Genetic Psychology: What It Is And How It Was Developed By Jean Piaget
The name genetic psychology is possibly unknown to many, and more than one will surely make you think about behavioral genetics, despite the fact that, as Piaget formulated it, this field of psychological study has little to do with heredity.
Genetic psychology focuses on finding out and describing the genesis of human thought throughout development of the individual. Let’s look at this concept in more depth below.
Genetic psychology is a psychological field that is responsible for investigating thought processes, their formation and their characteristics. Try to see how mental functions develop from childhood, and look for explanations that make sense of them. This psychological field was developed thanks to the contributions of Jean Piaget Swiss psychologist very important during the 20th century, especially with respect to constructivism.
Piaget, from his constructivist perspective, postulated that all thought processes and individual characteristics of the mind are aspects that are formed throughout life. The factors that would influence the development of a specific thinking style and associated knowledge and intelligence would be, basically, any external influence that one receives during one’s life.
It is possible that the name genetic psychology misleads us into thinking that it has something to do with the study of genes and DNA in general; However, it must be said that this field of study has little to do with biological inheritance. This psychology is genetic in that addresses the genesis of mental processes that is, when, how and why the thoughts of human beings are formed.
Jean Piaget as a reference
As we have already seen, the most representative figure within the concept of genetic psychology is the person of Jean Piaget, who is considered, especially in developmental psychology, one of the most influential psychologists of all time, along with Freud. and Skinner.
Piaget, after obtaining a doctorate in biology, began to delve deeper into psychology, being under the tutelage of Carl Jung and Eugen Bleuler. Some time later, he began working as a teacher in a school in France, where he had first-hand contact with the way children were developing cognitively, which made him begin his study in developmental psychology.
While there, he became interested in understanding how thought processes were formed from early childhood, in addition to being interested in see what changes were taking place depending on the stage in which the infant was found and how this could have repercussions, in the very long term, on their adolescence and adulthood.
Although his first studies were something that went quite unnoticed, it was from the 1960s onwards that he began to gain greater prominence within the behavioral sciences and, especially, in developmental psychology.
Piaget wanted to know how knowledge was formed and, more specifically, how one went from strictly infantile knowledge, in which simplistic explanations abound and little removed from the ‘here and now’, to a more complex one, such as that of adults, in which that abstract thinking has a place.
This psychologist was not a constructivist from the beginning When he began his research, he was exposed to multiple influences. Jung and Breuler, under whom he was tutored, were closer to psychoanalysis and eugenic theories, while the general trend in research was empiricist and rationalist, sometimes closer to behaviorism. However, Piaget knew how to extract what for him was the best from each branch, adopting an interactionist position.
Behavioral psychology, led by Burrhus Frederic Skinner, was the movement most defended by those who tried, from a scientific perspective, to describe human behavior. The most radical behaviorism defended that personality and mental abilities depended in a very relevant way on the external stimuli to which the person was exposed.
Although Piaget defended this idea partially, also considered aspects of rationalism The rationalists considered that the source of knowledge is based on our own reason, which is something more internal than what the empiricists defended and which is what makes us interpret the world in a very variable way.
Thus, Piaget opted for a vision in which he combined both the importance of the external aspects of the person and his own reason and ability to discern between what must be learned, in addition to the way in which that stimulus is learned.
Piaget understood that the environment is the main cause of each person’s intellectual development, however, the way in which the person interacts with that same environment is also important, what causes them to end up developing certain new knowledge.
Development of genetic psychology
Once his interactionist vision of thought was established, which ultimately ended up becoming Piagetian constructivism as it is understood today, Piaget carried out research to clarify more exactly what the intellectual development of boys and girls was
At first, the Swiss psychologist collected data in a similar way to what is done in more traditional research, however he did not like this, which is why he chose to invent his own method to investigate children. Among them was naturalistic observation, the examination of clinical cases and psychometry
As he had originally been in contact with psychoanalysis, during his time as a researcher he could not avoid using techniques typical of this current of psychology; However, he later became aware of how unempirical the psychoanalytic method is.
On his way trying to discern how human thought is generated throughout development and increasingly specifying what he understood as genetic psychology, Piaget wrote a book in which he tried to capture each of his discoveries and expose the best way to address the study of cognitive development in childhood: Language and thinking in young children.
The development of thought
Within genetic psychology, and with the help of Piaget, stages of cognitive development have been proposed which allow us to understand the evolution of children’s mental structures.
These stages are the ones that come next, which we are going to address very quickly and simply highlighting which mental processes stand out in each of them.
How did Piaget understand knowledge?
For Piaget, knowledge is not a static state, but rather an active process. The subject who tries to know a certain subject or aspect of reality changes according to what he is trying to know That is, there is an interaction between the subject and knowledge.
Empiricism defended an idea contrary to Piaget’s. The empiricists maintained that knowledge is rather a passive state, in which the subject incorporates knowledge from sensory experience, without having the need to intervene around him to acquire this new knowledge.
However, the empiricist vision does not allow us to reliably explain how the genesis of thought and new knowledge occurs in real life. We have an example of this with science, which is constantly advancing. It does not do so by passively observing the world, but by hypothesizing, reformulating arguments and testing methods, which vary depending on the findings made.
