Essays
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Self‐Regulation in the First 3 Years of Life: A Key to Predict Successful Development? - Pauen, Sabina
Self‐regulation (SR) skills in young children are known to predict later achievements, but we still know only little about how various aspects of SR first emerge, how they are related to each other and what mechanisms underlie their development in infancy and beyond. To answer these questions we need to improve concepts and measures to describe early SR development, clarify whether SR development undergoes a sensitive period in infancy, and to identify factors that influence SR development in early years. The present report argues for a multi‐method, system‐oriented, and dynamic approach to meet these challenges. -
Taking Personality to the Next Level: What Does It Mean to Know a Person? - Wilson, Robert
What does it mean to know a person? In his famous article, McAdams (1995) addresses this question from the perspective of personality psychology and concludes that personality traits are “the psychology of the stranger.” To really know someone, you need to know more than just how they typically think, feel, and behave on average (a common definition of traits). You need to know how their thoughts, feelings, and behaviors change depending on their role and context, why those fluctuations occur (the underlying motives and causes of those patterns), and how they make sense of their own patterns over time (their life narrative). In this essay, we argue that although there has been little empirical work on within‐person fluctuations in personality, the time is ripe to examine these patterns. New technology has made it possible to quantify momentary thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, and to track the contextual factors that underlie these fluctuations (i.e., “personality signatures”). By capturing individual differences at this dynamic level, we can gain a better understanding of how people differ from one another. This will also open the door to new research questions, such as investigating the amount of insight people have into their own and others' personality signatures. -
Temporal Identity Integration as a Core Developmental Process - Syed, Moin
The construct of identity has captivated scholars across the social sciences, humanities, and the arts. For good reason, too, as the question who am I? cuts to the core of human experience. Following Erikson's theorizing, developmental psychologists have stressed the importance of an identity that is extended through time. A healthy identity is defined, in part, by individuals' ability to reconcile and integrate their past experiences, current concerns, and future prospects, a phenomenon we label temporal identity integration. In this chapter, we review the foundational theoretical and empirical work pertaining to temporal identity integration, drawing on developmental, social, and personality psychology perspectives. We then review some of the most exciting empirical findings across these areas, and provide suggestions for future directions on the topic. -
The Development of Social Trust - Jaswal, Vikram K.
Trust is the currency on which all human interactions are based. This entry reviews a diverse body of literature on the development of trust. We begin by describing foundational theories linking early experience to trust, and then discuss how violations of trust affect children. We turn next to a particularly active area of trust research in cognitive development—namely, trust in information learned from what other people say (testimony). Children's willingness to believe what they are told is essential for the cultural transmission of knowledge; it allows them to learn about things they have not experienced themselves. We describe research showing that, in fact, young children have a great deal of difficulty not believing testimony. We suggest that this credulity is the manifestation of a bias to trust testimony specifically rather than a more generic, undifferentiated trust, and speculate about the origins of this bias. Finally, we offer several suggestions of areas for future research, including whether children (like adults) make judgments of trustworthiness based on an individual's facial features, how culture influences trust and trustworthiness, and how children learn to evaluate the credibility of digital sources of information. -
The Inherence Heuristic: Generating Everyday Explanations - Cimpian, Andrei
The ability to explain enables humans to understand their world and informs much of their behavior. And yet, little is known about the psychological processes by which explanations are generated. Here, I describe a recent proposal on this topic. According to this proposal, people come up with explanations much as they come up with solutions to other complex problems—heuristically. Extensive research on human reasoning has suggested that people answer difficult questions (e.g., how satisfied are you with your life?) by retrieving simple information that comes to mind easily (e.g., I am in a good mood right now) and then using this information to construct an approximate answer. Prompts for an explanation (e.g., why do we eat eggs for breakfast?) are hypothesized to trigger a similar process. This process oversamples highly accessible facts about the entities in the observation to be explained. Owing to the organization of memory, these accessible facts are more often about the inherent features of the relevant entities (e.g., eggs have a lot of protein) than about their history, their relations to other entities, and so on. This skew toward inherence then propagates through to the final product of this heuristic process, which is typically an inherence‐based explanatory intuition (hence the name inherence heuristic). The inherence heuristic proposal sheds light on the mechanistic underpinnings of explanation and has implications for our understanding of other cognitive phenomena of societal importance (such as the tendency to explain membership in social groups in terms of deep biological “essences”). -
The Intrinsic Dynamics of Development - van Geert, Paul
In this essay, we discuss an emergent developmental science. It provides an approach to development that redefines its theoretical and methodological basis in the general theory of complex dynamic systems. Its methodological research choices are in line with a focus on actual developmental processes, as they occur in individual cases, such as individual children, families, or relationships. Intraindividual variability based on frequent short‐term as well as long‐term measurements provides an important source of information. Theoretically, we advocate a model of a network of dynamically interacting components, generating a wide variety of developmental trajectories, in line with the idiosyncratic nature of developmental systems. -
The Role of School‐Related Peers and Social Networks in Human Development - Muller, Chandra
This essay describes the foundational research on peers within schools, the recent advances in the field, and new challenges and opportunities for future research. Schools bring together children and youths for many hours of the day over many years. The intensity of interaction and judgment within of peers within the school setting heightens the potential impact on human development during the crucial adolescent years. Extant research on the effects of peers in school cuts across disciplinary lines and is of interest to developmental psychologists, economists, sociologists, and anthropologists, who observe the potential for peers to structure and reinforce status hierarchies and opportunities to learn, contribute to the development of personality, identity, interests, and motivation, and shape the cultures that emerge in schools, all of which may impact students' learning, educational attainment, and adult earnings. Social network methods combined with more readily available data on students' course taking in schools provides rich and promising new opportunities for future research. -
The Roots of Moral Reasoning and Behavior in Infants - Kiley Hamlin, J.
Recent findings suggest that toddlers and infants engage in prosocial behaviors and evaluate potential social partners based on their morally relevant social acts. Together, this evidence suggests that some foundational aspects of human morality may stem from universal and unlearned features of the human mind. That is, despite the clear role of learning processes in much of moral development, basic motivations to cooperate with and help others, as well as an ability to judge third parties based on their prosocial and antisocial acts, may underlie and constrain those processes. Here, we review the current state of the literature on these topics and point to important remaining issues and future directions. -
Understanding the Adaptive Functions of Morality from a Cognitive Psychological Perspective - Dungan, James
What are the possible functions of moral cognition? Addressing this question has proved difficult, leading to disagreement among moral psychologist. Researchers claiming that morality is composed of many distinct domains have posited multiple functions, whereas researchers focusing on the features that are unique to and common across all moral judgments have suggested a unified evolutionary function. In this review, we suggest that the limitations of these accounts can be overcome by systematically investigating the cognitive mechanisms that support moral judgments across descriptively distinct domains. As a case study, we focus on the contrast between harm and purity morals, and we argue for a novel functional difference on the basis of differences in the underlying psychological processes. Understanding the psychology behind distinct morals will pave the way for understanding the distinct functions of moral cognition. -
Youth Entrepreneurship - Damon, William
Entrepreneurship is critical to job creation and economic growth in the United States and abroad; however, interest in pursuing entrepreneurial careers is on the decline among young people today. As a means of designing programs that effectively encourage and prepare young people to pursue entrepreneurial careers, this essay calls for increased focus on how entrepreneurs develop. An understanding of the experiences, opportunities, and interests that lead to successful entrepreneurship is needed. To that end, this essay, in addition to addressing leading process‐oriented definitions of entrepreneurship and briefly reviewing relevant empirical studies, outlines three promising areas of research on youth entrepreneurship. First, researchers have becoming increasingly interested in entrepreneurial purposes. Recent research finds that at least some young people seek out entrepreneurial careers as a means of applying their skills and talents to create organizations or businesses that solve personally meaningful problems in the broader world. This leads to the second emerging area of interest in youth entrepreneurship: the distinction between social and business entrepreneurship. The growth of new businesses and organizations that are at once highly profitable and at the same time exist to address social problems has blurred this distinction. Third, researchers are increasingly interested in identifying ways of effectively fostering entrepreneurial interests. This essay highlights key issues regarding the role that educational experiences and institutional support play in supporting the development of successful entrepreneurs.