emphasizes observation and imitation, rather than reinforcement, as the primary mechanisms of development



In a classic series of studies, Albert Bandura and his colleagues found that preschool children can acquire new behaviors through observing others.

 Discovered that children’s tendency to reproduce what they learned depended on

vicarious reinforcement

(i.e., whether the person whose actions they observed was rewarded or punished)

Bandura’s Research



Preschool children initially watched a short film in which an adult model performed highly aggressive actions on an inflatable Bobo doll (weighted at the bottom so it pops up when knocked down).

  One group of children observed the model rewarded with candy and soda for the aggressive behavior.

Another group saw the model punished.

 The remaining children saw the model experience no consequences.

Bandura’s Research

Findings:



Observing someone else receive a reward or punishment for the behavior affects the subsequent reproduction of the behavior.



Boys were initially more aggressive than girls, but the girls increased their level of imitation when offered rewards.



Over time, Bandura placed more emphasis on the cognitive aspects of observational learning.



Unlike most learning theorists, Bandura argued that child-environment influences operate in both directions, a concept referred to as reciprocal determinism .

Reciprocal Determinism



In recent years, Bandura has emphasized the importance of perceived self-efficacy .

 An individual’s beliefs about how effectively he or she can control his or her own behavior, thoughts, and emotions in order to achieve a desired goal

Current Perspectives



Learning theories are based on principles derived from empirical research.

 They, in turn, have generated extensive research and valuable practical applications 

The weaknesses of the learning approach are its limited attention to biological factors and (with the exception of Bandura’s theory) to the impact of cognition.



Relevant for research and children’s welfare in that therapeutic approaches to treat children are based on learning principles.

Major Theories of Social Cognition



Selman’s Stage Theory of Role Taking



Dodge’s Information-Processing Theory of Social Problem Solving



Dweck’s Theory of Self-Attributions and Achievement Motivation

Major Themes of the Social Cognitive Perspective

 Focus on children’s ability to thinking and reasons about their own and other people’s thoughts, feelings, motives, and behaviors  Emphasis on self-socialization —children’s active shaping of their own development through their own activity preferences, friendship choices, and other behaviors  Active child and individual differences are major themes  Some social cognitive theories emphasize stages while others emphasize continuity

Selman’s Stage Theory of Role Taking



Focuses on role taking – the ability to adopt the perspective of another person, thereby better understanding that person’s behavior, thoughts, and feelings

 Preschoolers, for example, cannot take the perspective of another and hence have very limited social cognition.



Selman proposed that children go through four increasingly complex and abstract stages in their thinking about other people.

Selman’s Stages of Development

Stage

1

6-8 years

2

8-10 years

3

10-12 years

4

12+ years

Description

Children come to appreciate that another person can have a different perspective from their own, but they attribute this to the other person’s not having the same information they do Children become able to think about the other person’s point of view Children can systematically compare their own and the other’s points of view Adolescents can compare another person’s perspective to that of a generalized other

Dodge’s Information-Processing Theory of Social Problem Solving



Emphasizes the crucial role of cognitive processes in social behavior



Children’s use of aggression as a problem solving strategy



Found that highly aggressive children seem to have a hostile attributional bias —an expectation that others are hostile to them, which becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy

Dweck’s Theory of Self-Attributions and Achievement Motivation



Emphasizes the role of self-attributions in academic achievement



Children with a entity/helpless orientation attribute success and failure to enduring aspects of the self and tend to give up in the face of failure

 Such “helpless” children tend to base their sense of self-worth on the degree of approval they receive from other people  To be assured of praise, they avoid situations in which they are likely to not be successful 

Children with an incremental/mastery orientation attribute success and failure to the amount of effort expended and persist in the face of failure.

Dweck’s Theory of Self-Attributions and Achievement Motivation



Older children’s cognitions about themselves are more complex



Some children have an entity theory of intelligence and tend to think that a person’s level of intelligence is fixed and unchangeable.

 When they experience failure, they conclude that they are not very smart and that there is nothing they can do about the situation.



Other children hold an incremental theory of intelligence and believe that intelligence can increase as a function of experience.

 These children tend to try harder after failure.

Implications

 Praising children for working hard supports an incremental model and a mastery-oriented motivational pattern.

 In contrast, offering praise and criticism focused on enduring traits can lead to an entity model and a helpless orientation.

Current Perspectives



Social cognitive theories have made important theoretical contributions and have been supported by research.



However, they provide an incomplete account because they do not address biological factors in development.

Major Ecological Theories of Development



Ethological and Evolutionary Theories



The Bioecological Model

Ecological Perspectives Ethological Evolutionary Bioecological

Ethological and Evolutionary Theories



Ethological and evolutionary theories are concerned with aspects of human development that are presumed to be based on our evolutionary heritage.



These theories primarily focus on species-specific behavior.

Ethology



Studies the evolutionary bases of behavior, attempting to understand behavior in terms of its adaptive or survival value



Ethologists argue that a variety of innate behavior patterns in animals, including imprinting , were shaped by evolution.

  Imprinting is a form of learning in which the young of some species of newborn birds and mammals become attached to and follow adult members of the species.

Although human newborns do not imprint, they work to maintain visual contact with adult humans.

The Ethological Perspective



Research also examined gender differences in play patterns



Ethologists argue that gender differences are affected by evolved predispositions, with females having an innate preference for objects that afford opportunities for nurturance; males, for objects that invite movement.

 Support for the argument comes from research showing that nonhuman primates exhibit similar patterns of gender preferences as human children.

Evolutionary Psychology



A relatively new approach that applies the Darwinian concepts of natural selection and adaptation to human behavior.

 A major premise of evolutionary psychology is that organisms, including humans, are motivated to behave in ways that preserve their genes in the gene pool of the species.



Evolutionary psychologists argue that the large size of our brains necessitates a prolonged period of immaturity.

 A consequence is humans’ neural plasticity in learning from experience.

 They also see play as an evolved platform for learning.

 Prolonged immaturity requires a great deal of nurturance from parents.

Evolutionary Psychology



Parental-investment theory stresses the evolutionary basis of many aspects of parental behavior, including the extensive investment parents make in their offspring.



Parents’ genes are perpetuated only if their offspring survive and reproduce.



A dark side of the evolutionary picture is the fact that the rate of murders committed by stepfathers against children residing with them is hundreds of times higher than the rate for fathers and their biological children.

Evolutionary Psychology



Further, an implication of the evolutionary view of development is that radical departures from the species typical environment (for example, in neonatal intensive care) could have negative consequences on development.

The Bioecological Model

Urie Brofenbrenner presents the child’s environment as composed of a series of nested structures, with every level having an impact on development.

 The

microsystem

is the immediate, bi-directional environment that a person experiences.

    The

mesosystem

encompasses the connections among various microsystems.

The

exosystem

consists of environmental settings that the person does not experience directly but that can affect the person indirectly.

The

macrosystem

is the larger cultural context within which the other systems are embedded.

The

chronosystem

consists of historical changes that influence the other systems.

Current Perspectives



Ecological theories are important because they place individual development in a much broader context than do other theories of social development.



Evolutionary psychology has been criticized because many of its tenets cannot be tested and because it overlooks the human capacity to transform our environments and ourselves.



The bioecological model has made important contributions to thinking about development, but can be criticized for its general omission of specific biological factors.