Piaget's cognitive development theory and analytical thinking capacity in college students

¶ … Cognitive Thinking in the Individual Person

It amazes this author that the brain is capable of perception, cognition, emotion, personality, behaviors, etc. all at once. Then our brain uses the information to organize our daily living. It is interesting how it develops as we age and degenerates as we age. The fact that the brain is capable of retaining large amounts of information and employs redundant systems in case of catastrophic failure is also absolutely miraculous. However, it is extremely depressing that so few people seem to be capable of truly analytical thinking. The question that fascinates this author is how the same neural functions and organization can produce a few thinkers and so many people that are the human equivalent of drones.

This author is a topical reader and tends to skip to the end of books. From this skimming, a memory of an article on figurative thought (the fourth level) by Piaget where he postulated that the majority of people never achieve this level of thought, that is full intellectual capability. This developmental level was the highest in his developmental process and Piaget theorized that it never exceeded 20% at a maximum (Gruber, and Voneche 651). In the fine tradition of figurative thought, this struck this author that most social and political revolutions are made by a small minority of a population. For instance, only 10% of the U.S. population supported the American Revolution and this reflected the upper class (Wood, and Wood 21). In other words, only 10% of Americans were able to have the abstract cognitive thought to visualize revolution and what it might do to or for the infant United States of America.

The aim of this author is to design a study that would measure the percentage of a test population capable of fully cognitive thinking. This percentage will be one quantifiable variable. To further explain the variance in percentage, the variable of affluence will be measured in dollar value in order to divide the test population as to those who describe themselves as rich, middle class and poor students.

Method

In the study, a chat room on the university computer system will be set up to monitor the message traffic for one hour a day. Topics would be recorded and analyzed for content. The percentage of students who talk about "serious" subjects such as their class material, the news, etc. will be recorded. Those who speak about "trivial" subjects such as sports or entertainment will be recorded separately. The percentage of conversations that reveal the potential for leadership or independent thinking will be analyzed to see if it hits this 10-20% threshold. The study will be further developed at a second stage to see if demographic factors affect these percentages.

Limitations and Directions for Future Research

The study is limited by the amount of students that this author can poll due to the class number. Secondly, education and affluence are not the only factors. Cultural factors also are at variance. The study will have to be further defined to produce experimental profiles for participants in order to find "average" demographic boundaries.

Literature Review

Certainly, if someone makes it in college, it would likely put them in the 10-20% category that we are looking for who are capable of fully abstract thinking. In a doctoral dissertation at the University of Tennessee Knoxville, Charles Curtis Luke II found that statistically there were significant differences between a high and low intent to return to the college on the education-employment attitude measures posited in the study. Significantly, the students that had greater autonomy in selecting their major had the belief that their academic work would lead to future employment. This increased their motivation to believe that their current college work would lead to future success. This indicated a significantly higher intent to return to the institution the following semester. While more study was necessary, it was clear here that even amongst university students, their motivation was focused on analytical rather than intuitive types of thinking (Luke, iv).

Constantine Sedikides and John J. Skowronski proposed what they called the "Law of Cognitive Structure Activation." This was presented in the journal called Psychological Inquiry in 1991.

In the first part of the study, sufficient already existing studies showing that a mental stimulus that is ambiguous enough to be encodable in response to multiple cognitive structures (such as constructs, scripts, events, or specific objects). The stimulus was to be encoded as an instance of a structure that is the most highly active in memory and the most semantically similar to the stimulus. Luke parameters for his law in the first part of the article. In the second part, the possible applications of the law to judgmental, personality, and behavioral processes. These span cognitive, clinical, developmental and social psychology as well (Sedikides, and Skowronski. 169).

Building upon this, Sedikides, Kenneth C. Herbst, Deletha P. Hardin and Gregory J. Dardis in a 2002 Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

expand upon this in another article where they explore where self-discipline of self-enhancement is linked to psychological benefits. It is also the case with personal and interpersonal liabilities such as excessive risk taking, social exclusion. Therefore, the structuring of social situations that tend to prompt people to keep self-enhancing beliefs in check can potentially confer personal and interpersonal advantages. In other words, discipline in the cognitive thinking process can enhance it.

The above authors examined in their study whether accountability can be made to serve this purpose. Accountability here was defined by them as the expectation to explain, justify and as well defend one's self-evaluations (for example, grades on an essay) to another person (their "audience"). In Experiment 1 they showed that this accountability curtails self-enhancement. In Experiment 2, they ruled out such audience concreteness and status as the explanations for this effect. In Experiment 3, they demonstrated that the accountability-induced self-enhancement reduction was due to identifiability. In Experiment 4, it was documented that there were identifiability decreases in self-enhancement due to a number of factors. These included the evaluation of expectancy, an accompanying focus on an individual's weaknesses, better memory for feedback, affirmation of a self-domain that is unrelated to the self-domain currently under threat, psychological distancing from others who take personal credit for success but who do not assign blame for failure. Finally, the withholding of information that will likely improve others was a factor (Sedikides, Hardin, Herbst, and Dardis, 592).

Conclusion

Certainly, the development of fully cognitive thinking is a complex issue that can not be simply explained. The subject goes beyond education and affluence. However, it is worth noting that this precious commodity is uncommon. It should be the mission of education in general and psychology in particular to help unlock the minds of individuals and to reach their full human potential. This is the ultimate revolution in human consciousness and needs to more effectively carried out to better humanity. The more fully functioning minds that exist, the better in a world where mindless actions at all levels of society cause so much suffering and pain. This is precisely where the cognitive perspective in psychology comes into play. It considers the role of an individual's mind in behavior. This includes how we perceive and how we represent the world, learn and remember our information and to solve our problems. In other words, a win-win situation for humanity.