Jean Piaget (1896-1980)

Early Life

Jean William Fritz Piaget was born in Neuchatal, Swistzerland in 1896. He studied at the University of Neuchatel and received his doctorate in 1918. He continued his post-doctoral studies in Zurich, and later moved to Paris. He began teaching while in Paris, and worked directly with the Grange-Aux-Belles Street School for Boys and headmaster Alfred Binet. Piaget worked with Binet in the assessment of Binet’s now widely used intelligence tests. While assisting with the tests, Piaget first recognized that the errors that the children made were inconsistent with those of older children. He began to consider the possibility that younger children possessed different cognitive processes than adults. This theorizing led to his future work in child cognitive research.

Professional Life

Piaget’s studies of children, including his own, led to several phases of Piaget:

• Zeroeth Piaget: The initial phase of Piaget is the Zeroeth Piaget. During this phase, Piaget studied philosophy and history before he became a psychologist. It was not until he began working at the Rousseau Institute that his theories on child cognitive development first surfaced.
• The First Piaget: This period was recognized as the time when Piaget first theorized that children grew from a cognitive process of egocentrism to sociocentrism. During the 1920’s, Piaget was a practicing psychologist and began to use both clinical and psychological techniques to devise what was known as a semi-clinical interview. By asking children a series of questions, Piaget would come to realize that children went from responding intuitively to responding in a socially acceptable manner as they aged.
• The Second Piaget: During this phase, Piaget identified assimilation and accommodation. To pursue this theory, Piaget examined and evaluated the behaviors of his own children. He observed their sucking behaviors as infants, and watched and assessed their later activities of accommodating their needs through physical movements and actions.
• The Third Piaget: During this phase Piaget posited the Elaboration of the Logical Model of Intellectual Development, stating that a child’s developmental intelligence occurs in progressive stages. The Third Piaget was the theory that was most widely accepted and adopted by modern psychology. 
• The Fourth Piaget: Here Piaget explored memory and perception, and other aspects of knowledge and intelligence. 

Contribution to Psychology

Piaget is seen as an epistemologist, focused on the development of knowledge through qualitative processes. He believed that each child experienced four specific stages of development:

1. Sensorimotor Stage – this stage is from infancy to age 2, during which a child interacts with his world through movement and explores his surroundings through the five senses.
2. Preoperational Stage – this stage is the fantasy stage, or magical thinking stage, and occurs from age 2-7. It is during this time that egocentrism originates and motor skills are acquired.
3. Concrete Operational Stage – as a child grows from age 7 to 11, he begins to use logical t hinking, but requires the use of aids. The egocentrism diminishes and eventually disappears.
4. Formal Operational Stage – during adolescence, 11-16 and beyond, a child is able to perform abstract thinking and has the ability to logically think and conserve information without aid.

Piaget believed that the cognitive development of a child occurs in a cycle. He stated that the dialectical process is designed to expand on each previous stage. The order in which this occurs is not only empirically accurate, but fundamentally necessary. His theory encompasses our ability to obtain knowledge and our reflections and perceptions of our own behaviors. Piaget was the first to examine and explore this model of human development and his works in genetic epistemology became the foundation of the study of child development.

Piaget’s influences can be observed throughout the world in child psychology. The Jean Piaget Society supports his theories and is a world-wide organization and holds conferences that are highly attended each year. Piaget’s theories continue to impact education, psychology, evolution, philosophy, morality and even artificial intelligence, as his theories were used in the development of many of our modern society’s computer operating systems and interfaces.