Theories of Development: Cognitive, Moral, Personality and More

Running head: THEORIES OF DEVELOPMENT
Theories of Development
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1THEORIES OF DEVELOPMENT
Development refers to the series of age related changes which takes place over the
course of a life span (Settersten, 2018). As according to the very famous psychologists like
Lawrence Kohlberg, Jean Piaget, and Sigmund Freud, development is a range of stages and a
stage refers to a period in the process of development in which an individual display a typical
behavioural pattern as well as establishes particular capacities. There are several theories of
development. These theories comprise of the cognitive theory, humanist theory, behaviourist
theory, social learning theory and operant conditioning. This paper is going to elaborate on
discussing some of the different theories of development along with their pros and cons in
relation to the different stages of life.
Firstly, according to the theory of personality by Sigmund Frued, personality
development means a range of different stages and among these stages, Sigmund Frued stated
that the stage of early childhood is the most vital one (Cervone & Pervin, 2015). He also
believed that an individual develop his personality by about his age of five years. Secondly,
as according to the theory of psychological development developed by Erikson, like Freud,
he too believed the fact that early childhood development is important. However, it is also to
note that as according to him, personality development takes place throughout a man’s life. In
the early 1960s, he had proposed a theory which relates 8 different stages of development
(McAdams & Zapata-Gietl, 2015). As stated by him, in every stage, an individual face new
challenges and the outcomes of each of the stages depends on how he handles those
challenges. He named the stages as- Trust vs. Mistrust>Autonomy vs. shame and
doubt>initiative vs. guilt> industry vs. inferiority> identity vs. role confusion> intimacy vs.
isolation> generative vs. self-absorption> integrity vs. despair (Knight, 2017). His theory is
very useful as because of the fact that it addresses both personality change as well as
personality stability. To some extent, the personality of an individual is stable because
childhood experiences indeed affects the people even when they reach their adulthood. It is

2THEORIES OF DEVELOPMENT
also to mention that personality keeps on developing and changing with the period of life as
individual face more new challenges in each stage. However, the main issue with this theory
is that with many stage theories of development, he have described only a typical pattern. It
does not acknowledge the several differences in between the individuals.
Thirdly, the theory of cognitive development, presented by Jean Piaget, focuses on the
conscious thoughts, problem solving, decision-making and remembering (Demetriou, Shayer
& Efklides, 2016). It refers to how a person understands the world through interacting.
According to Piaget, the thought processes of children changes when they mature and
develop physically as well as interact with the external world around them. He believed that
children develop schema or say, the mental models for representing the world. As they learn,
they modify and expand their schema through accommodation and assimilation (Carey,
Zaitchik & Bascandziev, 2015). The term accommodation refers to improvement of the
schema as new information are assimilated and term assimilation refers to the expanding of
the prevailing schema to include more new information. He proposed that the children go
through a total of four stages of cognitive development and they are the sensorimotor period,
the preoperational period, the concrete operational period and the formal operational period.
In this context, it is also to note that Piaget has argued that children are incapable of
conservation at the stage of preoperational due to the three weaknesses that emerge in the
manner they think and all these demerits are of centration, egocentrism and irreversibility.
Centration refers to the proneness of focusing on an aspect of specific problem and ignoring
the rest vital aspects. Secondly, irreversibility refers to the incapability to mentally reversing
any operation, while the egocentrism refers to the impotency of taking the view-point of
someone else’s.
While Piaget has made a very vital contribution to the research on the subject of
cognitive development, there are several reasons for which his theory has come under attack.