The Story of Psychology (74 page)

There seems to be good evidence, then, for both the maturational and the cognitive-developmental views; the truth, one suspects, is probably an amalgam of the two.

An influence on personality development that has long been a leading subject of research is parenting style. Researchers have explored it by
means of an array of techniques—observation, questionnaires, experiments, correlation analysis—and their findings, which have been quickly picked up by the media, are familiar to most literate people. Here, in brief, ignoring passing fads in parenting, is a handful of enduring findings gathered in recent decades. Bear in mind, however, that both genetic tendencies and external factors exert significant influences on personality development; the connections listed here between parent behavior and child personality are only correlations, and not always strong ones.

Discipline:
Power assertion (threats and punishment) and withdrawal of love are forms of external control; they may produce compliance, chiefly while the parents are watching or can carry out sanctions. But discipline by induction (explaining why a certain act is wrong, how it violates a principle, how it makes the other person feel) leads the child to absorb the parents’ values and make them part of his or her own standards; it creates self-control.
⁷⁷

Child-rearing style:
The children of authoritarian (dictatorial) parents tend to be withdrawn, low in vitality, mediocre in social skills, and often prejudiced, and, for boys, low in cognitive skills. The children of permissive parents have more vitality and sunnier moods but poor social and cognitive skills (the latter is true of boys in particular). The children of authoritative (firmly governing but democratic) parents tend to be self-assertive, independent, friendly, and high in both social and cognitive skills.
⁷⁸

Modeling:
Parents are models for their children’s behavior and traits of personality. An aggressive parent tends to produce an aggressive child, a gentle parent a gentle child. When parents preach particular values but themselves behave differently, children will imitate the behavior rather than follow the preachments. Children are especially likely to model themselves on a nurturing or strong parent, less so a cold or weak one.
⁷⁹

Parent-child interaction:
Children whose parents talk to them a lot develop higher verbal and social skills than those whose parents talk to them little. Children whose parents play with them a lot tend to be popular with other children and good at recognizing and interpreting other children’s moods and emotional expressions. The way the parent and child interact is likely to be the model for the child’s other relationships.
⁸⁰

Sex-role behavior:
While many of the behavioral differences between boys and girls have some basis in biology, much sex-typed behavior is learned from the parents. It begins at birth, when parents unconsciously respond differently to boy infants and girl infants. It continues in direct instruction about how to behave and, even more important, in the child’s identification with the same-sex parent and imitation of that role model. Macho men tend to have macho sons, seductive women seductive daughters, and so on. The child tends to imitate even non-sex-role traits of the same-sex parent more than those of the other-sex parent.
⁸¹

We could look at dozens of findings about parenting and personality development, but we have tarried long enough. It is time to see what develops when the child goes outside the home.

“Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways and be wise.” The formicine activity that Solomon (or whoever wrote Proverbs 6) would like us to emulate concerns gathering and putting by food in good times. But the social cooperation of ants is far more remarkable. From the moment they emerge from the larval stage, they are perfectly socialized, their minuscule nervous systems programmed to respond automatically to the chemical signals and touches of their fellows with appropriate social behaviors—food gathering, housekeeping, defensive combat, and the tending of larvae and the queen. We, in contrast, need fifteen to twenty years to become relatively socialized and even then are not done but must adapt our behavior as our roles change throughout life.

For well over half a century, developmentalists have been using a variety of techniques to gather evidence about the processes of human social development. Clipboard on knee and stopwatch in hand, they have observed babies and toddlers at home and in nurseries, preschoolers and schoolchildren on playgrounds and in classrooms; interviewed parents and plied them with questionnaires; recorded and analyzed volumes of child conversations; told children the beginnings of stories and asked what they thought happened next; designed hundreds of experimental situations to measure the level of social development at different ages; and calculated the correlations between blood hormone levels and sex-typed behavior.

From all this (and much more) they have gleaned a mass of findings. Some lend support to the psychoanalytic view of development, others to the social-learning view, others to the cognitive-developmental view, others to the cultural psychology view, and, finally, still others to the evolutionary psychology perspective. We need not sort them out but merely glance at a sample of the more interesting highlights.

Turn taking:
The earliest lessons in social behavior are learned in the family, where in addition to the fundamental one of trusting another human being, infants learn the lesson, crucial to social relationships, of taking turns when communicating. Parents talk to the infant, wait until the infant responds with a sound or smile, and then talk again; the infant senses the pattern and, by the age of toddlerhood, even before uttering a word, will carry on with another toddler in turn-taking fashion. In the following bit of dialogue from a study of this process, Bernie, thirteen months old, has been watching Larry, fifteen months, mouthing a toy. He finally “speaks”:

BERNIE
: Da…da.

LARRY
:(Laughs very slightly as he continues to look)

BERNIE
: Da.

LARRY
:(Laughs more heartily this time)

The same sequence is repeated five more times. Then Larry looks away and offers an adult a toy. Bernie pursues him.

BERNIE
:(Waving both hands and looking directly at Larry) Da!

LARRY
:(Looks back at Bernie and laughs again)

After nine more such interchanges, Bernie gives up and toddles away.
⁸²

Play:
The developmentalists L. Alan Sroufe and Robert G. Cooper saw play as the “laboratory” where the child learns new skills and practices old ones.
⁸³
Infants cannot play together; that requires emotional and cognitive skills that take two to three years to develop. Two toddlers, put close together, usually just stare at each other, watch each other play, or play side by side. But by three or thereabouts they begin to play together (not necessarily at the same game), and by five they play cooperatively.
⁸⁴

In play, toddlers and preschoolers learn the first lessons in self-control.
They discover that aggression is not tolerated by adult onlookers, and may cause the other child to retaliate or refuse to be a playmate. They learn sharing, albeit with some difficulty. They develop preferences for certain other playmates which, by four, turn into friendships marked by mutuality and commitment.
⁸⁵

By three or four they begin learning rules of play and the rudiments of right and wrong in play with older children: “Three strikes and you’re out”—and a tantrum won’t get you any more, but may well get you expelled from the game.
⁸⁶

At about the same time they become more skillful at lying and concealing any facial expression or tone of voice that would give them away. This, one research team claims, is often a direct result of training by parents (“Remember to thank Grandmother for the sweater even though you wanted a toy”).
⁸⁷

Role playing:
Sroufe and Cooper have also called play the “social workshop” in which children try out roles alone and with other children. They often play Mommy-and-Daddy, Mommy-and-baby, Daddy-and-baby, doctor-and-patient, and victim-and-rescuer games. They particularly like playing the parent and ordering their own parent, in the child role, to eat up everything, or get washed, or go to bed. Whether one interprets role playing psychoanalytically, behavioristically, cognitively, or otherwise, it serves as training for social life. One study even found that the more social fantasy play a preschooler engages in, the greater the child’s “social competence,” as rated by teachers.
⁸⁸

Social competence:
The elements of social competence are readiness to engage with peers, ability to sustain give-and-take with them, and popularity with or acceptance by them. Developmentalists measure popularity by such methods as asking the children in a particular play group which of their playmates they “especially like” and which they “don’t especially like”; simply by subtracting the negative responses from the positive ones and adding up the scores, they get an index of each child’s popularity in the group.

Self and group:
In play groups, and even more in classrooms, close contact with other children spurs the development of the sense of psychological self (as distinguished from the physical sense of self of the toddler at the mirror). By eight, children begin to recognize that inwardly as
well as outwardly they are different from others and that they are, in fact, unique.
⁸⁹

At the same time they become keenly aware and observant of group norms—for instance, the rules of games (choosing sides, taking turns, tossing a coin for first side at bat), and group loyalty (“telling on” a peer to parents or teachers is grounds for ostracism). Even at the elementary school level it is important to children to wear whatever is the fad in their group. As they near adolescence, the need to conform to peer-group norms—tastes in clothing, forms of speech, smoking, music, slang, drug use, sexual behavior—becomes extremely powerful. Adolescent peer-group norms and values differ among ethnic groups and social and economic levels, but the need to conform is omnipresent. After early adolescence, it wanes throughout the teen years.
⁹⁰

Sex-typed behavior:
Fifty years ago, it was well established that throughout childhood, and particularly with the approach of adolescence, children increasingly exhibit behavior considered appropriate to their sex. In the 1960s, with the emergence of the women’s liberation movement, many people believed that most sex-typed behavior would prove to be socially prescribed rather than inherent, and would shortly disappear. Much of it has; but some remains and apparently is likely to continue.

That may be due in part to biology. In the 1970s radioimmunoassay studies showed that hormone levels begin to rise at around seven—long before secondary sex characteristics appear and sex-typed behavior becomes exaggerated.
⁹¹
It is probably no coincidence that from seven on, few girls play games as rough as those of boys or get as dirty, and that until adolescence few boys are as conscious of their clothing and hair as most girls.

Yet despite all the changes that the women’s movement sought to initiate four decades ago, the preadolescent accentuation of sex-typed behavior continued to reflect social learning of one’s probable position as an adult in society. Even in 1990, most girls still saw their future in less optimistic terms than boys; that year, a nationwide poll of three thousand boys and girls in grades four to ten found that although in the elementary school years the self-esteem of girls was only slightly lower than that of boys, by middle school it declined markedly and continued at that level in high school. However, a decade later a meta-analysis of later self-esteem studies totaling forty-eight thousand young Americans showed only a minor advantage in self-esteem for males at all ages, a
result its four female researchers said surprised them. They offered a number of explanations, but it may well be that the women’s movement had slowly had an effect in our society.
⁹²

Empathy and altruism:
In the 1960s, a number of psychologists became interested in “prosocial behavior”—all those cooperative forms of behavior which make social life possible. Many were social psychologists, but others were developmentalists who were intrigued by one form of prosocial behavior, altruism. Much prosocial behavior is selfishly motivated—we stop at red lights and pay our taxes not out of love of our fellow creatures but out of self-interest—but altruism is motivated by concern for the other person. The question the developmentalists found interesting was how such behavior arises, since it is often in conflict with the strongest of all motivations, self-interest.

In the past four decades hundreds of developmentalists have conducted many hundreds of studies of altruism, using the empirical methods mentioned earlier. The answer to the question “How does altruism develop?” seems to be that it results from a complex interplay of influences: the brain circuitry that tends to cause humans to feel distress at the sight of another human in distress, the model set for children by parental care, cultural values, the growth of the child’s ability to imagine another person’s feelings, social experience (helping someone else enables the helper to see himself or herself as a good sort of person and to be seen as such a person by others), and judgment based on real-world knowledge of the probable consequences for the person in distress of being helped or not being helped.
⁹³