Chapter 18 Introduction
Emerging Adulthood: Cognitive Development
- Postformal Thought
- The Practical and the Personal: A Fifth Stage?
- Combining Subjective and Objective Thought
- Cognitive Flexibility
- Countering Stereotypes
- Dialectical Thought
- Morals and Religion
- Which Era? What Place?
- Dilemmas for Emerging Adults
- Stages of Faith
- Cognitive Growth and Higher Education
- The Effects of College
- A CASE TO STUDY: College Advancing Thought
- Changes in the College Context
- Evaluating the Changes
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WHAT WILL YOU KNOW?
- How is adults’ thinking about problems different from that of adolescents?
Thinking in adulthood differs from earlier thinking in three major ways: It is more practical, more flexible, and more dialectical—
able to consider and integrate opposing or conflicting ideas. - Is there evidence that adults are more moral than adolescents?
The idea that emerging adulthood is pivotal for a process of developing morals that continues through middle age has been supported by research over the past decades. Children combine the values of their parents, their culture, and their peers with their own sensibilities as they mature. Dramatic and extensive changes occur in young adulthood in the basic problem-
solving strategies used to deal with ethical issues. These changes are linked to fundamental reconceptualizations in how the person understands society and his or her stake in it. - What nation has the highest proportion of young adults who graduate from college?
In some nations, more than half of 25-
to 34- year- olds are college graduates. China has more college graduates than the United States, but the proportion of graduates is higher in the U.S. - How does college affect a person’s thinking processes?
College improves verbal and quantitative abilities, adds knowledge of specific subject areas, teaches skills in various professions, and fosters reasoning and reflection. Many of these abilities characterize postformal thinking.
What did you learn today?
When I asked my young children this question, I sometimes heard their excitement about new discoveries (that the sun does not really move in the sky) but also about things of no interest to me (like how a bunny eats a carrot). When I asked my adolescents this same question, I sometimes heard emotional truths (did you know that slaves were not counted as whole people in the Constitution?), but often I got silence. The children gave details; the adolescents might say “Nothing.”
How would you answer if someone asked you now? You might respond with ideas or information, something thoughtful, new to me as well as to you. In adulthood, cognition changes in quality, quantity, speed, efficiency, and depth, reflecting values, interests, and skills, as well as an awareness of what other people know. When and how these changes take place is explained in each of this book’s three chapters on adult cognition, Chapters 18, 21, and 24.
Cognitive development has been studied using many approaches:
- The stage approach describes shifts in the nature of thought, as in a postformal stage that follows the formal stage discussed in Chapter 15.
- The psychometric approach analyzes intelligence via IQ tests and other measures.
- The information-
processing approach studies how the brain encodes, stores, and retrieves information.
All three approaches provide valuable insights into the complex patterns of adult cognition. Yet, as emphasized in Chapter 17, chronological age is an imperfect boundary in adulthood. This chapter focuses on postformal thought, Chapter 21 on psychometrics, and Chapter 24 on information processing. For all three, some examples extend beyond chronological age boundaries.
Each cognitive chapter also includes age-