How Did Piaget Contribute To Psychology

During the development of many psychological theories there were many people who made incredibly important contributions to psychology who weren’t initially considered psychologists. Ivan Pavlov and his discoveries in behaviorism and learning in Russia, or Sigmund Freud and his founding of psychoanalysis in Austria. These are some of the most prominent names in psychology who made immense lasting changes to the field of psychology, and I would argue that in some aspects Piaget’s research was just as important as both of these men’s. Piaget began as a genetic epistemologist, where his main interest was learning how one comes to know things. As an epistemologist, Piaget’s study of childhood learning was fundamentally different from anyone’s

Arthur Piaget was Jean’s father who had an immense impact on his son’s life. Arthur Piaget was a Swiss historian who was incredibly dedicated to his writings of medieval literature and the history of Neuchâtel. Piaget’s godfather was a Swiss scholar by the name of Samuel Cornut. Piaget’s father and godfather both encouraged Piaget to pursue his interests in philosophy and epistemology during his adolescence. His father’s intense dedication to his work would be an attribute Jean would adopt into his life as he quickly becomes one of the youngest and most successful scientists of his

Until Piaget most people just assumed children were less intelligent versions of adults, but through his research Piaget showed that think very differently from adults. Understanding these differences was Piaget’s end goal. To fully understand Piaget’s model one must understand that Piaget interpreted children’s actions as their language, their way of understanding and explaining the world around them. Piaget thought that children actively construct their reality using the environment around them, in other words they learn by doing. Another thing to keep in mind is that Piaget’s model is marked by qualitative differences rather in developmental behavior. This contrasts with most researchers who were behaviorists at the time, who thought that operationalizing behavior was the only way to measure and understand behavior. Thus, the stages of Piaget’s model have about some leniency in the age at which a child will enter each stage. This is especially true in the case of children who experience developmental delays, such as extreme stress, development of a mental disorder, trauma, or a number of other stressors which inhibit the normal development of a child. Piaget’s model is also unique to other psychological theory at the time because his model is only for children, where most people at the time were concerned with adult learning and