One of the annoying things about developmental psychology is disentangling age-related from development-related effects.
For example, as people age they tend to get more settled or to more have their lives sorted out. I’m pointing at the thing where kids and teenages and adults in their 20s tend to have a lot of uncertainty about what they are going to do with their lives and that slowly decreases over time.
A simple explanation is that it’s age related, or maybe more properly experience related. As a person lives more years, tries more things, and better learns the limits of what they can achieve they become more settled into the corner of the world in which they can successfully operate. We should expect people with less years of experience to be more confused about themselves and older people to be less confused because they had more years to figure things out. This need not invoke developmental psychology, just simple accumulation of evidence.
But counter examples of resigned young people and curious and adventurous old people abound. But perhaps we can explain these simply in terms of contexts that cause that, and if a person were put in a different context they might behave differently and in a more age anticipated way.
Where I think developmental psychology helps is in understanding subtler differences in how people behave and why. For example, is a person content with their life because they’ve tried a bunch of things and given up stretching too far because they know it’ll just be hard to do new things and they’ll probably fail so it’s not worth the effort, or are they content with their life because they trust themselves. It can be kinda hard to tell from the outside and you might not even be able to tell with an intervention, say by making something easier for them so they can do some new thing that they previously could not do easily and seeing how they respond.
This is one of the challenges I think we face in talking about developmental psychology. It seems a useful model for explaining many aspects of how minds progress over time, but it’s hard to figure out what’s conflated with things that would happen in a world with no developmental psychology beyond simple learning.
(Don’t worry; I haven’t suddenly found developmental psychology less useful, just musing a bit on an issue that comes up often of the form “this developmental model sounds fine as far as it goes, but what about this simpler explanation”.)
Psychological Development and Age
One of the annoying things about developmental psychology is disentangling age-related from development-related effects.
For example, as people age they tend to get more settled or to more have their lives sorted out. I’m pointing at the thing where kids and teenages and adults in their 20s tend to have a lot of uncertainty about what they are going to do with their lives and that slowly decreases over time.
A simple explanation is that it’s age related, or maybe more properly experience related. As a person lives more years, tries more things, and better learns the limits of what they can achieve they become more settled into the corner of the world in which they can successfully operate. We should expect people with less years of experience to be more confused about themselves and older people to be less confused because they had more years to figure things out. This need not invoke developmental psychology, just simple accumulation of evidence.
But counter examples of resigned young people and curious and adventurous old people abound. But perhaps we can explain these simply in terms of contexts that cause that, and if a person were put in a different context they might behave differently and in a more age anticipated way.
Where I think developmental psychology helps is in understanding subtler differences in how people behave and why. For example, is a person content with their life because they’ve tried a bunch of things and given up stretching too far because they know it’ll just be hard to do new things and they’ll probably fail so it’s not worth the effort, or are they content with their life because they trust themselves. It can be kinda hard to tell from the outside and you might not even be able to tell with an intervention, say by making something easier for them so they can do some new thing that they previously could not do easily and seeing how they respond.
This is one of the challenges I think we face in talking about developmental psychology. It seems a useful model for explaining many aspects of how minds progress over time, but it’s hard to figure out what’s conflated with things that would happen in a world with no developmental psychology beyond simple learning.
(Don’t worry; I haven’t suddenly found developmental psychology less useful, just musing a bit on an issue that comes up often of the form “this developmental model sounds fine as far as it goes, but what about this simpler explanation”.)