Bryan W. Sokol

Taking and Coordinating Perspectives: From Prereflective Interactivity, through Reflective Intersubjectivity, to Metareflective Sociality.

Despite being eclipsed in recent years by simulation theory, theory of mind and accounts of executive functioning, social-relational approaches to perspective taking and coordination based on the ideas of Jean Piaget and George Herbert Mead have never completely disappeared from the literature of developmental psychology. According to the social-relational view presented here, perspectives are holistic orientations to situations, within which individuals coordinate their actions and interactions with objects and others. The developmental processes by which perspectives are occupied, differentiated, and coordinated move from (1) prereflective interactivity (i.e., positioning within routine, repetitive interactive sequences during infancy and early childhood), to (2) reflective intersubjectivity (i.e., the simultaneous consideration and use of multiple perspectives within the intersubjective transactions of later childhood and early adolescence – processes that are accelerated and extended through increasingly sophisticated uses of language), and finally to (3) metareflective sociality (i.e., the abstracted and generalized social engagement across a diversity of personal, interpersonal, and sociocultural perspectives witnessed in mature adult negotiations and problem solving). These social-relational processes are used to reinterpret, revise, and extend Robert Selman’s theory of the development of perspective taking and coordination. The result is a developmental process of occupying, experiencing, coordinating, and engaging across a diversity of perspectives within interactive, intersubjective, and psychological-sociocultural transactions that spans the course of individuals’ lives and captures some facets of the complex, transformative, and ongoing interplay between societies and persons.

Intranational Cultural Variation: Exploring Further Implications of Collectivism within the United States

Within-nation cultural variation across regions provides a largely untapped resource for examining cross- cultural relations usually studied at the international level. The current study examines the relations of collectivism, helping behavior with strangers, and pace of life across regions of the United States. The study shows that within-nation cultural variation can be used both to (a) cross-validate findings generated at the international level, findings that are otherwise exceedingly difficult to cross-validate, and to (b) generate new findings. The current study provides cross-validation for the previously reported negative relation at the international level between collectivism and a faster pace of life. The study also provides evidence that in the context of helping strangers, collectivism is negatively associated with certain types of helping behavior. In particular collectivism was negatively associated with the “planned” (as opposed to “spontaneous”) and “giving” (as opposed to “doing”) types of helping.

Beliefs about Truth and Beliefs about Rightness

Childrens developing conceptions of what is right or proper are commonly studied without reference to concomitant changes in their understanding of beliefs, just as studies of young peoples maturing grasp of the belief entitlement process ordinarily proceed separately from any examination of the value considerations that invest beliefs with meaning. In an effort to reverse these isolationist practices, a case is made for rereading the fact-value dichotomy that currently works to divide the contemporaneous literatures dealing with childrens moral reasoning development and their evolving theories of mind. Findings from two research programs, in which childrens beliefs about truth and rightness are combined, serve to illustrate the natural interdependence of these moral and epistemic matters.

The Developmental Contours of Character

The relationship between character education and developmental psychology has long been marked by tension. Recent scholarly advances within these two disciplines, however, offer a promising new pathway of dialogue and productive exchange. The present chapter is the result of one such exchange. Our efforts represent an attempt to “psychologize” character in order to clarify its structure and trace its developmental contours. With a clearer picture of the psychological processes contributing to character, we can better identify the best educational practices for promoting its growth. Our discussion focuses on the processes associated with children’s developing self-regulation, autonomy, perspective taking, moral reasoning, empathy, and emotional competence.

Through Thick and Thin: Agency as ‘Taking’ Perspectives

Formulating plans, making decisions, committing to a particular course of action, while perhaps not always an explicit part of the daily routine, are nevertheless a common experience in human life. Such experiences, in turn, form the basis for commonly held assumptions and expectations about human agency. That is, we all hold expectations about others’ capacities for self-control and self-determination, and we even adjust accordingly when such capacities are seen as compromised or not yet fully formed. On the one hand, such assumptions seem to operate in the most mundane and uncontroversial sorts of way – for instance, when employers expect their employees to follow instructions and work independently, or when parents and teachers vary their expectations of how successfully children can regulate their conduct in the classroom or on the playground. On the other hand, in more scientific quarters, the topic of human agency is anything but mundane, and certainly not uncontroversial. Introducing talk of human agency in psychological circles, in particular, is the cocktail party equivalent of talking about religion or politics. The topic tends to draw awkward silence or uncomfortable sideway glances. Even in an age where mainstream psychology seems well beyond behaviorist aversions toward so-called naïve or commonsense notions of human psychological functioning [e.g., Skinner, 1974], there is still the lingering sense that agency is an illusion at best, a fool’s errand at worst. At the very least, most psychologists cannot easily shake the question on any researcher’s mind: ‘How do you operationalize that?’ Again, awkward silence. It is no wonder then that many psychologists choose to remain agnostic about the topic of human psychological agency, despite its apparent centrality in the lives of everyday people. Then, a book like Roger Frie’s [2008] Psychological agency enters the conversation. There are no agnostics in this edited volume, only a tightly woven collection of

Introduction: Meaning, measurement, and correlates of moral development

Morality has again become an important focus of research in different scientific disciplines: from biology (ethology), neuropsychology and evolutionary psychology to social psychology, business ethics, and political philosophy. One of the reasons for this renewed interest, no doubt, stems from the tragedies that human beings, individually or in groups, inflict upon the lives of one another and the world at large, e.g., (civil) war, the extinction of species and ecological destruction, climate change, and last but not least – the financial crisis. Moral destitution and collapse, a lack of respect for human dignity and worth, deficits in proper moral functioning at all levels of the world community often discounted or masked by transparent excuses and vacuous rationalizations, are viewed as a principal cause of the social, societal and ecological crises with which we are confronted today. The key to solving these crises must lie, at least partly, in a better understanding and active deployment of morality. However, morality is not only an important topic of study for its potential relationship with antisocial behaviour, but also for its relationship with prosocial behaviour (helping, sharing, etc.). Relationships of morality with both types of negative and positive conduct shed important insight on moral (dis)functioning. Developmental psychology is charged with the specific task of illuminating the growth and evolution of moral functioning in human beings.

Good Fences Make Good Neighbors: A Response to Overton and Ennis

In much the same way that Overton and Ennis describe two counterpart ‘moments of analysis’ to capture the integrative and dispersive features of their relational metatheory, we fi nd ourselves experiencing competing urges – agreement and dissent – with their ambitious project to remove the long-standing walls that divide cognitive-developmental and behavior-analytic traditions in psychology. Our agreement emerges from the exciting prospect that cognitive-developmental and behavior-analytic theories might, from a certain perspective, be understood as complementary aspects of an overarching action theory. Our dissent comes from the danger of losing important conceptual boundaries in the fl uid identity relations that Overton and Ennis develop to demonstrate the co-equal status of these theories that are typically treated as oppositional. To be clear, the reservations we express in the following commentary are largely intended as qualifi cations to Overton and Ennis’ proposal, not utter objection. In fact, we see a great deal of wisdom in Overton and Ennis’ account, particularly in their insightful rendering of action theory. Nevertheless, we also note several places where Overton and Ennis’ efforts to characterize relational metatheory might profi t from constraint. We suggest three constraints, in particular, and ultimately we wonder if cognitive-developmental and behavior-analytic traditions are not better kept separate until their possible complementarity can be explored more thoroughly. ‘Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,’ as Robert Frost would say [1915]. And, at least for now, we would prefer to walk the line between these walled up traditions until greater clarity can be brought to an analysis of what really does or does not connect them.

A penny is your thoughts? Reflections on a Wittgensteinian proposal

Although in fundamental agreement with Carpendale & Lewis’ position, we discuss a potential source of confusion regarding the socially constituted nature of mental states. Drawing from recent work by Kusch (1997, 1999), we argue, more specifically, that mental states are instances of “artificial kinds,” and so, stand between the more common classificatory extremes of “the natural” and “the social.” Most of us, we suspect, labor under the impression that our thoughts are private and that even if “Big Brother” scrutinizes other aspects of our lives, at least our mental lives are safe from prying eyes. To be told otherwise—that is, to hear on good authority that our minds are not the private sanctuaries we have always imagined them to be—would be unsettling. Although this was not our own first reaction to Carpendale & Lewis’ (C&L’s) broad proposal regarding the socially constructed nature of the mind, we argue here that perhaps it should have been. In their treatment of the debate concerning the relative contribution of social versus individual processes in development, C&L effectively ‘out’ the often closeted “individualistic” assumptions underlying much of the present day smart-talk about children’s understanding of mind and, in the bargain, usher in a set of perhaps even more radical claims. That is, Orwellian threats notwithstanding, we suggest something even more insidious is afoot in C&L’s proposal, not the least of which is that our mental lives may never be quite so “private” again. Perhaps one of the more controversial claims that C&L make in this regard turns on the so-called “contents” of the mind (mental states such as beliefs and intentions) and their relation to human action. In rejecting the “causal psychological view of the mind” that posits mental states as hidden causal “entities” driving behavior, C&L effectively claim that our language about mental states has fooled us all and that, in fact, “there are no such contents.” All of this seems quite hard to swallow. Nevertheless, C&L’s position is not without support. Although borrowing ostensibly from Wittgenstein to develop their alternative view, C&L might just as easily have taken a page from Dewey (see, for e.g., his 1912 essay, “What are states of mind?”), who similarly argued that “psychical” states are the result of “retrospectively” re-framing our broader activities and experiences—what he calls “organic reactions”—and, as such, “are neither antecedents nor concomitants, in a separate realm of existence...but are the very qualities of these reactions” (Dewey, 1979/1912, p. 36). The upshot of this view, as expressed in more current philosophical circles, is that “our psychological classifications are constitutive of our mental states and events” (Kusch, 1997, p. 18; see also Taylor, 1985), or phrased more polemically, that our private thoughts are in fact “social institutions” (see Kusch, 1999, pp. 321368). Much of what is polemical here, however, follows from a somewhat different classification issue. The culprit in this case is the traditional bimodal scheme of classifying things as either natural or social kinds. As the logic in this scheme would have it, if natural kinds refer to real things in the world, then by default social kinds must refer to made-up things, or worse, to nothing at all. Mental states, in this either-or classificatory system, must either be seen then to somehow cut the mind-brain at its natural joints or amount to mere “mythical posits.” C&L, as well as many others who might otherwise agree with their assessment, are likely to be dissatisfied with these two options. Thankfully, there are other, more rewarding, ways to divide the spoils. In addition to—or more precisely, in between—such natural and social kinds are what some philosophers have come to call “human” (Hacking, 1992) or “artificial” (Kusch, 1997, 1999) kinds. To be clear, insofar as each kind involves a self-referential component, they