~ ~ ~

By Bill Harris, Centerpointe Research Institute

    [Also see Part 1 and Part 2]

This is the third post in a series about cognitive development based primarily on the work of the legendary Jean Piaget, but also drawing on other developmental theorists.

First, before we jump into this, why should you care about human development? How will knowing this benefit you?

First, cognitive development underlies development in nearly every other area of your life.

And, since where you are in the developmental process has a huge affect on the way you make sense of the world, and to a great degree determines your ability to successfully navigate your life, understanding development can greatly help you take charge of your life.

If for some reason you aren’t creating what you want in life — enough money, enough friends, enough peace of mind, enough fulfillment — it’s very likely that where you are developmentally has something to do with it.

So far we’ve looked at Piaget’s first three levels, sensorimotor, preoperational, and concrete operational.

In this post we’ll look at Piaget’s highest level, formal operational. Then, we’ll move on to higher levels as identified by other researchers.

You might want to read parts one and two first in order to better understand the information in this post.

So, we’ve followed the development of cognitive abilities from the sensorimotor stage, where the world is understood entirely through the senses and through motor functions (without any real emotional involvement or mental involvement); to the preoperational stage, where the child learns to understand the world through a rudimentary use of symbols and concepts; to the concrete operational stage, where the child applies symbols, concepts, and mental rules to concrete (but not abstract) operations in the world.

For most people, development stops at the concrete operational stage.

A few, however, develop further, to Piaget’s highest stage, formal operational. (And, an even smaller number continue to stages beyond that, which we will visit in a later post.)

Up through concrete operational, the person has used concepts, symbols, and mental rules to operate on concrete things and events.

Concrete operational is the stage at which we learn to get around in the world by learning through experience how cause and effect works in the world.

At formal operational, the child learns to apply his logical abilities to abstract ideas, which opens up a new and much wider perspective on life, and a large number of new life skills.

One of the big differences between concrete operational (conop) and formal operational (formop) is the ability to perform cognitive operations on hypothetical situations.

If a mother says to a concrete operational child, “Don’t make fun of that man with a big nose. How would you feel if someone made fun of your nose?” the child may respond, “But I don’t have a big nose!”

In a concrete sense, the child doesn’t have a big nose, and therefore cannot put himself in the place of the other person. Doing so is too abstract for the child.

It asks him to use ”as if” thinking, and to put himself in the role of another. The task is abstract rather than concrete.

Here is another situation requiring formal operational thinking: ”If Tom is taller than Sam, and Tom is also shorter than Mike, who is tallest?”

To figure out the answer, you have to be able to imagine the situation — it isn’t concrete, but rather hypothetical.

In the first of my three online Life Principles Integration Process courses, I introduce the idea that what you believe tends to come true in reality — what psychologists call a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I ask students to examine their beliefs and find those that aren’t working, those that are generating outcomes they don’t want.

(Notice that believing is concrete operational — it is based on evidence from experiences in the concrete, real world — while thinking about believing is formal operational — it’s a type of thinking about thinking, an operation performed on thinking.)

Once a person identifies a belief that is generating negative results, I ask them to determine what belief, if they adopted it and believed it, would generate the outcome they want.

(For instance, someone who believes “I’ll never make any money,” generally figures out a way to make that belief come true. If, on the other hand, they believed, “If I do what those who make money do, I’ll make money, too,” they’ll figure out how to make that belief come true, i.e., they will make money.)

I then ask the student to adopt this new belief — even though they have no real-world evidence that it is true (yet).

A concrete operational person believes something because they have concrete evidence for it. They’ve had actual experiences that tell them that what they believe is “true.”

Now, I’m asking them to 1) imagine what belief would generate a better result, and 2) believe “as if” that new belief is true, to imagine that it is true — without any concrete evidence (they have to either imagine the evidence, or notice that other people have created evidence, which makes such a belief possible).

I’ve noticed that while a lot of students can do this, some students have trouble.

This is a sign that they have not fully mastered concrete operational thinking (if that had, their beliefs would be more functional), and are therefore not quite ready to move into formal operational thinking.

Needing concrete evidence in order to believe something is concrete operational thinking.

Being able to imagine what it would be like to believe in some other way is formal operational.

The visionaries of the world use formal operational thinking (and, very likely, cognitive strategies beyond formal operational, which we will look at in another post).

If you call concrete operational “thinking,” then formal operational could be termed “thinking about thinking.”

Where concrete operational thinking might be described as learning the rules for how to do things, formal operations involves looking at how rules are generated, noticing patterns, and so forth — in other words, operating on rules and other ways of thinking, rather than operating merely on concrete things and situations.

In formal operational thinking, we’ve stepped back a step to observe the thinking process from the outside.

The concrete operational person is immersed in their mental processes — they are their mental processes.

The formal operational person has begun the process of having these mental processes instead of just being them.

Formal operational thinking — the ability to think about the thinking process — allows a person to investigate a problem in a systematic manner.

Let’s say you wanted to determine the rules for making a pendulum swing at a certain speed.

To systematically figure this out, you might try various combinations: a long string with a light weight, a long string with a heavy weight, a short string with a light weight, and a short string with a heavy weight.

Though the actual experiment is very concrete, the conception of it isn’t.

The formal operational person will imagine the possibilities before they begin. They have the cognitive ability to imagine them all, hold them in awareness, and compare them.

The concrete operational person will randomly try different possibilities and eventually will learn how a pendulum works.

The formal operational thinker, however, will create a systematic plan prior to the actual experiment — allowing her to cut right to the chase.

In many cases, the formal operational person will not only cognize the possibilities and the method of testing them, but also be able to imagine (based on information they have learned during the concrete operational stage) the actual result — before even doing the experiment.

At a more technical level, cognitive psychologists have identified eight different cognitive skills used to solve this problem (though you don’t need to know that these categories exist to use them).

The first four have to do with the ability to group possibilities in four different ways:

1) Conjunction: “It’s possible that both A and B make a difference.” This expresses the possibility that the length of the string and the weight of the pendulum both make a difference.

2) Disjunction: “It’s possible that it’s either this or that.” Another possibility is that it might be either the length or the weight.

3) Implication: “It’s possible that if it’s this, then that will happen.” This is the formation of hypothesis by noticing any possible if/then causative connection.

4) Incompatibility: “It’s possible that when this happens, that doesn’t.” This is the converse of implication (#3 above), and is a way to eliminate (disprove) a hypothesis.

The second four are called “operating on operations” — what I meant above by “thinking about thinking.” The concrete operational thinker has learned to use various cognitive operations in order to make things happen in the world.

The formal operational thinker can think about these operations and see (and use) patterns and principles.

If for instance your hypothesis is that it could be the string, or the weight, there are four operations you could use to test it:

1) Identity: “It could be the string or the weight.”

2) Negation: “It might not be the string and it might not be the weight.” (Negate each component and replace “or” with “and.”)

3) Reciprocity: “It could either not be the weight or not be the string.” (Negate the components but keep the and’s and or’s.)

4) Correlativity: “It’s the weight and the string.” (Keep the components as they are, but replace or’s with and’s.)

If you are a reasonably good formal operational thinker, you probably use the above in your thinking, even if you’ve never heard of, or even thought about, these categories.

But you can probably see why not everyone develops this type of cognitive ability — it can be complicated.

The more difficult questions on IQ tests can only be answered using formal operational thinking, for instance.

Formal operational thinking allows one to think logically and abstractly, to use imaginative “as if” thinking, to “think about thinking,” to understand shades of gray, and, additionally, to understand abstract concepts such as love, integrity, or freedom.

Only about 30% of adults develop formal operational cognitive abilities.

Part of the shift to formal operational thinking involves a significant identity change: a mature ego begins to emerge.

Continued on Bill Harris' blog at Centerpointe Research Institute.

    ~ ~ ~

Bill Harris is a Certified Trainer of Neuro Linguistic Programming and is trained in Ericksonian Hypnosis. He is a long time student of contemporary psychology, quantum mechanical physics, the evolution of non-linear systems (chaos theory) and the effects of a wide range of neurotechnologies on human change, evolution and healing.

He is a founding member of the Transformational Leadership Council started by Chicken Soup for the Soul author Jack Canfield, and is founder and director of Centerpointe Research Institute.

Also see more articles by Bill Harris

and free online course led by Bill Harris: The Masters of The Secret.

~ ~ ~

   [Image from book: Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer]
 

  

Positive psychology bookmarks

positive psychology
.....
positive psychology articles / sites....

positive psychology : books

~ ~ ~