Jean Piaget
Swiss psychologist who proposed stages of cognitive development
Swiss psychologist who described children's thinking as passing through four stages, from the sensorimotor stage in infancy to formal operational thought in adolescence. He founded the International Centre for Genetic Epistemology in Geneva in 1955.
Why this person matters
Piaget's observations made children's reasoning a central topic of developmental psychology. His stage theory remains the starting point for introductory teaching, although much of it has been revised. Collaborators such as Bärbel Inhelder, who worked with him for about 40 years, and Alina Szeminska contributed to the research, as did his wife Valentine Châtenay.
Main contributions
Children's errors as evidence
In Paris from 1919 he worked in the Binet-Simon laboratory, helping Théophile Simon standardise a French version of Cyril Burt's test. He shifted attention from whether children's answers were correct to the patterns in their wrong answers, which became the basis of his later work.
Four stages of development
He described a sensorimotor stage (birth to about 2), preoperational (about 2 to 7), concrete operational (about 7 to 11) and formal operational (about 11 onward). Key ideas include object permanence, egocentrism, conservation and abstract reasoning.
Institutions in Geneva
From 1921 he worked at the Jean-Jacques Rousseau Institute in Geneva, and from 1929 he directed the International Bureau of Education. In 1955 he founded the International Centre for Genetic Epistemology, which he directed until his death.
Context and limits
Critics note that his samples were small, his experiments loosely described and his statistics limited. Later researchers, including Baillargeon, Donaldson and Huttenlocher, found that young children do better on familiar tasks and grasp ideas such as object permanence earlier than he reported. Formal operational thought is reached by only some adults, and he paid little attention to culture, gender or race. Vygotsky stressed social and cultural influences on development.
In your introductory course
Lifespan development.Appears in the lifespan development chapter wherever cognitive stages, object permanence and conservation are introduced.
Related course reading: Psychology 2e, section 9.2. This is course context rather than a biographical source.
Years of active work
- 1921
Became director of studies at the Jean-Jacques Rousseau Institute in Geneva.
- 1925
Took a chair at the University of Neuchâtel, which he held until 1929.
- 1929
Became director of the International Bureau of Education; sources give the end of the post as 1967 or 1968.
- 1955
Founded the International Centre for Genetic Epistemology in Geneva.
Sources
- Jean Piaget Society, About Jean Piaget (chronology)Society or association. Institutional biography inspected.
- Encyclopedia.com, Piaget, JeanReference work. Reference article inspected.