The Blog That Ate Mind Chatter

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. German philosopher and sociologist Jergen Habermas spoke of the transition from concrete operational to formal operational as a transformation from a role identity to an ego identity.

A role identity (the type of identity of a person at the concrete operational stage) is defined by one’s place and function in the group. An ego identity, on the other hand — contrary to the common use of the term as a type of selfishness — is defined by a wider perspective that, among other things, considers what would be fair for all people, not just one’s group. This more world centric perspective is possible because one has, for the first time, a true independent identity, based on a more expanded ability to take the role of other. When Piaget speaks of his earlier stages as being egocentric, he doesn’t mean that a clearly differentiated self or ego exists. He means just the opposite — that the self is not differentiated from the world, or even from the group.

It’s only at the formal operational level that a true, integrated self emerges from it’s immersion (in the sensorimotor stage) in the total environment, then (in the late sensorimotor and early preoperational stage) in bodily impulses, then (in late preoperational) in emotions, and finally (in concrete operational) in social roles. Counterintuitively, then, the development of a strong ego is actually a move away from egocentricity.

In the sensorimotor and preoperational stages the child does not have a strong or separate ego. The child assumes that the world feels whatever he feels and wants whatever he wants. He cannot clearly separate self and other and, as a result, treats others as extensions of himself (which leads to magical thinking — if something is an extension of me, I can magically affect it, or some powerful other can affect it for me). Later, at the concrete operational stage, the child cannot separate herself from the view of her group — the group’s mythology or world view. At formal operational, however, a true, independent self — a differentiated ego — emerges.

Let’s take a quick detour, then, and look at the concept of the ego (for which I will rely heavily upon the remarks of Ken Wilber). The ego is the bad guy in mystical, New Age circles, but what New Agers mean by “ego” is a bit fuzzy. Most postmodern New Agers take it to mean the sense of being a separate self, a self isolated from others and from Spirit — a not unreasonable definition.

But since ego is the bad guy, New Age thinking often equates everything that is non-rational, every perspective not associated with ego, as being good. In doing so, they make no distinction between narcissistic, pre-egoic states, where a true ego is as yet undeveloped, and trans-egoic states, where the ego has been transcended (an ego is available to be used as a tool but the self is no longer identified as it — we’ll get to this in a later post).

As opposed to the New Age definition of ego, academic psychoanalytic circles often define ego as the process of organizing the psyche, often referring to this organizing principle as the self, that which gives unity to the mind. Many of these theorists don’t relate to the idea of going beyond the ego — or get why anyone would even want to.

Finally, in contemporary philosophy, a distinction is made between what could be called the empirical ego, the self that can be an object of awareness, and the Pure Ego or transcendental ego, that aspect of us that is pure subjectivity and therefore can never be seen or experienced as an object. This is what I (and others) have often referred to as the witness, and what the Hindus call Atman, the pure witness that itself can never be witnessed. This definition of ego confuses New Agers, because it equates the “bad” ego with Spirit.

When Piaget speaks of his earlier stages as being egocentric, he doesn’t mean that there is a clearly differentiated ego or self, able to distinguish itself from the world. In fact, he means the opposite — that the self is not differentiated from the world, that there is no strong ego. This is why the person at these early stages treats the world as an extension of the self. Only when a true, differentiated ego emerges (at formal operational) does egocentrism diminish.

Until that point, the self is immersed in bodily impulses (sensorimotor and preoperational) and pre-given social roles (concrete operational). Finally, however, at the formal operational stage, a fully separate and fully individuated sense of self emerges. This emerging ego begins to form during concrete operational, as a persona or role, and then more fully develops during the formal operational stage. Further development (past formal operational) continues into the more spiritual (transegoic) realms — something I will discuss in another post.

Pre-egoic (i.e., sensorimotor and preoperational), egoic (concrete operational and formal operational), and transegoic (beyond formal operational) stages could also be described as being subconscious, self-conscious, and superconscious, respectively; or as prepersonal, personal, and transpersonal; or as prerational, rational, and transrational. And, you could also equate these stages with egocentrism, ethnocentrism (or group-centrism), and worldcentrism.

I mentioned decentering earlier as a new and significant ability of the formal operational person, where there is an ability to hold in awareness more than one type of relationship or one way of categorizing things or situations. Decentering could be thought of as an increased ability to take and hold in awareness multiple perspectives — a hallmark of world-centrism.

In this progression, each stage transcends the stage before it, becoming less egocentric. In each case, the new perspective is wider. Cognitively, the person is increasingly able to see (and take) progressively larger perspectives. Ultimately this will culminate in an ability to see one’s self as the entire going on of it all (as Spirit, or the Divine).

Formal operational thinking and awareness, then, transcends but also includes concrete operational thinking and awareness. As such, it can operate upon the skills and perspectives of the concrete operational stage. What the child was immersed in during concrete operational (what was subject) can now be observed, as an object — and therefore manipulated and operated upon. While concrete operational uses rules of thought to operate upon the concrete world, formal operational operates upon the rules themselves.

The ability to do this opens one to a new world — the world of possibilities. This is why the adolescent, as he develops formal operational abilities, enters into a world of new feelings, new dreams, new possibilities, new idealistic strivings. Reason (the main tool of formal operations) is the main driving force for this new space of possibilities. While the concrete operational child can operate on the concrete world, he is still tied to the obvious and the given. The formal operational adolescent, however, can mentally see new and different arrangements and possibilities.

A classic experiment from Piaget illustrates this. Piaget presented a child with five glasses of colorless liquids, three of which, when mixed, will produce a yellow liquid, and asked the child to combine the liquids to produce such a liquid.

Each stage approaches the problem in a different way. The preop child randomly mixes a few different liquids, and then gives up. If he stumbles upon the correct combination, he assigns his success to magic: “The sun made it happen,” or, “I wished that it would happen.” The conop child begins combining the liquids, three at a time, concretely mixing until he finds the right three to produce a yellow color.

But the formop adolescent begins by announcing that all possible combinations of three liquids must be tried. In other words, he has a mental plan (a formal operation) that allows him to see, in his mind’s eye, that all possible combinations must be tried. This is a type of relational awareness, where all possibilities are mentally held in awareness — something entirely new.

This isn’t a magical view of how things relate, as in preoperational thinking, or a randomized but concrete way of seeing how things relate, as in concrete operational thinking, but rather a new type of thinking in which both discrete differences and interactive relationships are perceived and taken into consideration.

The preop child, and to a lesser extent the conop child, thinks that yellow is a property of the liquids. The formop adolescent, however, understands that the yellow color is created by a relationship between the various liquids. This ability to see relationship between items is a new and significant skill. At concrete operational, the concrete items are what is important. At formal operational, while the items themselves are still important, what is most important are the relationships between the items.

Wilber points out three important qualities of formal operational. It is the first stage that is ecological, in the sense that it can see and hold in awareness the possible consequences of the relationships involved in a situation. Second, formal operational involves an understanding of relativity. In being able to hold in mind different perspectives, it sees in what way they operate relative to each other. (In one experiment Piaget allowed a snail to move along a board while at the same time the board is moved along a table. Only those at formal operational could understand the distance the snail travels relative to both the board and the table. The formal operational thinker understands that the time something takes, or the distance it travels, must be measured relative to some arbitrary point.)

Finally, formal operational thinking is non-anthropocentric (it doesn’t interpret the world solely in terms of human values and experiences). Formop sees a bigger picture, a larger perspective, in which humans are a part of a larger whole that includes the entire planet and other living things.

In a similar way, rules and societal norms are reflected upon and evaluated by reference to universal principles that transcend those of any particular culture or group. “My country right or wrong” becomes “Is my country actually right?” Concrete rules such as the Ten Commandments are supplanted by more universal principles such as justice, mercy, compassion, respect for all individuals, human rights — and the connection between rights and responsibilities.

During this developmental process we’ve seen morality move from a preconventional, narcissistic perspective, centered around the child’s body-centered feelings and impulses; to a conventional, ethnocentric, group-centric perspective centered around one’s tribe, society, race, or social group; to a postconventional or worldcentric perspective, oriented to ”all of us.”

At formal operational, one’s role no longer determines one’s identity. Though still influenced by society, identity at the formal operational stage is individually determined. The question of “who am I?” must, for the first time, be answered not by society but by the individual. Until this point true self-esteem does not exist, because prior to this stage one’s esteem is defined by the group. Now, for the first time — with the arising of a separate, individuated self — self-esteem is possible.

In terms of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, one has moved from belongingness needs to self-esteem needs. A failure to successfully negotiate this shift results in the pathology of this stage, the identity crisis. At concrete operational one might fail to find an appropriate or healthy role in society, resulting in a script pathology. At formal operational the person is faced with finding an individual self that may or may not fit with society at all (think of Henry David Thoreau).

In addition to being ecological, relational, and non-anthropocentric, formal operational thinking is also introspective and experimental. It also relies on evidence to settle issues, and can understand and use ”what if” or “as if” statements to make sense of the world. In many ways, it is a stage about what could be. Modern technology, modern medicine, and many other human comforts and discoveries are the result of formal operational thinking.

Next, we’ll look at stages beyond formal operational, what is often called the transpersonal.

Be well.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 2nd, 2008 at 1:22 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.