11

Development
Prenatality: A Womb With a View
Infancy and Childhood: Perceiving, Doing, and Thinking
Infancy and Childhood: Bonding and Helping
Adolescence: Minding the Gap
Adulthood: Change We Can’t Believe In

HIS MOTHER CALLED HIM ADI and showered him with affection, but his
father was not so kind. His sister later recalled that Adi “got his sound
thrashing every day…. How often on the other hand did my mother caress
him and try to obtain with her kindness what my father could not obtain with
his harshness.” Although Adi’s father wanted him to become a civil servant,
Adi’s true love was art, and his mother quietly encouraged that gentle
interest. When Adi was just 18 years old, his mother was diagnosed with
terminal cancer, and his sister noted that Adi “spoiled my mother during this
time of her life with overflowing tenderness. He was indefatigable in his care
for her, wanted to comply with any desire she could possibly have and did all
to demonstrate his great love for her.”

Adi was heartbroken when his mother died, but he had little time for grieving.
As he later wrote, “Poverty and hard reality compelled me to make a quick
decision. I was faced with the problem of somehow making my own living.” In
defiance of his father, Adi decided to make his living as an artist. He applied
to art school but was flatly rejected, and so—motherless, homeless, and
penniless—Adi wandered the streets for years, sleeping on park benches,
living in shelters, and eating in soup kitchens, all the while trying desperately
to sell his sketches and watercolors, and sometimes trading them for food.

But this is not the story of a forgotten artist. Indeed, just 10 years after his
mother died, Adi had achieved a degree of fame that few artists have ever
known. Today, collectors from all over the world compete at auctions to buy
his paintings, which rarely come up for sale. The largest collection of his work
is not in the hands of any private citizen or museum but is instead owned by
the U.S. government, which keeps the collection under lock and key, in a
windowless room in Washington, DC, where few people have ever been
allowed to visit. Marylou Gjernes, the longtime curator of this collection, once
remarked, “I often looked at them and wondered, ‘What if? What if he had
been accepted into art school? Would World War II have happened?’” Why
would the curator ask such a question? Because although the artist’s mother
called him Adi, the rest of us know him as Adolf Hitler.
 Adi painted in many styles, including the precise and well-structured
watercolor shown here. In 2013, one of his paintings sold at auction
for $40,000.

WHY IS IT SO DIFFICULT TO IMAGINE ONE OF THE WORST mass murderers of the 20th century
as a gentle child who loved to draw, as a compassionate adolescent who cared for his ailing mother, or
as a dedicated young adult who suffered for the sake of his art? After all, you didn’t start out as the
person you are today. You are utterly different from the baby you once were, and utterly different from
the elderly person you will someday become—so different, in fact, that people who saw just one of
these versions of you would probably be unable to recognize the other. From birth to infancy, from
childhood to adolescence, from young adulthood to old age, human beings are transformed by time.
They experience dramatic changes in the way they look, think, feel, and act, but they also display
some surprising consistencies. Developmental psychology is the study of continuity and change
across the life span, and in the last century, developmental psychologists have discovered some truly
amazing things about our metamorphosis.

Throughout the lifespan, human beings show both continuity and change in how they look, think, feel, and behave.

The story of our development starts where we do: at conception. First we’ll examine the 9-month
period between conception and birth and see how prenatal events set the stage for so much of what’s
to come. Then we’ll examine infancy and childhood, the periods during which children learn how to
think about the world and their relationship to it, understand and bond with others, and tell the
difference between right and wrong. Next, we’ll examine a relatively new invention called adolescence,
which is the stage at which children become both independent and sexual creatures. Finally, we’ll
examine adulthood, the stage at which people typically leave their parents, find mates, and have
children of their own.
Prenatality: A Womb With a View
Learning Outcomes
Describe the three prenatal stages of development.
Give reasons why it is advantageous for humans to be born with underdeveloped brains.
Explain how the prenatal environment influences fetal development.

Most of us calculate our age by counting our birthdays, but the fact is that on the day we are born we are already
9 months old. The prenatal stage of development ends with birth, but it begins 9 months earlier when about 200
million sperm set out on a journey from a woman’s vagina, through her uterus, and to her fallopian tubes. Many
are called, but few are chosen. Some of the sperm don’t swim vigorously enough to make any progress, and
others get stuck in a kind of spermatozoidal traffic jam in which too many sperm head in the same direction at the
same time. Of those that do manage to make their way through the uterus, many sperm take the wrong turn and
end up in the fallopian tube that does not contain an egg. When all is said and done, only one out of every million
sperm manages to find the correct fallopian tube, get close to an egg, and then release digestive enzymes that
erode the egg’s protective outer coating. The moment the first sperm does this, the egg releases a chemical that
reseals its coating and keeps all the other sperm from entering. After triumphing over 199,999,999 of its fellow
travelers, this single successful sperm sheds its tail and fertilizes the egg. About 12 hours later, the egg merges
with the nuclei of the sperm, and the prenatal development of a unique human being begins.

This electron micrograph shows several human sperm, one of which is fertilizing an egg. Contrary to what many people
think, fertilization does not happen right away. It typically happens 1 to 2 days after intercourse, but can happen as many
as 5 days later.
Prenatal Development
That unique human being has a name. A zygote is a fertilized egg that contains genetic material from both the egg
and the sperm, and its brief lifetime is called the germinal stage, which is the 2-week period that begins at
conception. During this stage, the one-celled zygote divides into two cells that then divide into four cells that then
divide into eight cells, and so on. By the time an infant is born, its body contains trillions of cells, each of which
came from the original zygote. During the germinal stage, the zygote migrates down the fallopian tube and
implants itself in the wall of the uterus. This is a difficult journey, and about half of zygotes don’t complete it,
either because they are defective or because they implant themselves in an inhospitable part of the uterus. Male
zygotes are especially unlikely to complete this journey and no one understands why, though several comedians
have suggested it’s because male zygotes are especially unwilling to stop and ask for directions.

The moment the zygote successfully implants itself in the uterine wall, it loses its old name and earns a new one:
embryo. The embryonic stage is a period that starts at about the 2nd week after conception and lasts until about
the 8th week (see FIGURE 11.1). During this stage, the implanted embryo continues to divide, and its cells begin
to differentiate. Although it is only an inch long, the embryo already has arms, legs, and a beating heart. It also
has the beginnings of female reproductive organs, and if it is a male embryo, it begins to produce a hormone
called testosterone that will masculinize those organs.

Figure 11.1

Prenatal Development Humans undergo dramatic changes during the 9 months of prenatal development. These images
show an embryo at 30 days (about the size of a poppyseed), an embryo at 8 weeks (about the size of a raspberry), and
a fetus at 5 months (about the size of a banana).

The embryo doesn’t have a lot of time to get used to its new name, however, because at about 9 weeks it becomes
a fetus. The fetal stage is a period that lasts from about the 9th week after conception until birth. The fetus has a
skeleton and muscles that make it capable of movement. It develops a layer of insulating fat beneath its skin, and
its digestive and respiratory systems mature. During the fetal stage, brain cells begin to generate axons and
dendrites that allow them to communicate with other brain cells. They also begin to undergo a process (described
in the Neuroscience and Behavior chapter) known as myelination, which is the formation of a fatty sheath
around the axons of a neuron. Just as plastic sheathing insulates the wires in a kitchen appliance, myelin insulates
the neurons in the brain, preventing the leakage of the signals that travel along the axon. Myelination starts
during the fetal stage, but it doesn’t end until adulthood.

The human brain grows rapidly during the fetal period, but unlike the brains of other primates, it does not come
close to achieving its adult size. A newborn chimpanzee’s brain is nearly 60% of its adult size, but a newborn
human’s brain is only 25% of its adult size, which is to say that 75% of a human’s brain development occurs after
birth. Why are humans born with such underdeveloped brains? First, humans have really big heads, and if a
newborn baby’s head were anywhere close to its adult size, then the baby could never pass through its mother’s
birth canal. Second, one of our species’ greatest talents is its ability to adapt to a wide range of novel
environments that differ in climate, social structure, and so on. So rather than arriving in the world with a highly
developed brain that may or may not meet the requirements of its environment, human beings arrive with
underdeveloped brains that do much of their developing within the very environments in which they ultimately
must function, thereby gaining the unique capacities that each environment requires.

This chimp and boy share a deep interest in dirt, bugs, and leaves. But one difference between them is that a newborn
chimp’s brain will not quite double in size while a newborn human’s brain will quadruple!

Prenatal Environment
The word environment probably makes you think of green fields and blue skies. But the womb is also an
environment, and it has a powerful impact on development (Coe & Lubach, 2008; Glynn & Sandman, 2011;
Wadhwa, Sandman, & Garite, 2001). Although a woman’s bloodstream is separated from the bloodstream of her
unborn child by the placenta, many substances can pass through the placenta. A teratogen is any substance that
passes from mother to unborn child and impairs development.

Teratogens include the mercury in fish, the lead in water, and the paint dust in air, but the most common
teratogens are substances that have their very own advertising campaigns. Fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS) is a
developmental disorder that stems from heavy alcohol use by the mother during pregnancy and children born
with FAS have a variety of brain abnormalities and cognitive deficits (Carmichael Olson et al., 1997; Streissguth
et al., 1999). One study that followed children born with FAS for 25 years found that by the age of 14, a stunning
60% had been suspended or expelled from school (Streissguth, 2007). Although some studies suggest that light
drinking does not harm the fetus, there is little consensus about how much drinking is “light” (Warren & Hewitt,
2009). On the other hand, everyone agrees that “none” is a perfectly safe amount.

This child has some of the telltale facial features associated with fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS): short eye openings, a flat
midface, a flat ridge under the nose, a thin upper lip, and an underdeveloped jaw.

Tobacco is the other common teratogen, and there is no debate about its effects. About 7% of American mothers
smoke during pregnancy (Drake, Driscoll, Mathews, 2016), and as a result their children are smaller, more likely
to be born prematurely, and more likely to have perceptual and attentional problems in both infancy (Wiebe et al.,
2014) and childhood (Espy et al., 2011; Fried & Watkinson, 2000). Even secondhand smoke can lead to reduced
birth weight and deficits in attention and learning (Makin, Fried, & Watkinson, 1991; Windham, Eaton, &
Hopkins, 1999). Exactly how dangerous is smoking during pregnancy? Very! Research suggests that smoking
during pregnancy increases a woman’s odds of having a stillborn child by a whopping 47% (Marufu, Ahankari,
Coleman, & Lewis, 2015).

The things a pregnant woman ingests can harm her unborn child, but so too can the things she fails to ingest.
Women who don’t get enough nutrition during pregnancy have children who are at increased risk for a variety of
physical and mental illnesses (Neugebauer, Hoek, & Susser, 1999; Susser, Brown, & Matte, 1999). It is worth
noting that the embryo is more vulnerable to the effects of teratogens and malnutrition than is the fetus but that
structures such as the central nervous system are vulnerable throughout the entire prenatal period.

The prenatal environment is rich with chemicals that affect the unborn child, but it is also rich with information.
The fetus can hear its mother’s heartbeat, the gastrointestinal sounds associated with her digestion, and her voice.
Newborns will suck a nipple more vigorously when they hear the sound of their mother’s voice than when they
hear the voice of a female stranger (Querleu et al., 1984), indicating that even at birth they are already more
familiar with the former. Newborns who listen to strangers speaking two languages will suck more vigorously
when they hear words from their mother’s native language, indicating that they are already familiar with the
tempo and rhythm of their mother’s speech (Byers-Heinlein, Burns, & Werker, 2010). What unborn children hear
in the womb even influences the sounds they make themselves. French newborns cry with a rising pitch and
German newborns cry with a falling pitch, mimicking the cadence of their mother’s native tongue (Mampe et al.,
2009). Clearly, the fetus is listening.

Build to the Outcomes

1. What are the three stages of prenatal development?
2. What is the adaptive benefit of being born with an underdeveloped brain?
3. How does the uterine environment affect the unborn child?
4. What evidence suggests that “the fetus is listening”?
Infancy and Childhood: Perceiving, Doing, and
Thinking
Learning Outcomes
Describe the evidence suggesting that newborns can see.
Explain the two rules of motor development.
Outline the stages of Piaget’s theory of cognitive development.
Differentiate between egocentrism and theory of mind.
Describe the key skills that allow infants to learn from others.

Newborn babies don’t look like they can do much more than poop, burp, sleep, and cry. But looks can be
deceiving. Infancy is the stage of development that begins at birth and lasts between 18 and 24 months, and in
the last few decades, researchers have discovered that much more is going on inside the infant than meets the
untrained eye.

Perceptual Development
New parents might not stand around the crib and make goofy faces if they realized that their babies can’t see
them. Newborns have a limited range of vision, and the amount of detail they can see from 20 feet away is
roughly equivalent to the amount of detail that you can see from 600 feet away (Banks & Salapatek, 1983). On
the other hand, newborns can see things that are 8 to 12 inches away, which just so happens to be the distance
between a mother’s face and her nursing infant’s eyes.

But wait. How do psychologists know what a newborn can and can’t see? Recall from the Learning chapter that
habituation is the tendency for organisms to respond less intensely to a stimulus each time it is presented. So if a
newborn habituates to a visual stimulus, that means he or she must have been able to see it. If newborns are
shown an object over and over again, they will stare a lot at first and then less and less each time the object is
presented. If the object is then rotated 90°, the newborns will begin staring at it again (Slater, Morison, &
Somers, 1988). So yes, newborns can see objects, and the objects to which they are especially attentive are those
that look like faces (Biro et al., 2014). For example, newborns in one study were shown a shape that either had
facial features, scrambled facial features, or no facial features (see FIGURE 11.2a). When the shape was moved
across their fields of vision, the newborns tracked the movement with their eyes—but they tracked the moving
shape that had facial features longer than they tracked either of the others (Johnson et al., 1991; cf. Kwon et al.,
2016). Some studies suggest that even the fetus attends to facial features (see FIGURE 11.2B). When lights were
shined through pregnant women’s abdomens, their fetuses were more likely to turn toward the lights that were
configured like a human face (Reid et al., 2017).
 Figure 11.2

Infants Track Social Stimuli When newborns see the stimuli in Panel A, they will track the shapes with facial features
(left) longer than the shapes with scrambled facial features (middle) or no facial features (right). When fetuses see the
stimuli in Panel B, they are more likely to turn their heads toward the face-like configuration (left) than the other
configuration (right).

(A) ADAPTED FROM JOHNSON ET AL., 1991; (B) ADAPTED FROM REID ET AL., 2017.

Infants don’t just attend to human objects—they also respond to them. In one study, researchers got very close to
two groups of newborn infants. They stuck out their tongues in front of one group and pursed their lips in front of
the other. Did the newborns see them? Yes, and not only that, but the newborns in the first group stuck out their
own tongues more often than did the newborns in the second group; and the newborns in the second group pursed
their lips more often than did the newborns in the first group (Meltzoff & Moore, 1977; cf. Oostenbroek et al.,
2016, and Meltzoff et al., 2018). It doesn’t take newborns long to learn this trick: They have been shown to
mimic facial expressions in their very first hour of life (Reissland, 1988). Clearly, babies are watching—and what
they are watching most closely is us!

Infants mimic the facial expressions of adults—and vice versa, of course!

Motor Development
Infants can use their eyes and ears right away, but they have to spend some time learning to use their other parts.
Motor development is the emergence of the ability to execute physical actions such as reaching, grasping,
crawling, and walking. Infants can do a bit of this at birth because they are born with a small set of motor
reflexes, which are motor responses that are triggered by specific patterns of sensory stimulation. For example,
the rooting reflex causes infants to move their mouths toward any object that touches their cheek, and the sucking
reflex causes them to suck any object that enters their mouth. Together, these two reflexes allow newborn infants
to find their mother’s nipple and begin feeding—a behavior so vitally important that nature took no chances and
hard-wired it into every one of us. Interestingly, these and other reflexes that are present at birth seem to
disappear in the first few months as infants learn to execute more sophisticated motor behavior.

The development of these more sophisticated behaviors tends to obey two general rules. The first is the
cephalocaudal rule (or the “top-to-bottom” rule), which describes the tendency for motor skills to emerge in
sequence from the head to the feet. Infants tend to gain control over their heads first, their arms and trunks next,
and their legs last. A young infant who is placed on her stomach may lift her head and her chest by using her
arms for support, but she typically has little control over her legs. The second rule is the proximodistal rule (or
the “inside-to-outside” rule), which describes the tendency for motor skills to emerge in sequence from the center
to the periphery. Infants learn to control their trunks before their elbows and knees, which they learn to control
before their hands and feet (see FIGURE 11.3). Although motor skills develop in an orderly sequence, they do
not develop on a strict timetable. Rather, the timing of these skills is influenced by many factors, such as the
infant’s incentive for reaching, body weight, muscular development, and general level of activity. Some evidence
suggests that the early emergence of certain motor skills is associated with greater intelligence in adulthood
(Flensborg-Madsen & Mortensen, 2018).
Figure 11.3

Motor Development Infants learn to control their bodies from head to feet and from center to periphery. These skills do
not emerge on a strict timetable, but they do emerge in a strict sequence.
 Motor skills develop through practice. In just 1 hour in a playroom, the average 12- to 19-month-old infant takes 2,368
steps, travels 0.4 mile, and falls 17 times (Adolph et al., 2012).

For adults, perceptual and motor skills work seamlessly together. But children take a while to learn to act on what
they see. When infants or young children are allowed to play with an object such as a slide or a car and are then
given a miniature version of the object, they will often make a scale error by treating the miniature object as
though it were the regular-sized one—for instance, they’ll try to get inside the miniature car or slide down the
miniature slide (DeLoache, Uttal, & Rosengren, 2004) (see FIGURE 11.4). Although the children can see that
the miniature objects are small (which is why they bend down to touch them), their perceptual knowledge of the
object’s size is not yet coordinated with their motor behavior, so they try to do with the miniature object what
they would normally do with the regular-sized object. The perceptual system that is responsible for the
identification of objects is neurologically separate from the motor system that is responsible for the control of
movements, which is why certain kinds of brain damage can cause these two systems to become dis-coordinated
in adults. The same two systems appear to be not-yet-coordinated in infants and young children.
 Figure 11.4

Scale Errors (a) This 21-month-old child has made a scale error by attempting to slide down a miniature slide. (b) This
24-month-old child has opened the door to the miniature car and is repeatedly trying to force his foot inside the car.

Cognitive Development
Infants can see and hear and move their bodies. So can houseflies. The question is whether infants can do the
thing that makes humans so special: Can they think? In the first half of the 20th century, a Swiss biologist named
Jean Piaget became interested in this question and so began to study cognitive development, which is the
process by which infants and children gain the ability to think and understand. Piaget suggested that during this
process, infants and children learn three essential things: how the physical world works, how their own minds
work, and how other people’s minds work. Let’s see how they achieve these understandings.
 Jean Piaget (1896–1980) was the father of modern developmental psychology, as well as the last man who actually
looked cool wearing a beret.

Discovering the World

Piaget (1954) suggested that cognitive development occurs in four discrete stages: the sensorimotor stage, the
preoperational stage, the concrete operational stage, and the formal operational stage (see TABLE 11.1). The
sensorimotor stage is a stage of cognitive development that begins at birth and lasts through infancy. As the
word sensorimotor suggests, infants at this stage are mainly busy using their ability to sense (perceptual skills)
and their ability to move (motor skills) to acquire information about the world.

TABLE 11.1 PIAGET’S FOUR STAGES OF COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT

Stage Characteristic

Sensorimotor Infant experiences the world by sensing it and moving in it, develops schemas, begins to act intentionally,
(Birth–2 years) and shows evidence of understanding object permanence.

Preoperational (2–6 Child acquires motor skills but does not understand conservation of physical properties. Child begins this
years) stage by thinking egocentrically but ends with a basic understanding of other minds.
Concrete Child can think logically about physical objects and events and understands conservation of physical
operational (6–11 properties.
years)
 Formal operational Child can think logically about abstract propositions and hypotheticals.
(11 years and up)

During the sensorimotor stage, infants explore with their hands and mouths, learning important lessons about the
physical world such as “Guacamole falls down, not up.”

By actively exploring their environments with their eyes, mouths, and fingers, infants begin to construct
schemas, which are theories about the way the world works. As every scientist knows, the good thing about
theories is that they allow us to predict what will happen next. If an infant learns that tugging at a stuffed animal
brings the toy closer, then that observation is incorporated into the infant’s theory about how physical objects
behave (“Things come closer if I pull them”), and the infant can later use that theory when she wants a different
object to come closer, such as a rattle or a ball. Piaget called this assimilation, which happens when infants apply
their schemas in novel situations. Of course, if the infant applies this theory to the family cat, the cat is likely to
sprint in the opposite direction. Infants’ theories about the world are sometimes disconfirmed by experience,
which causes infants to take special notice (Stahl & Feigenson, 2015) and to adjust their theories (“Inanimate
things come closer when I pull them, but animate things just hiss and run”). Piaget called this accommodation,
which happens when infants revise their schemas in light of new information.

What kinds of theories or schemas do infants develop, apply, and adjust? Piaget suggested that infants are
surprisingly clueless about some of the most basic properties of the physical world and must acquire information
about those properties through experience. For example, when you put your shoes in the closet, you know that
they are still there even after you close the closet door, and you would be surprised if you opened the door a
moment later and found the closet empty. But according to Piaget, this wouldn’t surprise an infant because
infants do not yet have an understanding of object permanence, which refers to the fact that objects exist even
when they are not visible. Piaget noted that in the first few months of life, infants act as though objects stop
existing the moment they are out of sight. For instance, a 2-month-old infant will track a moving object with her
eyes, but once the object leaves her visual field, she will not search for it. Put the shoes in the closet and close the
door and—poof!—the infant acts as if they no longer exist.

But does this really mean that infants don’t realize that objects have permanence? To answer this question
definitively, of course, we’d have to know what infants are thinking, which Piaget considered impossible: “The
child’s first year of life is unfortunately still an abyss of mysteries for the psychologist. If only we could know
what is going on in a baby’s mind while observing him in action, we could certainly understand everything there
is to psychology” (Piaget, 1927/1977, p. 199). But there’s nothing scientists love more than an abyss of
mysteries, and during the 1960s, the psychologist Robert Fantz (1964) developed an ingenious technique for
finding out what is “going on in a baby’s mind.” The logic of his preferential looking time technique is simple.
Check out the objects in FIGURE 11.5. The odds are good that you looked longer at the one on the left than the
one on the right. Why? Because the object on the left is an “impossible object.” You found it interesting precisely
because it violates your beliefs about how the physical world works. Now, here’s the cool part: Because you
naturally stare longer at things that violate your beliefs, psychologists can use the duration of your stare to figure
out what your beliefs must be! Your mind is no longer an abyss of mysteries. It is open to investigation.

Figure 11.5

BUT … THAT’S IMPOSSIBLE! Which of these pictures did you look at longer? What does that reveal about your theory
of the physical world?

When psychologists used this simple technique with infants, they quickly discovered that infants know more
about object permanence than Piaget suspected. For instance, in one study, infants were shown a miniature
drawbridge that flipped up and down (see FIGURE 11.6). These were the “habituation trials.” Once the infants
got used to this, they watched as a solid box was placed behind the drawbridge—in the path of the drawbridge,
but out of the infant’s sight. Some infants then saw a possible event: The drawbridge began to flip and then it
suddenly stopped, as if its motion was being impeded by the unseen solid box. Other infants saw an impossible
event: The drawbridge began to flip—and then it didn’t stop, as if its motion was unimpeded by the unseen solid
box. So what did infants do? Four-month-old infants stared longer at the impossible event than at the possible
event (Baillargeon, Spelke, & Wasserman, 1985). The only thing that made the impossible event impossible was
the fact that an unseen box should have—but didn’t—impede the motion of the drawbridge, which means that the
infants must have realized that the box continued to exist even when it could no longer be seen. These and other
studies suggest that infants acquire an understanding of object permanence much earlier than Piaget suspected
(Shinskey & Munakata, 2005; Wang & Baillargeon, 2008).

Figure 11.6

The Impossible Event During the habituation trials, infants watch a drawbridge flip back and
forth with nothing in its path until they grow bored. During the test trials, a box is placed
behind the drawbridge, and the infants are shown either a possible event (in which the
motion of the drawbridge is impeded) or an impossible event (in which the motion of the
drawbridge is not impeded). The graph shows the infants’ looking times during the
habituation trials and the test trials. As you can see, during the test trials, the infants’
interest was reawakened by the impossible event but not by the possible event (Baillargeon,
Spelke, & Wasserman, 1985).

Discovering the Mind

The long period following infancy is called childhood, which is the period that begins at about 18 to 24 months
and lasts until about 11 to 14 years. According to Piaget, people enter childhood at one stage of cognitive
development and leave at another. They enter at the preoperational stage, which is the stage of cognitive
development that begins at about 2 years and ends at about 6 years, during which children develop a preliminary
understanding of the physical world. They exit at the concrete operational stage, which is the stage of cognitive
development that begins at about 6 years and ends at about 11 years, during which children learn how actions,
or operations, can transform the concrete objects of the physical world.

The difference between these stages is nicely illustrated by one of Piaget’s clever experiments, in which he
showed children a row of cups and asked them to place an egg in each. Preoperational children were able to do
this, and afterward they readily agreed that there were just as many eggs as there were cups. Then Piaget removed
the eggs and spread them out in a long line that extended beyond the row of cups. Preoperational children
incorrectly claimed that there were now more eggs than cups, pointing out that the row of eggs was longer than
the row of cups and hence there must be more of them. Concrete operational children, on the other hand,
correctly reported that the number of eggs did not change when they were merely spread out in a longer line.
They understood that quantity is a property of a set of concrete objects that does not change when an operation
such as spreading out alters the set’s appearance (Piaget, 1954). Piaget called the child’s insight conservation,
which is the understanding that the quantitative properties of an object are invariant, despite changes in the
object’s appearance.
Why don’t preoperational children grasp the notion of conservation? Adults naturally distinguish between the
subjective and the objective, between appearances and realities, between the way things look and the way things
are. We know that a wagon can be red but look gray at dusk, and that a highway can be dry but look wet in the
heat. Visual illusions delight us precisely because we know that they look one way but are really another.
Preoperational children don’t make this distinction. They assume that things are as they seem, that what’s in their
minds is also in the world, and that when something looks gray or wet it must be gray or wet. As they move from
the preoperational to the concrete operational stage, they come to realize that the way the world appears and the
way the world is are sometimes very different things.

Once children have this epiphany, they can suddenly solve problems that require them to ignore an object’s
subjective appearance (cf. Deák, 2006; Lane et al., 2014). They can understand that when a ball of clay is rolled,
stretched, or flattened, it is still the same amount of clay despite the fact that it looks larger in one form than in
another. They can understand that when water is poured from a short, wide beaker into a tall, thin cylinder, it is
still the same amount of water despite the fact that the water level in the tall cylinder is higher. They can
understand that when a sponge is painted gray to look like a rock, it is still a sponge despite its appearance. In
short, they understand that certain operations—such as squishing, pouring, and spreading out—can change what
an object looks like without changing what the object is like.

When preoperational children are shown two equal-size glasses filled with equal amounts of liquid, they correctly say
that neither glass “has more.” But when the contents of one glass are poured into a taller, thinner glass, they incorrectly
say that the taller glass now “has more.” Concrete operational children don’t make this mistake, because they recognize
that operations such as pouring change the appearance of the liquid but not its actual volume.

Children learn to solve physical problems at the concrete operational stage, and they learn to solve nonphysical
problems at the formal operational stage, which is the final stage of cognitive development that begins around
the age of 11, during which children learn to reason about abstract concepts. Childhood ends when formal
operations begin, and people who move on to this stage (and Piaget believed that some people never do) are able
to reason systematically about abstract concepts such as liberty and love and about hypotheticals and
counterfactuals—about events that have not yet happened and about events that might have happened but didn’t.
There are no concrete objects in the world to which the words liberty and love refer, yet people at the formal
operational stage can think and reason about such concepts in the same way that a concrete operational child can
think and reason about squishing and folding. The ability to generate, consider, reason about, or mentally
“operate on” abstract concepts is the hallmark of formal operations.

According to Piaget, people cannot reason about abstract concepts such as freedom and justice until they reach the
formal operational stage. But they can still hold signs!

Discovering Other Minds

As children develop, they discover their own minds. But they also discover the minds of others. Because
preoperational children don’t fully grasp the fact that they have minds that mentally represent objects, they also
don’t fully grasp the fact that other people have minds that may mentally represent the same objects in different
ways. That’s why preoperational children mistakenly expect others to see the world as they do. When 3-year-old
children are asked what a person on the opposite side of a table is seeing, they typically claim that the other
person sees what they themselves see (see FIGURE 11.7). Egocentrism is the failure to understand that the
world appears different to different people. Egocentrism is a hallmark of the preoperational stage, and it reveals
itself in a variety of interesting ways.
 Figure 11.7

Egocentrism Pre-operational children mistakenly believe that others share their points of view. The child can see the
tree, but when asked what the adult sees, she will say “A tree.” The child doesn’t seem to realize that although she can
see the tree, the adult cannot.

Perceptions and Beliefs

Just as 3-year-old children fail to realize that other people don’t always see what they see, they also fail to realize
that other people don’t always know what they know. This fact has been demonstrated in numerous studies using
the false-belief task (Wimmer & Perner, 1983). In the standard version of this task, children see a puppet named
Maxi deposit some chocolate in a cupboard and then leave the room. A second puppet arrives a moment later,
finds the chocolate, and moves it to a different cupboard. The children are then asked where Maxi will look for
the chocolate when he returns: in the first cupboard where he initially put it, or in the second cupboard, where the
children know it currently is?

Most 5-year-olds realize that Maxi will search the first cupboard because Maxi did not see what the children saw
—namely, that the chocolate was moved. But 3-year-olds typically claim that Maxi will look in the second
cupboard. Why? Because that’s where the children know the chocolate is—and they assume that what they
know, everyone knows! Children are able to give the right answer in the false-belief task somewhere between the
ages of 4 and 6 (Callaghan et al., 2005), though children in some cultures are able to give it earlier than children
in others (Liu et al., 2008).
 When small children are told to hide, they sometimes cover their eyes. Because they can’t see you, they assume that
you can’t see them (Russell, Gee, & Bullard, 2012).

Some researchers, however, think the false-belief task, like Piaget’s test for object permanence, doesn’t allow
very young children to demonstrate their true abilities (Scott & Baillargeon, 2017), and several studies have
shown that even infants can perform surprisingly well when given modified versions of the false-belief task that
make it easier for them to respond (Baillargeon, Scott, & He, 2010; Onishi & Baillargeon, 2005; Rubin-
Fernandez & Geurts, 2012; Senju et al., 2011; Southgate, Senju, & Csibra, 2007; but see Kulke et al., 2018).
Even chimpanzees, bonobos, and orangutans can perform the modified versions of this task (Krupenye et al.,
2016). Of course, infants and great apes may not arrive at the right answer the same way that older children do,
namely, by truly understanding that others can have beliefs that differ from their own (Apperly & Butterfill,
2009; Low & Watts, 2013). Still, whatever it is they are doing, their performances are impressive, and it seems
clear that the age at which children acquire some rudimentary understanding of other minds is lower than Piaget
suspected.

Desires and Emotions

Different people have different perceptions and beliefs. They also have different desires and emotions. Do
children understand that these aspects of other people’s mental lives can differ from their own? Infants do seem
to understand that people have desires that guide their behavior (Liu et al., 2017) and that other people’s desires
can differ from their own. For example, a 2-year-old who likes dogs can understand that other children don’t like
dogs and can correctly predict that other children will avoid dogs that the child herself would approach. When
18-month-old toddlers see an adult express disgust while eating a food that the toddlers enjoy, they hand the adult
a different food, as if they understand that different people have different tastes (Repacholi & Gopnik, 1997).
Interestingly, young children seem to understand other people’s desires best when their own desires have already
been fulfilled and are not competing for their attention (Atance, Bélanger, & Meltzoff, 2010).

In contrast, children take a much longer time to understand that other people may have emotional reactions unlike
their own. When 5-year-olds hear a story in which Little Red Riding Hood knocks on her grandmother’s door,
unaware that a wolf is inside waiting to devour her, they realize that Little Red Riding Hood does not know what
they know; nonetheless, they expect Little Red Riding Hood to feel what they feel, namely, afraid (Bradmetz &
Schneider, 2004; de Rosnay et al., 2004; Harris et al., 1989). When asked where Maxi will look for the chocolate
that was moved while Maxi was out of the room, they correctly say that Maxi will look in the original location,
but they incorrectly say that Maxi feels sad. It is only at about 6 years of age that children come to understand
that because they and others have different knowledge, they and others may also experience different emotions in
the same situation.

Theory of Mind

Clearly, children have a whole lot to learn about how the mind works—and most of them eventually do. The vast
majority of children ultimately come to understand that they and others have minds and that these minds
represent the world in different ways. Once children understand these things, they are said to have acquired a
theory of mind, which is the understanding that the mind produces representations of the world and that these
representations guide behavior.

The age at which most children acquire a theory of mind appears to be influenced by a variety of factors, such as
the number of siblings the child has, the frequency with which the child engages in pretend play, whether the
child has an imaginary companion, the socioeconomic status of the child’s family, and even culture (see A World
of Difference: That’s the Dumbest Thing I Never Heard!). But of all the factors researchers have studied,
language seems to be the most important (Astington & Baird, 2005). Children’s language skills are an excellent
predictor of how well they perform on false-belief tasks (Happé, 1995). The way caregivers talk to children is
also a good predictor of how well children perform on these tasks. Perhaps not surprisingly, children whose
caregivers frequently talk about thoughts and feelings tend to be good at understanding beliefs and belief-based
emotions. Some psychologists speculate that children benefit from hearing psychological words such as think,
know, and want (Ruffman et al., 2018). Others suggest that children benefit from the grammatically complex
sentences that typically contain these psychological words. And still others believe that caregivers who use
psychological words are also more effective in getting children to reflect on mental states.

Whatever the explanation, it is clear that language—and especially language about thoughts and feelings—is an
important tool for helping children make sense of their own and others’ minds (Harris, de Rosnay, & Pons,
2005). This fact also helps explain why deaf children whose parents do not know sign language are slow to
acquire a theory of mind (DeVilliers, 2005; Peterson & Siegal, 1999; Peterson et al., 2016; Pyers & Senghas,
2009).

A World of Difference
That’s the Dumbest Thing I Never Heard!
Everyone sees the world a bit differently. That’s obvious to you. But it isn’t obvious to a 2-year-old child, who
naturally assumes that her view is everyone else’s view as well. As children develop, they acquire a theory of
mind, and one component of that theory is the realization that other people may believe things that the child
doesn’t, and may not believe things that the child does.

But where does that realization come from? Does a lightbulb just switch on at some point, leaving the child
permanently illuminated? Piaget didn’t think so. He thought children came to this realization in the course of
their social interactions, where they inevitably encountered disagreement. A child says, “That dog is mean,” and
his father replies, “No, he’s very nice.” A playmate says, “My house is red,” and another responds, “You’re
wrong. It’s blue!” All of the disagreement that children hear eventually leads them to understand that different
people have different beliefs about the world.

Although being disagreeable is a popular pastime in Western societies, not all cultures appreciate a good
argument as much as Americans do. For instance, many Eastern cultures encourage respect for one’s elders
and family harmony, and they encourage people to avoid interpersonal conflict. In such cultures, if a person
doesn’t have something agreeable to say, they often say nothing at all. Thus, children who grow up in these
cultures do not normally hear people challenging each other’s beliefs. So how do they come to understand that
different people have different beliefs?

The answer seems to be: s-l-o-w-l-y! For example, in one study, 77% of Australian preschoolers understood
that different people have different beliefs, but only 47% of Iranian preschoolers understood the same
(Shahaeian et al., 2011). Were the Iranian children just slow learners? Nope. In fact, they were just as likely as
the Australian children to have acquired other components of a theory of mind—for instance, the realization that
different people like different things—and they were even more likely than the Australian children to realize that
people know what they see and not what they don’t. Iranian preschoolers appear to learn just as fast as
Australian preschoolers do, but it takes them a bit longer to understand that people have different beliefs
because they are exposed to fewer debates about them. The pattern seen in Australia is also seen in the United
States, and the pattern seen in Iran is also seen in China, suggesting that this may be a stable difference
between Western and Eastern cultures (Wellman et al., 2006).

In the end, of course, everyone comes to realize that human beings don’t always see eye to eye. But people
who live in places where they are encouraged to speak their minds and air their differences in public seem to
figure that out a bit earlier than most. At least that’s what research suggests. Do you agree? Well, why not?
What’s the matter with you anyway?
 When parents debate the best way to get a bike into a car, their children learn that people have different beliefs. For example, Mom
believes that Dad should shut up, and Dad doesn’t. But he will. Probably soon.

Another group of children who are slow to acquire a theory of mind are those with autism, a disorder we’ll cover
in more depth in the Disorders chapter. Children with autism often have difficulty communicating with other
people and making friends, and some psychologists have suggested that this is because they have trouble
acquiring a theory of mind (Frith, 2003). They find it difficult to understand the inner lives of other people
(Dawson et al., 2007; Peterson et al., 2016), are slow to recognize that other people can believe what they don’t
believe themselves (Baron-Cohen, Leslie, & Frith, 1985; Senju et al., 2009), and have trouble understanding
belief-based emotions such as embarrassment and shame (Baron-Cohen, 1991; Heerey, Keltner, & Capps, 2003).
Interestingly, children with autism (and other children who have not yet acquired a theory of mind) are not
susceptible to the phenomenon of “contagious yawning,” which apparently requires that one be able to imagine
what the yawner herself is experiencing (Platek et al., 2003; Senju et al., 2007).

People with autism often have an unusual ability to concentrate on small details, words, and numbers for extended
periods of time. Thorkil Sonne (right) started a company called Specialisterne.com, which places people who have
autism—such as his son Lars (left)—at jobs that they can do better than more “neurotypical” people can.

Piaget Remixed
Cognitive development is a long, strange trip, and Piaget’s ideas about it were
nothing short of groundbreaking. Few psychologists have had such a profound and
enduring impact. But while some of his ideas have held up quite well, in the last
few decades psychologists have discovered two general ways in which Piaget got it
wrong. First, Piaget thought that children graduated from one stage to another in
the same way that they graduated from kindergarten to first grade: A child is in
kindergarten or first grade, he is never in both, and there is an exact moment of
transition to which anyone can point. Modern psychologists see development as a
more fluid, continuous, and less step-like progression than Piaget believed it to be.
Development is not the
Children who are making the transition between stages may perform more mature step-like progression that
behaviors one day and less mature behaviors the next. In a sense, cognitive Piaget imagined. Children
development is more like the gradual change of seasons than it is like graduation who are making the

day. transition between stages

may act more mature one
day and less mature the
The second thing about which Piaget was mistaken was the ages at which these next.
transitions occur. By and large, they happen earlier than he realized (Gopnik,
2012). For example, Piaget suggested that infants had no sense of object
permanence because they did not actively search for objects that were moved out of their sight. But when
researchers use experimental procedures that allow infants to “show what they know,” even 4-month-olds display
a sense of object permanence. Piaget also suggested that it takes many years until children can overcome their
egocentrism enough to realize that others do not know what they know, but new experimental procedures have
detected some evidence of this understanding in 13-month-old infants (Baillargeon et al., 2010). Every year,
clever researchers find new ways of testing infants and children, and every year, textbook authors must lower the
age at which cognitive milestones are achieved. Don’t be too surprised if in the coming years, someone discovers
that zygotes can do algebra.

Discovering Our Cultures

Piaget saw the child as a lone scientist who goes out into the world and makes observations, develops theories,
and revises those theories in light of disconfirming evidence. But scientists rarely go it alone. Rather, they receive
training from more experienced scientists, inherit the theories and methods of their forebears, and seek each
other’s opinions. According to the Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky, children do the same thing. Vygotsky
was born in 1896—the same year as Piaget—but unlike Piaget, he believed that cognitive development was
largely the result of the child’s interaction with members of her own culture rather than her interaction with
rocks, paper, scissors, and other concrete objects. Vygotsky didn’t think it made sense to divide the universe of
skills into those that a child has and has not yet acquired. He noted that between the things a child can do and the
things a child cannot do lies a zone of proximal development, which refers to the range of things children cannot
do by themselves but can do with guidance and instruction. For example, most infants cannot open a jar on their
own, but they can learn to open a jar if an adult shows them how.
 As Vygotsky pointed out, children are not lone explorers who discover the world for themselves; rather, they are
members of families, communities, and societies that teach them much of what they need to know.

Vygotsky also noted that cultural tools, such as language and counting systems, exert a strong influence on
cognitive development (Vygotsky, 1978). For instance, in both English and Chinese, the numbers beyond 20 are
named by a decade (twenty) that is followed by a digit (one), and their names follow a logical pattern (twenty-
one, twenty-two, twenty-three, etc.). In Chinese, the numbers from 11 to 19 are constructed the same way (ten-
one, ten-two, ten-three …). But in English, the names of the numbers between 11 and 19 either reverse the order
of the decade and the digit (sixteen, seventeen) or are just plain arbitrary (eleven, twelve). The difference in the
regularity of these two systems makes a big difference to the children who must learn them. The fact that 12 is a
10 plus a 2 is obvious to the Chinese child, who actually calls the number “ten-two,” but not so obvious to the
English-speaking child, who calls it “twelve.”

In one study, children from many countries were asked to hand an experimenter a certain number of bricks. Some
of the bricks were single, and some were glued together in strips of 10. When Asian children were asked to hand
the experimenter 26 bricks, they tended to hand over two strips of 10 plus six singles. Non-Asian children used
the clumsier strategy of counting out 26 single bricks (Miura et al., 1994). Results such as these suggest that the
regularity of the counting system that children inherit can promote or discourage their discovery of basic
mathematical facts (Gordon, 2004; Imbo & LeFevre, 2009).

Human children can take advantage of the accumulated wisdom of their species because unlike most other
animals, they have three essential skills that allow them to learn from others (Meltzoff et al., 2009; Striano &
Reid, 2006; Whiten, 2017):

1. If an adult turns her head to the left, 3-month old infants and 9-month old infants will look to the left. But if
 the adult first closes her eyes and then looks to the left, the younger infant will look to the left, but the older
infant will not (Brooks & Meltzoff, 2002). This suggests that younger infants are following the adult’s head
movements but that older infants are following her gaze. That is, they are trying to see what they think she
is seeing (Rossano, Carpenter, & Tomasello, 2012). The ability to focus on what another person is focused
on, known as joint attention, is a prerequisite for learning what others have to teach us (Sodian & Kristen-
Antonow, 2015; see FIGURE 11.8).
2. Infants are natural mimics who often do what they see adults do (Jones, 2007). This tendency is known as
imitation. Children imitate adults so precisely that they even copy parts of their actions that they know to be
pointless, a phenomenon called overimitation (Lyons, Young, & Keil, 2007; Simpson & Riggs, 2011). But
they don’t copy parts of their actions that they know to be wrong. When an 18-month-old sees an adult’s
hand slip as the adult tries to pull the lid off a jar, the child won’t copy the slip but will instead perform the
intended action of removing the lid (Meltzoff, 1995, 2007; Yu & Kushnir, 2014).
3. An infant who approaches a new toy will often stop and look back to examine her mother’s face for cues
about whether Mom thinks the toy is or isn’t dangerous. The ability to use another person’s reactions as
information about how they should think about the world is known as social referencing (Kim, Walden, &
Knieps, 2010; Walden & Ogan, 1988). This is just one of the many instances in which children rely on
adults to tell them what they should and shouldn’t fear (see Other Voices: Shut the Lights Off, Say No
More).

Figure 11.8

Joint Attention Joint attention allows children to learn from others. When a 12-month-old
infant interacts with an adult (a) who then looks at an object (b), the infant will typically look
at the same object (c)—but only when the adult’s eyes are open (Meltzoff et al., 2009).

Joint attention (“I see what you see”), imitation (“I do what you do”), and social referencing (“I think what you
think”) are three of the basic abilities that allow infants to learn from other members of their species and to
discover things about the world that they might never discover alone (Heyes, 2016).

Other Voices
Shut the Lights Off, Say No More
Americans from both the left and right sides of the political spectrum agree that
gun violence is one of our nations’ most frightening problems. In response to the
surge of school shootings in recent years, many public schools are now
conducting “active shooter drills” that teach children how to protect themselves
during an attack. At first blush, this sounds like a good idea—after all, what’s the
harm of being prepared?

According to author and educator, Erika Christakis, the harm is this: We are
scaring our kids to death—and for no good reason! Here’s her argument:
Around the country, young children are being taught to run in zigzag
patterns so as to evade bullets. I’ve heard of kindergartens where words
like barricade are added to the vocabulary list, as 5- and 6-year-olds are
instructed to stack chairs and desks “like a fort” should they need to keep a
gunman at bay. In one Massachusetts kindergarten classroom hangs a Erika Christakis is an early
poster with lockdown instructions that can be sung to the tune of “Twinkle, childhood educator and the

Twinkle, Little Star”: Lockdown, Lockdown, Lock the door/Shut the lights author of The Importance of
Being Little: What Young
off, Say no more….
Children Really Need from
Grownups (2017).
In the 2015–16 school year, 95 percent of public schools ran lockdown
drills, according to a report by the National Center for Education
Statistics…. A recent analysis by The Washington Post found that during the 2017–18 school year,
more than 4.1 million students experienced at least one lockdown or lockdown drill, including some
220,000 students in kindergarten or preschool….

Deaths from shootings on school grounds remain extremely rare compared with those resulting
from accidental injury, which is the leading cause of death for children and teenagers. In 2016, there
were 787 accidental deaths (a category that includes fatalities due to drowning, fires, falls, and car
crashes) among American children ages 5 to 9—a small number, considering that there are more
than 20 million children in this group. Cancer was the next-most-common cause of death, followed
by congenital anomalies. Homicide of all types came in fourth. To give these numbers yet more
context: The Washington Post has identified fewer than 150 people (children and adults) who have
been shot to death in America’s schools since the 1999 shooting at Columbine High School, in
Colorado. Not 150 people a year, but 150 in nearly two decades.

Preparing our children for profoundly unlikely events would be one thing if that preparation had no
downside. But in this case, our efforts may exact a high price…. A 2018 survey by the Pew
Research Foundation determined that, despite the rarity of such events, 57 percent of American
teenagers worry about a shooting at their school. This comes at a time when children are already
suffering from sharply rising rates of anxiety, self-mutilation, and suicide. According to a landmark
study funded by the National Institute of Mental Health, 32 percent of 13-to-18-year-olds have
anxiety disorders, and 22 percent suffer from mental disorders that cause severe impairment or
distress. Among those suffering from anxiety, the median age of onset is 6.

… Our feverish pursuit of disaster preparedness lays bare a particularly sad irony of contemporary
life. Among modernity’s gifts was supposed to be childhood—a new life stage in which young
people had both time and space to grow up, without fear of dying or being sent down a coal mine.
To a large extent, this has been achieved. American children are manifestly safer and healthier than
in previous eras. The mortality rate of children under 5 in the United States today is less than 1
percent (or 6.6 deaths per 1,000 children), compared with more than 40 percent in 1800. The
reduction is miraculous. But as in so many other realms, we seem determined to snatch defeat from
 the jaws of victory. At just the moment when we should be able to count on childhood, we are in
danger of abandoning it…. Our children may be relatively safe, but childhood itself is imperiled.

Excerpt from: “Active-Shooter Drills Are Tragically Misguided” Atlantic Monthly March 2019.

Build to the Outcomes

1. How does habituation enable researchers to understand what a newborn can or cannot see?
2. What are the cephalocaudal and proximodistal rules?
3. What happens at each of Piaget’s stages of cognitive development?
4. What does the false-belief task demonstrate?
5. Which factors determine how quickly and early a child will acquire a theory of mind?
6. What skills allow children to learn from other members of their cultures?
Infancy and Childhood: Bonding and Helping
Learning Outcomes
Describe attachment and its four styles.
Describe Piaget’s and Kohlberg’s theories of the development of moral reasoning.
Why is moral reasoning only part of the picture of moral development?

Infants and children learn how to think about the world, about their minds, and about other minds. But they also
learn to form relationships and establish emotional bonds with these other minds, as well as to reason about right
and wrong and behave accordingly. Social development and moral development are among the most important
projects of infancy and childhood, so let’s explore each in turn.

Social Development
When Konrad Lorenz was a child, his neighbor gave him a day-old duckling that soon began to follow Lorenz
wherever he went. A few decades later, Lorenz was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology for explaining how
and why that had happened (Lorenz, 1952). Everyone who had ever raised a duckling already knew that it would
follow its mother and assumed that this behavior was some sort of hard-wired instinct. But Lorenz realized that
evolution had not designed ducklings to follow their mothers; rather, it had designed them to follow the first
noisy moving object they saw upon hatching. In most cases, that object was indeed their mother, but if it just so
happened to be a little boy, then the duckling would ignore its mother and follow the boy instead. Ducklings were
not prepared to follow their mothers in particular; they were prepared to form a bond.

Becoming Attached

Like ducklings, human infants need adults to survive, and therefore they too come into the world prepared to
form a bond. Because they cannot waddle after an adult, they instead do things to make adults waddle after them:
They cry, gurgle, coo, and smile, and these signals cause adults to move toward them, pick them up, comfort
them, change them, and feed them. At first, newborns will send these signals to any adult within range, but they
seem to keep a “mental tally” of how different adults respond to their signals, and at about 6 months they begin to
direct those signals toward the adult who responds first, best, fastest, and most often.
 Like hatchlings, human infants need to stay close to their mothers to survive. Unlike hatchlings, human infants know how
to get their mothers to come to them rather than the other way around.

That person is known as the primary caregiver, and he or she quickly becomes the emotional center of the
infant’s universe. Infants feel safe in the primary caregiver’s presence and will happily crawl around and explore
the environment. If their primary caregiver gets a little too far away, the infant will begin to feel unsafe and will
take action to close the gap, either by moving toward the primary caregiver or by crying until the caregiver
moves toward them. The emotional bond with a primary caregiver is called an attachment (Bowlby, 1969, 1973,
1980). This bond is so important that infants who, by unfortunate circumstances, are deprived of the opportunity
to form one are at serious risk for a wide range of physical, mental, and emotional impairments (Gillespie &
Nemeroff, 2007; O’Connor & Rutter, 2000; Rutter, O’Connor, & the English and Romanian Adoptees Study
Team, 2004; Kessler et al., 2008).
 In a series of classic studies, psychologist Harry Harlow (1958) raised baby rhesus monkeys in isolation and then put
them in a cage with two “artificial mothers.” One was made of wire and dispensed food while the other was made of cloth
and did not. The baby monkeys spent most of their time clinging to the cloth mother, leading Harlow to conclude that
even monkeys are “born to bond.”

Attachment Styles

Infants form attachments, but not all of these attachments are of the same quality (Ainsworth et al., 1978). A
common method for measuring the quality of an attachment involves bringing an infant and his or her primary
caregiver (usually the mother) to a laboratory room and then staging a series of episodes in which the primary
caregiver briefly leaves the room and then returns. Infants tend to react to these episodes in one of four ways,
which are known as attachment styles, or characteristic patterns of reacting to the presence and absence of
one’s primary caregiver (FIGURE 11.9).

Infants with a secure attachment style may or may not be distressed when their caregiver leaves the room,
but they respond positively to her when she returns—either by acknowledging her with a glance or a smile
(if the infant was not distressed) or by going to her for calming (if the infant was distressed). The majority
of infants in all cultures have a secure attachment style.
Infants with an ambivalent attachment style are distressed when their caregiver leaves the room, but when
she returns they respond negatively to her—either by rebuffing her, or by refusing her attempts at calming.
Infants with an avoidant attachment style are not distressed when their caregiver leaves the room, and they
don’t respond positively or negatively when she returns—they mainly just ignore her.
Infants with a disorganized attachment style show no consistent pattern of response to either their
caregiver’s absence or return.
 Figure 11.9

Attachment Styles How an infant responds when the primary caregiver leaves and returns allows researchers to identify
the infant’s attachment style. If the infant does not consistently show one of these three patterns, then the infant’s
attachment style is said to be disorganized.

What makes infants react in these different ways? A bit of nature and a bit of nurture. Infants are born with a
temperament, or a biologically based pattern of attentional and emotional reactivity (Kagan, 1997; Rothbart &
Bates, 2006; Thomas & Chess, 1977). About 40% of infants are easy babies who adjust easily to new situations,
quickly establish routines, and are generally cheerful and easy to calm; about 10% are difficult babies who are
slow to adjust to new experiences and are likely to react negatively and intensely to novel stimuli and events;
about 15% are slow-to-warm-up babies who are somewhat difficult at first but then become easier over time; and
the remaining 35% cannot be easily classified (Thomas & Chess, 1977; but see Gartstein et al., 2017). Not only
are these differences present at birth, but they are quite stable over time (Baker et al., 2013). For example,
difficult babies who react fearfully to novel stimuli—such as sudden movements, loud sounds, or unfamiliar
people—tend to become quiet, cautious, and shy adults who avoid unfamiliar people and novel situations
(Schwartz et al., 2003). Nature clearly plays a role in how infants react to situations, including the absence and
return of their primary caregiver.

But nurture seems to play an even bigger role. How caregivers think, feel, and act has a strong influence on an
infant’s attachment style. For instance, mothers of securely attached infants tend to be especially sensitive to
signs of their child’s emotional state, especially good at detecting their infant’s “requests” for reassurance, and
especially responsive to those requests (Ainsworth et al., 1978; De Wolff & van IJzendoorn, 1997; van
IJzendoorn & Sagi, 1999). Mothers of securely attached infants also tend to be “mind-minded,” which is to say
that they think of their infants as unique individuals with mental and emotional lives, not just as creatures with
urgent physical needs (Meins, 2003; Meins et al., 2001; McMahon & Bernier, 2017).

A mother’s behavior is correlated with her infant’s attachment style—but is it actually a cause of her infant’s
attachment style? It appears so. Researchers studied a group of young mothers whose infants were particularly
irritable or difficult. When the infants were about 6 months old, half the mothers participated in a training
program designed to sensitize them to their infants’ emotional signals and to encourage them to be more
responsive. A year later, infants whose mothers had received the training were more likely to be securely attached
than were infants whose mothers did not (van den Boom, 1994, 1995). Clearly, it takes two to make a bond.

Some parents worry that placing their child in day care may impair the attachment process. But a massive long-term
study by the National Institute for Child Health and Human Development showed that while attachment style is strongly
influenced by maternal sensitivity and responsiveness, the quality, amount, stability, or type of day care have little or no
influence (Friedman & Boyle, 2008).

The Effects of Attachment Styles

As a result of interactions with their primary caregivers, infants develop a set of beliefs about the way
relationships work, which psychologists call the infant’s internal working model (Bretherton & Munholland,
1999). Infants with different attachment styles appear to have different internal working models (see FIGURE
11.10). Infants with a secure attachment style seem to be confident that their primary caregivers will respond
when they feel insecure, whereas infants with an avoidant attachment style seem to be confident that they won’t.
Both sets of infants have clear expectations about what will happen when they feel insecure. On the other hand,
infants with an ambivalent attachment style do not have a clear expectation: They seem to be uncertain about
whether or not their primary caregiver will respond on any particular occasion. Finally, infants with a
disorganized attachment style just seem to be confused about their relationships with their primary caregivers,
which has led some psychologists to speculate that this style primarily characterizes children who have been
abused (Carolson, 1998; Cicchetti & Toth, 1998).
 Figure 11.10

Internal Working Models Do infants really have internal working models? It appears they do. Infants stare longer when
they see something they don’t expect, and securely attached infants will stare longer at a cartoon of a mother ignoring
rather than comforting her child. Infants who are not securely attached do just the opposite (Johnson, Dweck, & Chen,
2007).

An infant’s attachment style, and the internal working model that goes with it, have a long-lasting influence
(Waters et al., 2015). For example, adults who were securely attached as infants have greater academic success
(Jacobson & Hoffman, 1997), superior cognitive functioning (Bernier et al., 2015), and higher psychological
well-being (Madigan et al., 2013). They also have more successful social relationships (McElwain, Booth-
LaForce, & Wu, 2011; Schneider, Atkinson, & Tardif, 2001; Simpson, Collins, & Salvatore, 2011; Sroufe,
Egeland, & Kruetzer, 1990; Steele et al., 1999; Vondra et al., 2001). One study that tracked participants over two
decades showed that 1-year-old infants who are securely attached are less likely to experience negative emotions
when trying to resolve major relationship conflicts with their romantic partners at the age of 21 (Simpson et al.,
2007). They are also more likely to rebound from conflicts with their romantic partners (Salvatore et al., 2011).
The bond we form with that first noisy moving object—the one that most of us call Mom—is a powerful force
that impacts our development for years to come.

Moral Development
Infants can make one distinction quickly and well, and that’s the distinction between pleasure and pain. Before
their bottoms hit their very first diaper, infants can tell when something feels good or bad and can demonstrate to
anyone within earshot that they strongly prefer the former. But over the next few years, they begin to notice that
their pleasures (“Throwing food is fun”) can be someone else’s pains (“Throwing food makes Mom mad”),
which is a problem because infants need those other people to survive, and making them mad is not a winning
strategy. Infants care what adults think about them (Botto & Rochat, 2018), so they learn to balance their needs
with the needs of those around them, and they do this in part by developing a distinction between right and
wrong. How does this happen?

Moral Reasoning

Piaget spent time playing games with children and quizzing them about how they came to know the rules of those
games and what they thought should happen to children who broke those rules. By listening carefully to what
children said, Piaget concluded that as they develop, children’s thinking about right and wrong—that is, their
moral reasoning—changes in three ways (Piaget, 1932/1965).

First, Piaget noticed that children’s moral reasoning tends to shift from realism to relativism. Very young
children regard moral rules as real, inviolable truths about the world. For the young child, the rightness or
wrongness of an action is like the height and weight of an object: They have an actual existence in the
world and do not depend on what people think or say. That’s why young children generally don’t believe
that a bad action such as hitting someone can ever be good, even if everyone agrees to allow it. But as they
mature, children begin to realize that some moral rules are human inventions and that people can agree to
adopt them, change them, or abandon them entirely.
Second, Piaget noticed that children’s moral reasoning tends to shift from prescriptions to principles.
Young children think of moral rules as guidelines for specific actions in specific situations. (“Each child
can play with the iPad for 5 minutes and must then pass it to the child sitting to their left.”) As they mature,
children come to see that these rules are expressions of more general principles, such as fairness and equity,
which means that specific rules can be abandoned or modified when they fail to uphold the general
principle (“If Jason missed his turn with the iPad, then he should get two turns now.”)
Third, Piaget noticed that children’s moral reasoning tends to shift from outcomes to intentions. For the
young child, an unintentional action that causes great harm (“Reiko accidentally broke the iPad”) seems
“more wrong” than an intentional action that causes slight harm (“Reiko got mad and broke the pencil”)
because young children tend to judge the morality of an action by its outcome rather than by the actor’s
intentions. As they mature, children begin to see that the morality of an action is critically dependent on the
actor’s state of mind (Cushman et al., 2013; Nobes, Panagiotaki, & Engelhardt, 2017).

According to Piaget, young children do not realize that moral rules can vary across persons
and cultures. For example, Hindus consider it immoral to eat cows, but Americans eat more
 than a billion pounds of beef each year at McDonald’s alone!

The psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg used Piaget’s insights as the basis of a detailed theory of the development
of moral reasoning (Kohlberg, 1958, 1963, 1986). Kohlberg asked both children and adults how they would
resolve a series of “moral dilemmas” (e.g., should a poor husband steal a drug from a pharmacy to save his dying
wife?). On the basis of their responses, he concluded that there are three distinct stages of moral development.
According to Kohlberg:

Most children are at the preconventional stage, which is a stage of moral development in which the
morality of an action is primarily determined by its consequences for the actor. A person at this stage might
reason: “If the husband steals the drug he could end up in jail, so he shouldn’t.”

Most adolescents are at the conventional stage, which is a stage of moral development in which the
morality of an action is primarily determined by the extent to which it conforms to social rules. A person at
this stage might reason: “Stealing is against the law, so the husband shouldn’t steal the drug.”

Most adults are at the postconventional stage, which is a stage of moral development in which the morality
of an action is determined by a set of general principles that reflect core values. A person at this stage
might reason: “Human life is sacred, so the husband should steal the drug.”
 During World War II, many Albanian Muslims shielded their Jewish neighbors from the Nazis. “There was no government
conspiracy; no underground railroad; no organized resistance of any kind. Only individual Albanians, acting alone, to
save the lives of people whose lives were in immediate danger,” wrote Norman Gershman, who photographed Muslims
such as Baba Haxhi Dede Reshatbardhi (pictured) who saved so many Jewish lives.

Beyond Moral Reasoning

Although Kohlberg got many things right, we now know that he also got a few things wrong. First, although the
development of moral reasoning does seem to follow the basic trajectory described by his theory, the three stages
are not as discrete as Kohlberg thought. For instance, a person might apply preconventional, conventional, and
postconventional thinking in different circumstances, which suggests that the person did not “reach a stage” so
much as “acquire a skill” that he or she may or may not use at a particular time. Second, Kohlberg’s theory does
a better job of describing the development of moral reasoning in Western societies than in non-Western societies
(McNamara et al., 2019). For example, some non-Western societies value obedience and community more than
liberty and individuality; thus, the moral reasoning of people in such societies may appear to reflect a
conventional devotion to social norms when it actually reflects a postconventional consideration of deeply held
ethical principles. Third, moral reasoning turns out to be just a piece of the story of moral development. What
does that mean?

Research on moral reasoning portrays people as deliberating judges who use rational analysis—sometimes simple
and sometimes sophisticated—to decide what’s right and what’s wrong. But recent studies show that long before
children are capable of deliberation or rational analysis, they display a surprising amount of “moral sense”
(Blake, McAuliffe, & Warneken, 2014; Zahn-Waxler et al., 1992). For instance, when 16-month-olds watch a
puppet show in which one puppet helps others and another puppet hinders others, they are more likely to reach
out and touch the puppet who helped (Hamlin, Wynn, & Bloom, 2007; Margoni & Surian, 2018). Even 3-month-
old infants who can’t yet reach out will tend to look at the helper longer than at the hinderer (Hamlin, Wynn, &
Bloom, 2011; cf. Scarf et al., 2012; Hamlin, 2014). When 16-month-olds watch toys being distributed, they are
surprised when one person gets more than another (Bian, Sloan, & Baillargeon, 2018; Sloan et al., 2012;
Sommerville et al., 2013), and they prefer those who distribute the toys fairly to those who don’t (Geraci &
Surian, 2011). One-year-olds will helpfully point toward an object that they can see an adult searching for
(Liszkowski, Carpenter, Striano, & Tomasello, 2006), and 2-year-olds smile more after giving someone else a
tasty treat than after receiving one themselves (Aknin, Hamlin, & Dunn, 2012). In short, infants and young
children seem to have many of the moral sensibilities of adults.

They also seem to have many of the same moral limitations: They favor people who have been kind to them in
the past (Paulus, 2016), they favor familiar people over strangers, they favor members of their own group over
members of other groups, and so on (Wynn et al., 2018). Studies such as these suggest that morality is not simply
the result of reasoning, but also of basic psychological tendencies—such as a sense of fairness or a desire to help
and cooperate—whose roots may be part of our evolutionary heritage.
Most people are upset by the suffering of others, and research suggests that even young children have this response,
which may be the basis of their emerging morality.

Build to the Outcomes

1. How is attachment assessed?
2. How do caregivers influence an infant’s attachment style?
3. According to Piaget, what three shifts characterize moral development?
4. What are Kohlberg’s three stages of moral development?
5. What kind of evidence suggests that infants and children have a “moral sense”?
Adolescence: Minding the Gap
Learning Outcomes
Explain why the protraction of adolescence matters.
Describe the determinants of sexual orientation and behavior.
Explain how adolescents are influenced by their peers.

Between childhood and adulthood is an extended developmental stage that may not qualify for a hood of its own,
but that is clearly distinct from the stages that come before and after. Adolescence is the period of development
that begins with the onset of sexual maturity (about 11 to 14 years of age) and lasts until the beginning of
adulthood (about 18 to 21 years of age). Unlike the transition from embryo to fetus or from infant to child, this
transition is abrupt and well-marked. In just 3 or 4 years, the average adolescent gains about 40 pounds and
grows about 10 inches. For girls, all this growing starts at about the age of 10 and ends when they reach their full
heights at about the age of 16; for boys, it starts and ends about 2 years later.

The beginning of this growth spurt signals the onset of puberty, which is the onset of bodily changes associated
with sexual maturity. These changes involve the primary sex characteristics, which are bodily structures that
change at puberty and are directly involved in reproduction (e.g., girls begin to menstruate and boys begin to
ejaculate), as well as the secondary sex characteristics, which are bodily structures that change at puberty but
are not directly involved in reproduction (e.g., girls develop breasts and boys develop facial hair). All of these
changes are caused by the increased production of hormones—specifically, estrogen in girls and testosterone in
boys.
 Adolescents are often described as gawky because different parts of their faces and bodies mature at different rates. But
as the actress Rashida Jones can attest, the gawkiness generally clears up.

Just as the body changes during adolescence, so too does the brain. For example, just before puberty there is a
marked increase in the growth rate of the tissue that connects different regions of the brain (Thompson et al.,
2000). Between the ages of 6 and 13, the connections between the temporal lobe (the region specialized for
language) and the parietal lobe (the region specialized for understanding spatial relations) multiply rapidly—and
then stop suddenly, just about the time that the critical period for learning a language ends (see FIGURE 11.11).
The most significant neural changes occur in the prefrontal cortex. An infant’s brain forms many more new
synapses than it actually needs, and by the time children are 2 years old, they have about 15,000 synapses per
neuron, which is roughly twice as many as the average adult (Huttenlocher, 1979). This early period of synaptic
proliferation is followed by a period of synaptic pruning, in which the connections that are not frequently used
are eliminated. Scientists used to think that proliferation-and-pruning happened only during infancy, but we now
know that the prefrontal cortex undergoes a second wave of proliferation just before puberty, and a second wave
of pruning during adolescence (Giedd et al., 1999). The adolescent brain seems to be a work in progress.

Figure 11.11

Your Brain On Puberty These graphs show changes in “synaptic density” (which is the number of synapses per unit
area) in different regions of the brain. As you can see, density peaks in the frontal and parietal lobes at about age 12 (a,
 b); in the temporal lobe at about age 16 (c); and in the occipital lobe at different ages for males and females (d).

The Protraction of Adolescence

The age at which puberty begins varies across individuals (e.g., people tend to reach puberty at about the same
age as their same-sexed parent did) and across ethnic groups (e.g., African American girls tend to reach puberty
before European American girls do). It also varies across generations (Malina, Bouchard, & Beunen, 1988;
Sawyer et al., 2018). For example, in the 19th century, girls in Scandinavia, the United Kingdom, and the United
States tended to have their first menstrual periods when they were about 17 years old, but by 1960, that age had
fallen to about 13 years (Patton & Viner, 2007). In newly industrialized countries like China, the age at which
girls have their first menstrual period has decreased by almost 5 months every decade for the past 25 years (Song
et al., 2014). Similarly, the average age at which American boys show the early signs of puberty has fallen to
between 9 and 10 years old (Herman-Giddens et al., 2012).

The famous Leipzig Boy’s Choir is in trouble. Boys enter the choir at the age of 9 and sing soprano until their voices
change. Back in 1723, when Johann Sebastian Bach was the choirmaster, that change happened at about the age of
17. Today, it happens at about the age of 12. As a result, by the time a soprano learns to sing he isn’t a soprano
anymore. As a result, the choir is struggling.

Puberty is happening much earlier today than it did just a few decades ago. But why? For girls at least, the main
reason appears to be diet (Ellis & Garber, 2000). Young women have more body fat today than ever before, and
body fat secretes estrogen, which hastens puberty. Some evidence suggests that exposure to environmental toxins
that mimic estrogen may also play a role (Buck Louis et al., 2008). Stress appears to be another cause of early
puberty in girls (Belsky, 2012; Belsky et al., 2015). Studies show that girls reach puberty earlier if they grow up
in unpredictable households with high levels of conflict, in households without a biological father, or if they are
victims of early sexual abuse (Greenspan & Deardorff, 2014).

About 60% of preindustrial societies don’t have a word for adolescence because there is no such stage. When a Krobo
girl menstruates for the first time, older women take her into seclusion for two weeks and teach her about sex, birth
control, and marriage. Afterward, a public ceremony is held, and the young woman who was regarded as a child just
days earlier is thereafter forever regarded as an adult.

Whatever its causes, early puberty has important psychological consequences. Just two centuries ago, the gap
between childhood and adulthood was relatively brief because people became physically mature at roughly the
same time that they were ready to accept adult roles in society—that is, to marry and get a job. But today, people
typically spend 3 to 10 more years in school, and they take jobs and get married much later than they once did
(Fitch & Ruggles, 2000). So while the age at which people become physically adult has gone down, the age at
which they take on adult roles and responsibilities has gone up, resulting in a protracted period of adolescence.
Some researchers argue that in the Western world, adolescence now lasts for a full 15 years (Sawyer et al., 2018).

What are the consequences of protracted adolescence? Adolescence is often characterized as a time of internal
turmoil and external recklessness, and some psychologists have speculated that the protraction of adolescence is
partly to blame for its sorry reputation (Moffitt, 1993). According to these theorists, adolescents are adults who
have temporarily been denied a place in adult society. American teenagers are subjected to 10 times as many
restrictions as older adults, and twice as many restrictions as active-duty U.S. marines or incarcerated felons
(Epstein, 2007a). As such, they feel especially compelled to do things to protest these restrictions and
demonstrate their adulthood, such as smoking, drinking, using drugs, having sex, and committing crimes. In a
sense, adolescents are people who have been forced to live in a strange gap between two worlds, and the
pathologies of adolescence are a result of this predicament. As one researcher noted, “Isolated from adults and
wrongly treated like children, it is no wonder that some teens behave, by adult standards, recklessly or
irresponsibly” (Epstein, 2007b).

Adolescents who experiment with reckless behavior generally don’t become reckless adults
—if they live that long. This is the text that 17-year-old Maria Droesch was sending to her
mother when she crashed the car she was driving and died. Her mother now hauls the
wreckage of Maria’s car from town to town to persuade people not to text while driving. In
2017, about 40% of high school age students admitted to texting while driving at least once
in the last 30 days (Kann et al., 2018).

With that said, the storm and stress of adolescence is not quite as prevalent as HBO might lead us to believe
(Steinberg & Morris, 2001). Research suggests that the “moody adolescent” who is a victim of “raging
hormones” is largely a myth. Adolescents are no moodier than children (Buchanan, Eccles, & Becker, 1992), and
fluctuations in their hormone levels have a very small impact on their moods (Brooks-Gunn, Graber, & Paikoff,
1994). Although they can be more impulsive and susceptible to peer influence than adults (see FIGURE 11.12),
they are just as capable of making wise decisions based on good information (Steinberg, 2007). American
adolescents do some fairly questionable stuff—about 30% try cigarettes, about 35% try marijuana, about 40% try
vaping, and about 60% try alcohol—but few go much farther than that (Kann et al., 2018). Those who try these
substances generally don’t develop problems that impair their academic success or personal relationships
(Hughes, Power, & Francis, 1992; Johnston, Bachman, & O’Malley, 1997). Adolescents minor in misbehavior
but they don’t major in it, and most of what they do ends up having no long-term consequences (Warren et al.,
2016). The fact is that adolescence is not a terribly troubled time, and most adolescents “age out” of whatever
troubles they manage to get themselves into (Epstein, 2007b; Martin et al., 2014; Sampson & Laub, 1995).
 Figure 11.12

How Do Peers Affect Decision Making? Adolescents make better decisions when no one is around! Participants in one
study played a video driving game with or without their peers in the room. The presence of peers greatly increased the
number of risks taken and crashes experienced by adolescents but had little or no effect on adults (Gardner & Steinberg,
2005).

Emerging Sexuality
Puberty can be a difficult time, but it is especially difficult for girls who reach puberty before the majority of their
peers. These early bloomers are at elevated risk for a wide range of negative consequences, from distress and
depression to delinquency and disease (Mendle, Ryan, & McKone, 2018; Mendle, Turkheimer, & Emery, 2007).
This happens for several reasons (Ge & Natsuaki, 2009). First, early bloomers don’t have as much time as their
peers do to develop the skills necessary to cope with adolescence (Petersen & Grockett, 1985). And yet, because
they look so mature, people expect them to act like adults. In other words, early puberty creates unrealistic
expectations that these adolescents may have trouble fulfilling. Second, older men may draw these girls into
activities that they are not ready to engage in, from drinking to sex (Ge, Conger, & Elder, 1996). Some research
suggests that for girls, the timing of puberty has a greater influence on emotional and behavioral problems than
does the occurrence of puberty itself (Buchanan et al., 1992).

The timing of puberty does not have such a consistent effect on boys. Some studies suggest that early maturing
boys do better than their peers, some suggest they do worse, and some suggest that it makes no difference at all
(Ge, Conger, & Elder, 2001). Interestingly, recent research shows that for boys, the tempo or speed with which
they make the transition from the first to the last stages of puberty may be a better predictor of negative outcomes
than is the timing (Mendle et al., 2010; Mendle, 2014).

Sexual Orientation: A Matter of Biology

For some adolescents, puberty is further complicated by the fact that they are attracted to members of the same
sex. Why does this make puberty complicated? Among Americans born between 1980 and 1998, about 7%
identify themselves as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender (Gates, 2017). Among current high school–aged
students, that number is a bit higher (Kann et al., 2018). These adolescents are different from the vast majority of
their peers, and as you probably know, adolescents care a whole lot about “fitting in” with their peers (Somerville
et al., 2013). Not only are these adolescents a minority, but they are a minority that is often subject to the disdain
and disapproval of family, friends, and community. Engaging in sexual activity with members of the same sex is
illegal in 75 nations and punishable by death in 11 (Bailey et al., 2016). Although Americans are rapidly
becoming more accepting of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people (see FIGURE 11.13), many still
disapprove to varying degrees, and social disapproval naturally makes an adolescent’s life difficult.

Figure 11.13

Changing Attitudes Toward Same-Sex Marriage In 1965, homosexuality was illegal in America, and most Americans
thought it was a mental illness. Things have changed. For example, in just 10 years, there has been a complete reversal
of Americans’ attitudes toward same-sex marriage, which was legalized throughout the United States in 2015.

What determines whether a person’s sexuality is primarily oriented toward the same or the opposite sex? For a
long time, psychologists thought the answer was upbringing. For example, during the 1940s and 1950s,
psychoanalytic theorists suggested that boys who grew up with domineering mothers and cold, distant fathers
were less likely to identify with their fathers and therefore more likely to become gay. The only trouble with this
theory is that scientific research has failed to identify any aspect of parenting that has a significant impact on a
child’s ultimate sexual orientation. Indeed, researchers have not even been able to find evidence that a parent’s
sexual orientation has any influence on the sexual orientation of his or her child (Patterson, 2013). Similarly,
peers have a measurable influence on both the decision to engage in sexual activity and the desire for romantic
relationships, but they have no influence on an adolescent’s sexual orientation (Brakefield et al., 2014).

So what does determine a person’s sexual orientation? Considerable evidence suggests that biology and genetics
play major roles. First, same-sex sexual activity appears to predate civilization itself and is observed in almost all
mammals (Nash, 2001). Second, sexual orientation varies in the same way that many other heritable traits do. For
instance, the fraternal twin of a gay man (with whom he shares 50% of his genes) has a 15% chance of being gay,
but the identical twin of a gay man (with whom he shares 100% of his genes) has about a 50% chance (Bailey &
Pillard, 1991; Gladue, 1994). A similar pattern characterizes women (Bailey et al., 1993). Third, the brains of gay
and lesbian people look in some ways like the brains of opposite-gendered straight people (Savic & Lindström,
2008). For example, the cerebral hemispheres of straight men and gay women (both of whom are gynephilic, or
attracted to women) tend to be of different sizes, whereas the hemispheres of straight women and gay men (both
of whom are androphilic, or attracted to men) tend to be the same size. Some evidence suggests that high levels
of androgens in the womb may predispose a fetus—whether male or female—to become an androphilic adult
(Ellis & Ames, 1987; Meyer-Bahlberg et al., 1995), while other studies suggest that a mother’s immune system
may play a role in determining her male child’s sexual orientation (Balthazart, 2018)

The fourth striking piece of evidence for the role of biology and genetics in determining sexual orientation is the
fact that a child’s behavior is a surprisingly good predictor of his or her adult sexual orientation (Bailey &
Zucker, 1995). Most children go through a period in which they adamantly refuse to do anything that is
stereotypically associated with the opposite gender (Halim et al., 2014). But a few children are eager to engage in
what researchers call “gender nonconforming behavior,” which for boys includes dressing like a girl and playing
with dolls, and for girls includes dressing like a boy and engaging in rough play. These behaviors usually emerge
by the time the child is 2 to 4 years old, despite the fact that parents typically discourage them (Cohen-Kettenis &
Pfäfflin, 2003). As it turns out, children who engage in gender nonconforming behavior are significantly more
likely to become gay, lesbian, or bisexual adults (Li, Kung, & Hines, 2017). Experimental participants who are
shown family videos or photos of children are able to predict the child’s ultimate sexual orientation with relative
accuracy (Rieger et al., 2010; Watts et al., 2018). This does not mean that every little boy who likes pigtails will
become a gay man or that every little girl who likes pigskins will become a lesbian, but it does mean that some
signs of adult sexual orientation are observable long before people begin to experience sexual attraction around
the age of 10.

Although men and women both have a sexual orientation, they seem to experience them differently. For example,
men’s sexual orientations are good predictors of their physiological arousal to erotic stimuli: Straight men are
aroused by erotic pictures of women but not of men, and gay men are aroused by erotic pictures of men but not of
women. But women’s sexual orientations are not such good predictors of their physiological arousal to erotic
stimuli. For instance, straight women are equally aroused by erotic pictures of women and men, and lesbians are
only slightly more aroused by erotic pictures of women than of men (Chivers et al., 2004; Chivers, Seto, &
Blanchard, 2007). Men’s sexual orientations also appear to be more rigid and less fluid than women’s. For
example, men are more likely than women to report being either exclusively heterosexual or exclusively
homosexual, whereas women are more likely than men to report being either “mostly heterosexual” or bisexual
(Savin-Williams & Vrangalova, 2013). Women’s sexual orientations are also more likely to depend on
circumstances and to shift over time (Bailey et al., 2016; Baumeister, 2000). It is important to note that just
because people’s sexual orientations can change does not mean that they can be changed: There is no evidence to
suggest that “conversion” or “reparative” therapies can transform gay, lesbian, or bisexual people into
heterosexuals (American Psychological Association, 2009).

The science of sexual orientation is still young and fraught with conflicting findings, but at least two conclusions
are noncontroversial. First, whatever the complete story of its determinants turns out to be, sexual orientation
clearly has biological and genetic components. It is not a “lifestyle choice.” Second, human sexual orientation is
far more complex and diverse than one-word labels like “straight” and “gay” suggest. Physiological arousal,
psychological attraction, sexual behavior, biological sex, and gender identity are different things that combine in
seemingly endless variations that defy the simple categorization that language imparts (see The Real World:
Coming to Terms with Ourselves). Indeed, in a recent survey of U.S. adults, the percentage who identified as gay
or lesbian was only slightly larger than the percentage who identified as “something else” or who said they didn’t
know the answer (Ward et al., 2014). Human beings are sexual creatures who still have a great deal to learn about
themselves.

The Real World

Coming to Terms with Ourselves
Sexuality involves both the body and the mind. But people’s bodies are hidden beneath their clothes, and
people’s minds are hidden behind their eyes, so the complexity and diversity of sexuality in the real world is all
too easy to miss. Understanding it requires understanding three distinct but related concepts.

Sex refers to the bodies we are born with. Most (though not all) human bodies are either male (i.e., they have
XY chromosomes and a penis) or female (i.e., they have XX chromosomes and a vagina). Gender refers to our
identities—how we see ourselves, how we want others to see us, and how it feels to be inside our own skins.
Most (though not all) adults identify themselves as men or women. Last, sexual orientation refers to the kinds of
people to whom we find ourselves attracted. Most (though not all) adults are attracted to people of the opposite
sex and gender. These three dimensions don’t capture every important aspect of human sexuality, but they do
allow us to build a classification scheme that helps us understand and talk to each other. The accompanying
table shows the terms that are typically used to refer to people who differ on these dimensions. (For more on
this topic, go to http://www.glaad.org/reference/transgender.)

In Latin, the prefix trans means “on the other side of,” and the prefix cis means “on this side of.” So the term
transgender refers to anyone whose gender and sex do not match, and the term cisgender refers to anyone
whose gender and sex do match. Notice also that the terms male and female refer to a person’s sex, whereas
the terms man and woman refer to a person’s gender. Most people prefer to be described in terms of their
gender rather than their sex, so both transgender and cisgender women typically prefer to be called she, and
both cisgender and transgender men typically prefer to be called he. There are some people who feel that none
of these adjectives or pronouns properly describe them. In general, it makes sense to think about other people’s
sex, gender, and orientation the way they think about it themselves.

It also makes sense to talk about them that way. Over time, descriptors of marginalized groups often take on
 pejorative connotations. The word homosexual, for example, has traditionally been used as a neutral description
of people with same-sex orientations, but in some circles it has become an unflattering way to refer to gay and
lesbian people. Conversely, terms that were once pejorative are occasionally reclaimed by the people whom
they were initially meant to demean. For example, in some circles, queer is now a positive description of anyone
who is not cisgender and straight. The National Queer Arts Festival has been thriving in San Francisco since
1998, but its name would have been an unthinkable slur just 20 years earlier.

The vast majority of humans are cisgender and straight, and all these other complicated terms and categories
make some of them wistful for simpler times. But the truth is that there never were simpler times—just times in
which the complexity of human sexuality was a secret, hidden from our view. In America, those times have now
passed, and the full range of our diversity is proudly on display. For those who of us are not in the most
populated categories, and for those of us who hope to understand human behavior scientifically, this is a
welcome change.

Sexual Behavior: A Matter of Choice

Sexual orientation may not be a choice, but sexual activity is—and many teenagers choose it. Although the
percentage of American high school students who are sexually active has been declining in recent years (see
FIGURE 11.14), it is still close to a third. Sex is a positive and rewarding experience for many teenagers
(Vasilenko, Maas, & Lefkowitz, 2015), but it is a problem for others—especially for those who start having it too
early. Teenagers who begin having sex before the age of 15 have a lower sense of self-worth and higher rates of
anxiety, depression, aggressiveness, and substance abuse (Golden, Furman, & Collibee, 2016). Only about half of
sexually active high school students report using a condom during their last sexual encounter (Kann et al., 2018),
and those who start having sex early are even less likely to use them (Siebenbruner, Zimmer-Gembeck, &
Egeland, 2007) and are therefore more likely to end up with a sexually transmitted infection.

Figure 11.14

Teenagers are Having Less Sex The number of American high school students who are sexually active (which is defined
as having had intercourse in the last 3 months) has been dropping over the last decade.

ADAPTED FROM THE CENTERS FOR DISEASE CONTROL AND PREVENTION’S “YOUTH RISK BEHAVIOR
SURVEY 1991–2017,” HTTPS://WWW.CDC.GOV/HEALTHYYOUTH/DATA/YRBS/PDF/TRENDSREPORT.PDF
What can be done to help teenagers make wise choices about their sexual behavior? Comprehensive sex
education is a powerful tool. Research shows that it leads teens to delay having sex for the first time, decreases
the number of partners they have, increases the likelihood they will use condoms and other forms of birth control
when they do have sex, and lowers the likelihood that they will get pregnant or get a sexually transmitted
infection (Chin et al., 2012; Mueller, Gavin, & Kulkarni, 2008; Satcher, 2001). And yet, despite its well-
documented benefits, sex education in American schools is often absent, sketchy, or based entirely on the goal of
abstinence. This is unfortunate because abstinence-only programs turn out to be largely ineffective (Kohler,
Manhart, & Lafferty, 2008; Santelli et al., 2017), and some studies even suggest that teens who take abstinence
pledges are just as likely to have sex as those who don’t but are less likely to use birth control when they do
(Rosenbaum, 2009). That’s unfortunate too, because teenage mothers fare more poorly than teenage women
without children on almost every measure of academic and economic achievement, and their children fare more
poorly on most measures of educational success and emotional well-being than do the children of older mothers
(Olausson et al., 2001).

The human papilloma virus is a sexually transmitted infection that can lead to cervical cancer. Luckily, there is a vaccine
that can prevent it. Some parents worry that being vaccinated will encourage their daughters to have sex early, but
studies show that young women who have been vaccinated do not have sex any earlier than those who have not been
vaccinated.

From Parents to Peers

Children’s views of themselves and their world are tightly tied to the views of their parents, but puberty creates a
new set of needs that snip away at those bonds by orienting adolescents toward peers rather than parents. The
psychologist Erik Erikson (1959) characterized each stage of life by the major task confronting the individual at
that stage. His stages of psychosocial development (shown in TABLE 11.2) suggest that the major task of
adolescence is the development of an adult identity (Becht et al., 2017). Adolescents achieve their identities in
different ways: Some explore a variety of identities before finally committing to one of them, while others do
little personal exploration and instead adopt the identities prescribed for them by family, religion, or culture
(Kroger, 2017; Marcia, 1966, 1993). Regardless of how and when they find them, adolescent identities all have
one thing in common: An expanded focus on peers (Roisman et al., 2004).

TABLE 11.2 ERIKSON’S STAGES OF PSYCHOSOCIAL DEVELOPMENT

According to Erikson, at each “stage” of development a “key event” creates a challenge or “crisis” that a person
can resolve positively or negatively.

Ages Key Event Crisis Positive Resolution

1. Birth to Feeding Trust vs. Child develops a belief that the environment can be counted on to meet his or
12–18 mistrust her basic physiological and social needs.
months

2. 18 Toilet training Autonomy Child learns what he or she can control and develops a sense of free will and a
months to vs. corresponding sense of regret and sorrow for inappropriate use of self-control.
3 years shame/doubt

3. 3–6 Independence Initiative vs. Child learns to begin action, to explore, to imagine, and to feel remorse for
years guilt actions.

4. 6–12 School Industry vs. Child learns to do things well or correctly in comparison to a standard or to
years inferiority others.

5. 12–18 Peer relationships Identity vs. Adolescent develops a sense of self in relation to others and to own internal
years role thoughts and desires.
confusion

6. 19–40 Love relationships Intimacy vs. Person develops the ability to give and receive love; begins to make long-term
years isolation commitment to relationships.

7. 40–65 Parenting Generativity Person develops interest in guiding the development of the next generation.
years vs.
stagnation

8. 65 to Reflection on and Ego integrity Person develops a sense of acceptance of life as it was lived and the
death acceptance of vs. despair importance of the people and relationships that the individual developed over
one’s life the life span.
This shift from parents to peers can be difficult for several reasons. First, children cannot choose their parents,
but adolescents can choose their peers and therefore have the power to shape themselves by joining groups that
will lead them to develop new values, attitudes, beliefs, and perspectives (Shin & Ryan, 2014). In a sense,
adolescents have the opportunity to invent the adults they will soon become, and the responsibility this
opportunity entails can be overwhelming (Tarantino et al., 2014). Second, as adolescents strive for greater
autonomy, their parents naturally rebel. For instance, parents and adolescents tend to disagree about the age at
which certain adult behaviors—such as staying out late or having sex—are permissible, and you don’t need a
psychologist to tell you which position each party in this conflict tends to hold (Dekovic´, Noom, & Meeus,
1997; Holmbeck & O’Donnell, 1991).

Because adolescents and parents often have different ideas about who should control the adolescent’s behavior,
their relationships become more conflictive and less close, their interactions become briefer and less frequent
(Larson & Richards, 1991), and their parents become less happy about it (Luthar & Ciciolla, 2016). Even so,
most adolescents don’t have a particularly large number of conflicts with their parents (Chung, Flook, & Fuligni,
2009), and when they do, they tend to be conflicts over relatively minor issues, such as dress and language
(which may explain why teenagers argue more with their mothers, who are typically in charge of such issues,
than with their fathers; Caspi et al, 1993).

When adolescents pull away from their parents, they move toward their peers. Across a wide range of cultures,
historical epochs, and even species, these peer relations evolve in a similar way (Dunphy, 1963; Weisfeld, 1999).
Most young adolescents initially form groups or “cliques” with same-sex peers, many of whom were friends
during childhood (Brown, Mory, & Kinney, 1994). Next, male cliques and female cliques begin to meet in public
places, such as town squares or shopping malls, and they begin to interact—but only in groups and only in public.
After a few years, the older members of these same-sex cliques peel off and form smaller, mixed-sex cliques,
which may assemble in private as well as in public, but they usually assemble as a group (Molloy et al., 2014).
Finally, couples (typically, but not always, a male and a female) peel off from the small, mixed-sex clique and
begin romantic relationships.

Adolescents form same-sex cliques that meet opposite-sex cliques in public places. Eventually, most of them will form
mixed-sex cliques, pair off into romantic relationships, get married, have children, and then worry about those kids when
they do all the same things.

Studies show that throughout adolescence, people spend increasing amounts of time with opposite-sex peers
while maintaining the amount of time they spend with same-sex peers (Richards et al., 1998), and they
accomplish this by spending less time with their parents (Larson & Richards, 1991). Although peers exert
considerable influence on adolescents’ beliefs and behaviors, this influence generally occurs because adolescents
like their peers and want to impress them, and not because the peers exert pressure (Smith, Chein, & Steinberg,
2014; Susman et al., 1994). As they age, adolescents show an increasing tendency to resist whatever peer
pressure they do experience (Steinberg & Monahan, 2007). Acceptance by peers is of tremendous importance to
adolescents, and those who are rejected by their peers tend to be withdrawn, lonely, and depressed (Pope &
Bierman, 1999), in part because adolescents take negative feedback from their peers much more seriously than
adults do (Rodman, Powers, & Somerville, 2017). Fortunately for those of us who were seventh-grade nerds,
people who are unpopular in early adolescence can become popular in later adolescence as their peers become
less rigid and more tolerant (Kinney, 1993).

Build to the Outcomes

1. How does the brain change at puberty?
2. What are the consequences of early puberty?
3. What makes adolescence especially difficult?
4. What determines sexual orientation?
5. Why do many adolescents make unwise choices about sex?
6. What are Erikson’s stages of psychosocial development?
7. How do family and peer relationships change during adolescence?
Adulthood: Change We Can’t Believe In
Learning Outcomes
Specify the physical and socioemotional changes that occur in adulthood.
Describe how marriage and children affect adults’ happiness.

It takes fewer than 7,000 days for a single-celled zygote to reach a adulthood, which is the stage of development
that begins around 18 to 21 years and lasts for the remainder of life. Many of us think of adulthood as the
destination to which the process of development finally delivers us, and that once we’ve arrived, our journey is
pretty much complete: Middle-aged adults are just young adults with mortgages, and older adults are just middle-
aged adults with wrinkles. But this conception of development is wrong. Although they are a bit more difficult to
see, a whole host of physical, cognitive, and emotional changes take place between our first legal beer and our
last legal breath.

Changing Abilities
The early 20s are the peak years for health, stamina, vigor, and prowess, and because our psychology is so
closely tied to our biology, these are also the years during which many of our cognitive abilities are at their
sharpest. If you are a typical college student, then at this very moment you see farther, hear better, remember
more, and weigh less than you ever will again. Make sure to take pictures, because this glorious moment at your
physical peak will be over in just a few dozen months. That’s right: months. Somewhere between the ages of 26
and 30, your body will start the slow process of breaking down in every way. Your muscles will slowly be
replaced by fat, your skin will slowly become less elastic, your hair will start to thin and your bones will start to
weaken. Your sensory abilities will become less acute and your brain cells will die at an accelerated rate. Other
than becoming more resistant to colds and less sensitive to pain, your aging body just won’t work as well as your
youthful body now does.

These physical changes will have measurable psychological consequences (Hartshorne & Germine, 2015;
Salthouse, 2006). For instance, as your brain ages, your prefrontal cortex and its associated subcortical
connections will deteriorate more quickly than the other areas of your brain (Raz, 2000), and you will experience
a noticeable decline in many cognitive tasks that require effort, initiative, or strategy. Your memory will get
worse overall, and some kinds will get worse faster than others. For example, you will experience a greater
decline in working memory (the ability to hold information “in mind”) than in long-term memory (the ability to
retrieve information), a greater decline in episodic memory (the ability to remember particular past events) than
in semantic memory (the ability to remember general information such as the meanings of words), and a greater
decline in retrieval accuracy than in recognition accuracy. Also, your memory will get worse overall, and some
kinds will get worse faster than others. Sorry. Did we say that already? As FIGURE 11.15 shows, performance
on most (but not all) cognitive tasks peaks when people are young.
 Figure 11.15

Age-Related Changes in Cognitive Performance This chart shows the age of peak performances on a wide variety of
cognitive tests, some of which measure working memory (WM), short-term memory (STM), and long-term memory
(LTM).

DATA FROM HARTSHORNE & GERMINE (2015).

So the bad news is that older adults experience declines in memory and attention. The good news is that they
compensate by doing things differently (Bäckman & Dixon, 1992; Park & McDonough, 2013; Salthouse, 1987).
Older chess players remember chess positions more poorly than younger players do, but they play just as well
because they learn to search the board more efficiently (Charness, 1981). Older typists react more slowly than
younger typists do, but they type just as quickly and accurately because they are better at anticipating the next
word in spoken or written text (Salthouse, 1984). Older airline pilots are worse than younger pilots when it comes
to remembering a list of nonsense words, but they are just as good at remembering the heading commands that
pilots receive from the control tower every flight (Morrow et al., 1994).
 One week before his 58th birthday, US Airways pilot Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger made a perfect emergency landing in
the Hudson River and saved the lives of everyone on board. None of the passengers wished they’d had a younger pilot.

The brain itself begins to compensate for the toll that time takes. As you know from the Neuroscience chapter,
young brains are highly differentiated—that is, they have different parts that do different things. But as the brain
ages, it becomes de-differentiated (Lindenberger & Baltes, 1994). For example, regions of the visual cortex that
specialize in face and scene perception in younger people are much less specialized in older people (Grady et al.,
1992; Park et al., 2004). The brain is like a bunch of specialists who work independently when they are young
and able, but who pull together as a team when each specialist gets older and slower (Park & McDonough, 2013).
For instance, when young adults try to keep verbal information in working memory, the left prefrontal cortex is
more strongly activated than the right, and when they try to keep spatial information in working memory, the
right prefrontal cortex is more strongly activated than the left (Smith & Jonides, 1997). But this bilateral
asymmetry pretty much disappears in older adults, which suggests that the older brain is compensating for the
declining abilities of each individual neural structure by calling on its other neural structures to help out (Cabeza,
2002) (see FIGURE 11.16). The physical machinery breaks down as time passes, and one of the ways in which
the brain meets that challenge is by changing its division of labor.
 Figure 11.16

Bilaterality in Older and Younger Brains Across a variety of tasks, young brains show more bilateral asymmetry in their
patterns of activation than do older brains. One explanation is that older brains compensate for the declining abilities of
one neural structure by calling on other neural structures for help.

Changing Goals
So one reason that Grandpa can’t remember where he left his socks is that his
prefrontal cortex doesn’t work as well as it used to. But another reason is that the
Is There a Cognitive
location of socks just isn’t the sort of thing that grandpas work hard to remember
Decline with Age
Regardless of Cognitive
(Haase, Heckhausen, & Wrosch, 2013). According to socioemotional selectivity
Stimulation? theory (Carstensen & Turk-Charles, 1994), younger adults are largely oriented
Go to toward the acquisition of information that will be useful to them in the future (e.g.,
launchpadworks.com. reading restaurant reviews), whereas older adults are generally oriented toward
information that brings emotional satisfaction in the present (e.g., reading detective
novels). Because young people have such long futures, they invest their time attending to, thinking about, and
remembering potentially useful information that may fill their informational needs tomorrow. Because older
people have much shorter futures, they spend their time attending to, thinking about, and remembering positive
information that fills their emotional needs today.
For example, older people perform much more poorly than younger people when they are asked to remember a
series of unpleasant faces, but only slightly more poorly when they are asked to remember a series of pleasant
faces (Mather & Carstensen, 2003). Whereas younger adults show equal amounts of amygdala activation when
they see very pleasant or very unpleasant pictures, older adults show much more activation when they see very
pleasant than very unpleasant pictures, suggesting that older adults just aren’t attending to information that
doesn’t make them happy (Mather et al., 2004; Mikels & Shuster, 2016). Indeed, compared with younger adults,
older adults are generally better at sustaining positive emotions and curtailing negative ones (Isaacowitz, 2012;
Isaacowitz & Blanchard-Fields, 2012; Mather & Carstensen, 2005; Ford et al., 2018). They experience fewer
negative emotions in their daily lives (Carstensen et al., 2000; Charles, Reynolds, & Gatz, 2001; Mroczek &
Spiro, 2005; Schilling, Wahl, & Wiegering, 2013; Stone et al., 2010), and are more accepting of them when they
do (Shallcross et al., 2013). Even their daydreams seem to be more pleasant (Maillet et al, 2018)!

Because they are not concerned about “saving for tomorrow,” older people are also more willing than younger
people to forego personal financial gain and instead contribute to the public good (Freund & Blanchard-Fields,
2014; see Hot Science: There’s No Time Like the Present). And because they are oriented toward emotionally
satisfying rather than profitable experiences, older adults become more selective about their interaction partners,
choosing to communicate and spend time with family and a few close friends rather than with a large circle of
acquaintances (Chui et al., 2014; David-Barrett et al., 2016). One study monitored a group of people from the
1930s to the 1990s and found that their rate of interaction with acquaintances declined from early to middle
adulthood, but their rate of interaction with spouses, parents, and siblings remained stable or increased
(Carstensen, 1992; Sander Schupp, & Richter, 2017; see FIGURE 11.17). A study of older adults who ranged in
age from 69 to 104 found that the oldest adults had fewer peripheral social partners than the younger adults did,
but they had just as many emotionally close partners whom they identified as members of their “inner circle”
(Lang & Carstensen, 1994; Zhaoyang et al., 2018). “Let’s go meet some new people” isn’t something that most
60-year-olds tend to say, but “Let’s go hang out with some old friends” is. It is sad but instructive to note that
many of these same cognitive and emotional changes can be observed among younger people who have
discovered that their futures will be short because of a terminal illness (Carstensen & Fredrickson, 1998;
Sullivan-Singh, Stanton, & Low, 2015).
 Figure 11.17

Friends but not Family Become Less Important as we Age The amount of time people spend with their families doesn’t
change much over the course of their lives, but the amount of time they spend with friends diminishes dramatically.

ADAPTED FROM SANDER, SCHUPP, & RICHTER (2017).

Hot Science
There’s No Time Like the Present
It is often said that children and their grandparents are so much alike because they share a common enemy.
Kidding aside, there do seem to be ways in which younger and older people are more like each other than
either group is like the folks in the middle, and recent research suggests that one of those ways is patience. We
all know people who just “have to have it now” and others who are able to wait patiently until later. Researchers
can measure these differences using an “intertemporal discounting task.” The idea behind the task is simple:
Give people a choice between receiving some amount of money today or receiving more money in the future,
and then see how much more money it takes to get them to wait. The smallest amount required to convince a
person to wait is a measure of their patience: The more money they require, the less patient they are.

Richter and Mata (2018) gave this task to more than 1,500 people ranging in age from 18 to 96. Would they
rather receive $230 right now or wait and receive $235 in a year? How about $240? How about $245? The
researchers went all the way up to $360 and found something that you probably would have guessed yourself:
Adolescents and young adults were less patient than their parents. What you might not have guessed is that
elderly people were nearly as impatient as adolescents. Yes, young people were more likely than their parents
to say, “Forget about tomorrow, I want it now.” But so were their grandparents! When the researchers controlled
for variables such as cognitive ability, education, health, and financial security, the results did not change.

Exactly why this happened is anyone’s guess, but one possibility is that younger people have not yet learned to
think about the future, and older people don’t have all that much future to think about. Both of them care more
about today than tomorrow, and so they eat dessert first.
 Adolescents and older adults have something in common: They don’t like to wait for the things they want!

Given all this, you shouldn’t be surprised to learn that people find late adulthood to be one of the happiest and
most satisfying periods of life. You shouldn’t be surprised, but you probably are because young adults vastly
overestimate the problems of aging (Pew Research Center for People & the Press, 2009; Sneed, 2005). Young
adults predict that they will be happier at the age of 30 than at the age of 70, but 70-year-olds typically report
greater happiness than 30-year-olds do (Lacey, Smith, & Ubel, 2006; but see Twenge, Sherman, & Lyubomirsky,
2016). Not only do older adults report feeling happier, they also report feeling hotter. Yes, you read that right.
When people are asked whether they feel good about their physical appearance, they are more likely to say yes if
they are over 65 than if they are under 34 (Gallup, 2014)!
 Young adults overestimate the problems of aging. In the 1965 hit song “My Generation,” Pete Townshend, the lead
singer of The Who, sang, “Things they do look awfully cold, I hope I die before I get old.” At the age of 74, Townshend is
still touring and making records, so apparently he’s reconsidered his position.

Changing Roles
The psychological separation from parents that begins in adolescence usually becomes a physical separation in
adulthood. In virtually all human societies, young adults leave home, get married, and have children of their own.
Marriage and parenthood are two of the most significant aspects of adult life. If you are right now a college-age
American, then you are likely to get married at around the age of 27 and have approximately 1.8 children because
you believe that marriage and children will make you happy. But do they?
 Research suggests that marriage has a positive impact on happiness. Especially in the first five minutes.

In fact, married people do report being somewhat happier than unmarried people—whether those unmarried
people are single, widowed, divorced, or cohabiting (Dion, 2005; Johnson & Wu, 2002; Lucas & Dyrenforth,
2005). That’s why some researchers consider marriage to be a good investment in one’s happiness. But other
researchers suggest that married people may be happier simply because happy people are more likely to get
married and that marriage may be an effect—not a cause—of happiness (Lucas et al., 2003). The general
consensus among scientists seems to be that both of these positions have some merit: Even before marriage,
people who will end up married tend to be happier than those who will never marry, but marriage does seem to
confer some further happiness benefit, particularly when the members of the couple regard each other as their
“best friend” (Helliwell & Grover, 2014). It is worth noting that marriage has become less popular over the past
few decades in most Western nations and that being single has become an increasingly attractive and satisfying
option for many (DePaulo & Morris, 2006; Pepping, MacDonald, & Davis, 2018). If these trends continue, the
happiness boost that marriage seems to provide may soon be a thing of the past.

Children are another story—not because the happiness boost is longer lasting, but because there isn’t one.
Research shows that children do not increase their parents’ happiness; indeed, more often than not they decrease
it (Stanca, 2016). Parents typically report lower marital satisfaction than do nonparents—and the more children
they have, the less satisfaction they report (Twenge, Campbell, & Foster, 2003). Marital satisfaction decreases
dramatically over the course of a marriage, and the presence of children appears to be responsible for some of
that decline, which slows when the children grow up and leave home (Van Laningham, Johnson, & Amato,
2001). Given that mothers in virtually all cultures do more child care than fathers, it is not surprising that the
negative impact of parenthood is stronger for women than for men. Mothers of young children experience role
conflicts (“How am I supposed to manage being a full-time lawyer and a full-time mother?”) and restrictions of
freedom (“I never get to play tennis anymore”) that fathers often side-step. A study that measured the moment-to-
moment happiness of American women as they went about their daily activities found that women were less
happy when taking care of their children than when eating, exercising, shopping, napping, or watching television
—and only slightly happier than when they were doing housework (Kahneman et al., 2004).

On average, children lower their parents’ happiness. But this effect is stronger in some
countries than in others—and in about a third of all countries, children raise their parents’
happiness. In 2015, parents in Macedonia (left) experienced the largest “happiness penalty”
and parents in Montenegro (right) experienced the largest “happiness premium” (Stanca,
2016).

Does all of this mean that people would be happier if they didn’t have children? Not necessarily. Because
researchers cannot randomly assign people to be parents or nonparents, studies of the effects of parenthood are
necessarily correlational. When controlling for other factors, people who want children and have children may be
somewhat less happy than people who neither want them nor have them, but it is possible that people who want
children would be even less happy if they didn’t have them. What does seem clear is that raising children is a
challenging job that people find most rewarding when they’re not in the middle of doing it.

Build to the Outcomes

1. What cognitive changes are associated with adulthood?
2. How do adults compensate for their declining abilities?
3. How do people’s goals change in adulthood?
4. Why is late adulthood such a happy time for most people?
5. What does research say about the effects of marriage and children on happiness?
 Chapter Review

Prenatality: A Womb With a View

Developmental psychology studies continuity and change across the life span.
The prenatal stage of development begins when a sperm fertilizes an egg, producing a zygote. The
zygote, which contains chromosomes from both the egg and the sperm, develops into an embryo at 2
weeks and then into a fetus at 8 weeks.
Humans are born with underdeveloped brains, which is essential to the birth process and allows for
adaptation to the social and physical environment after birth.
The fetal environment has important physical and psychological effects. In addition to the food a
pregnant woman eats, teratogens—agents that impair fetal development—can affect the fetus. The
most common teratogens are tobacco and alcohol.
The fetus can hear and becomes familiar with its mother’s voice.

Infancy and Childhood: Perceiving, Doing, and Thinking

Infants have a limited range of vision, but they can see and remember objects that appear within it.
They learn to control their bodies from the top down and from the center out.
Infants slowly develop theories about how the world works. Piaget believed that these theories
developed through four stages in which children learn basic facts about the world, such as the fact
that objects continue to exist even when they are out of sight and the fact that objects have enduring
properties that are not changed by superficial transformations. Children also learn that their minds
represent objects; hence objects may not be as they appear, and others may not see them as the child
does.
Hearing language about thoughts and feelings helps children acquire a theory of mind.
Cognitive development is also driven by social interactions and infants have several abilities that
allow them to learn from others.

Infancy and Childhood: Bonding and Helping

At a very early age, human beings develop strong emotional ties to their primary caregivers. The
quality of these ties—which are indexed by either secure, avoidant, ambivalent, or disorganized
attachment styles—is determined both by the caregiver’s behavior and the child’s temperament.
Piaget concluded that children’s reasoning about right and wrong develops in three ways. It is
initially based on inviolable truths about the world, but expands to include concepts of fairness and
equity. As they mature, children begin to consider the actor’s intentions as well as the extent to
 which the action obeys abstract moral principles. Kohlberg outlined a theory of morality that
progresses from evaluation of an action’s consequences, to determination of whether it obeys social
rules, and finally to how it aligns with core values.
Infants seem to have some “moral sense,” such as an affinity toward kind people and a concern with
fairness.

Adolescence: Minding the Gap

Adolescence begins with puberty, the onset of sexual maturity of the human body. Puberty now
occurs earlier than ever before, and the entrance of young people into adult society occurs later.
Adolescents are more likely to do things that are risky or illegal, but they rarely inflict serious or
enduring harm on themselves or others.
Although most people are attracted to members of the opposite sex, some are not, and research
suggests that biology and genetics play key roles in determining a person’s sexual orientation. Sex
education has been shown to reduce risky sexual behavior.
As adolescents seek to develop their adult identities, they seek increasing autonomy from their
parents and become more peer oriented, forming single-sex cliques, followed by mixed-sex cliques.
Finally, they pair off as couples.

Adulthood: Change We Can’t Believe In

Performance on most cognitive tasks peaks when people are in their 20s, and older people develop a
variety of strategies to compensate for their cognitive declines.
Older adults are more oriented toward emotional satisfaction, which influences the way they attend
to and remember information, the size and structure of their social networks, and their happiness.
For most people, adulthood means leaving home, getting married, and having children. The
responsibilities that parenthood entails present a significant challenge to people’s happiness.

Key Concept Quiz

1. Learning begins
a. in the womb.
b. at birth.
c. in the newborn stage.
d. in infancy.

2. The proximodistal rule states that

a. motor skills emerge in sequence from the center to the periphery.
 b. motor skills emerge in sequence from the top to the bottom.
c. motor skills such as rooting are hard-wired by nature.
d. simple motor skills disappear as more sophisticated motor skills emerge.

3. According to Piaget, a child’s theories about the way the world works is known as .
a. assimilation
b. accommodation
c. a schema
d. habituation

4. Once children understand that human behavior is guided by mental representations, they are said to
have acquired
a. joint attention.
b. a theory of mind.
c. formal operational ability.
d. egocentrism.

5. When infants in a new situation examine their mother’s face for cues about what to do, they are
demonstrating an ability known as
a. joint attention.
b. social referencing.
c. imitation.
d. all of the above.

6. The capacity for attachment may be innate, but the quality of attachment is influenced by
a. the child’s temperament.
b. the primary caregiver’s ability to read the child’s emotional state.
c. the interaction between the child and the primary caregiver.
d. all of the above.

7. According to Kohlberg, each stage in the development of moral reasoning is characterized by a

specific focus. What is the correct sequence of these stages?
a. focus on consequences, focus on ethical principles, focus on social rules
b. focus on ethical principles, focus on social rules, focus on consequences
c. focus on consequences, focus on social rules, focus on ethical principles
d. focus on social rules, focus on consequences, focus on ethical principles

8. Scientific evidence suggests that play(s) a key role in determining a person’s sexual
orientation.
a. personal choices
b. parenting styles
c. sibling relationships
d. biology and genetics
 9. Adolescents place the greatest emphasis on relationships with
a. peers.
b. parents.
c. siblings.
d. nonparental authority figures.

10. Data suggest that, for most people, the last decades of life are
a. characterized by an increase in negative emotions.
b. spent attending to the most useful information.
c. extremely satisfying.
d. a time during which they begin to interact with a much wider circle of people.

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Key Terms
developmental psychology
germinal stage
embryonic stage
fetal stage
myelination
teratogen
fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS)
infancy
motor development
motor reflexes
cephalocaudal rule
proximodistal rule
cognitive development
sensorimotor stage
schemas
assimilation
accommodation
object permanence
childhood
preoperational stage
concrete operational stage
conservation
formal operational stage
egocentrism
theory of mind
attachment
attachment styles
temperament
internal working model
preconventional stage
conventional stage
postconventional stage
adolescence
puberty
primary sex characteristics
secondary sex characteristics
adulthood

Changing Minds
1. One of your friends recently got married, and she and her husband are planning to have children.
You mention to your friend that once this happens she’ll have to stop drinking. She scoffs. “They
make it sound as though a pregnant woman who drinks alcohol is murdering her baby. Look, my
mom drank wine every weekend when she was pregnant with me, and I’m just fine.” What is your
friend failing to understand about the effects of alcohol on prenatal development? What other
teratogens might you tell her about?
2. You are at the grocery store when you spot a crying child in a stroller. The mother picks up the child
and cuddles it until it stops crying. A grocery clerk is standing next to you, stocking the shelves. He
leans over and says, “Now, that’s bad parenting. If you pick up and cuddle a child every time it cries,
you’re reinforcing the behavior, and the result will be a very spoiled child.” Do you agree? What do
studies of attachment suggest about the effects of picking up and holding children when they cry?
3. You and your roommate are watching a movie in which a young man tells his parents that he’s gay.
The parents react badly and decide that they should send him to a “camp” where he can learn to
change his sexual orientation. Your roommate turns to you: “Do you know anything about this? Can
people really be changed from gay to straight?” What would you tell your friend about “conversion
therapy” and about the factors that determine sexual orientation?
4. One of your cousins has just turned 30 and, to his horror, has discovered a gray hair. “This is the
end,” he says. “Soon I’ll start losing my eyesight, growing new chins, and forgetting how to use a
cell phone. Aging is just one long, slow, agonizing decline.” What could you tell your cousin to
cheer him up? Does everything in life get worse with age?
Answers To Key Concept Quiz

1. a

2. a

3. c

4. b

5. b

6. d

7. c

8. d

9. a

10. c

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