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During her twenties, Jamila was probably searching for her identity. Susan’s sunny, people-oriented personality is genetic. If Elissa’s mother gives her a lot of love during her first years of life, she will grow up to be a loving, secure adult. If any of these thoughts entered your mind while reading about the people in the opening chapter vignette, you were using a major theory that developmentalists use to understand human life.

Theories attempt to explain what causes us to act as we do. They may allow us to predict the future. Ideally, they give us information about how to improve the quality of life. Theories in developmental science may offer broad explanations of behavior that apply to people at every age, or describe changes that occur at particular ages. This section provides a preview of both kinds of theories.

Let’s begin by outlining some theories (one is actually a research discipline) that offer general explanations of behavior. I’ve organized these theories somewhat chronologically—based on when they appeared during the twentieth century—but mainly according to their position on that core issue: Is it the environment, or the wider world, that determines how we develop? Are our personalities, talents, and traits shaped mainly by biological or genetic forces? This is the famous nature (biology) versus nurture (environment) question.

Give me a dozen healthy infants … and I’ll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to be any specialist I might select—doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief, and yes, even beggar man and thief.

(Watson, 1930, p. 104)

So proclaimed the early-twentieth-century psychologist John Watson as he spelled out the nurture-is-all-important position of traditional behaviorism. Intoxicated by the scientific advances that were transforming society, Watson and his fellow behaviorist B. F. Skinner (1960, 1974) dreamed of a science of human behavior that would be as rigorous as physics. These theorists believed that we could not study feelings and thoughts because inner experiences could not be observed. It was vital to chart only measurable, observable responses. Moreover, according to these traditional behaviorists, a few general laws of learning explain behavior in every situation at every time of life.

Exploring Reinforcement

According to Skinner, the general law of learning that causes each voluntary action, from forming our first words to mastering higher math, is operant conditioning. Responses that we reward, or reinforce, are learned. Responses that are not reinforced go away or are extinguished. So what accounts for Watson’s beggar men and thieves, the out-of-control kids, all of the marriages that start out so loving and then fall apart? According to Skinner, the reinforcements are operating as they should. The problem is that instead of reinforcing positive behavior, we often reinforce the wrong things.

One excellent place to see Skinner’s point is to take a trip to your local Walmart or restaurant. Notice how when children act up at the store parents often buy them a toy to quiet them down. At dinner, as long as a toddler is playing quietly, adults ignore her. When she starts to hurl objects off the table, they pick her up, kiss her, and take her outside. Then, they complain about their child’s difficult personality, not realizing that their own reinforcements have produced these responses!

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One of Skinner’s most interesting concepts, derived from his work with pigeons, relates to variable reinforcement schedules. This is the type of reinforcement that typically occurs in daily life: We get reinforced unpredictably, so we keep responding, realizing that if we continue, at some point we will be reinforced. Readers with children will understand how difficult it is to follow the basic behavioral principle to be consistent or not let a negative variable schedule emerge. At Walmart, even though you vow, “I won’t give in to bad behavior!” as your toddler’s tantrums escalate, you cave in, simply to avoid other shoppers’ disapproving stares (“What an out-of-control mother and bratty kid!”). Unfortunately, your child has learned, “If I keep whining, eventually I’ll get what I want.”

Reinforcement (and its opposite process, extinction) is a powerful force for both good and bad. It explains why, if a child starts out succeeding early in elementary school (being reinforced by receiving A’s), he is apt to study more. If a kindergartner begins failing socially (does not get positive reinforcement from her peers), she is at risk for becoming incredibly shy or highly aggressive in third or fourth grade (see Chapter 6). If you were not being reinforced by people, wouldn’t you withdraw or act in socially inappropriate ways?

Behaviorism makes sense of why, after starting out loving, marriages can end in divorce. As newlyweds, couples are continually reinforcing each other with expressions of love. Then, over time, husbands and wives tend to ignore the good parts of their partner and pay attention when there is something wrong.

The theory even offers an optimistic environmental explanation for the physical and mental impairments of old age. If you were in a nursing home and weren’t being reinforced for remembering or walking, wouldn’t your memory or physical abilities decline? The key to producing well-behaved children, enduring, loving marriages, and fewer old-age disabilities is simple. According to traditional behaviorists, we need to reinforce the right things.

However, things are not that simple. Human beings do think and reason. People do not need to be personally reinforced to learn.

Taking a Different Perspective: Exploring Cognitions

Enter cognitive behaviorism (social learning theory), launched by Albert Bandura (1977; 1986) and his colleagues in the 1970s, in studies demonstrating the power of modeling, or learning by watching and imitating what other people do.

Because we are a social species, modeling (both imitating other people, and others reciprocally imitating us) is endemic in daily life. Given that we are always modeling everything from the latest hairstyle on, who are we most likely to generally model as children and adults?

Bandura (1986) finds that that we tend to model people who are nurturing, or relate to us in a caring way. (The good news here is that being a loving, hands-on parent is the best way to naturally embed your values and ideas.) We model people whom we categorize as being like us. At age 2, you probably modeled anything from the vacuum cleaner to the behavior of the family dog. As we grow older, we tailor our modeling selectively, based on our understanding of who we are.

Modeling similar people partly explains why, after children understand their gender label (girl or boy) at about age 2 1/2, they separate into sex-segregated play groups and prefer to play with their “own group” (see Chapter 6). It makes sense of why at-risk teenagers gravitate to the druggies group at school, and then model the leader who most embodies the group norms (see Chapter 9). While I will use modeling to explain behavior at several points in this book, another concept—also devised by Bandura—will be a genuine foundation in the chapters to come: self-efficacy.

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Self-efficacy refers to our belief in our competence, our sense that we can be successful at a given task. According to Bandura (1989, 1992, 1997), efficacy feelings determine the goals we set. They predict which activities we engage in as we travel through life. When self-efficacy is low, we decide not to tackle that difficult math problem. We choose not to ask a beautiful stranger for a date. When self-efficacy is high, we not only take action, but also continue to act long after the traditional behavioral approach suggests that extinction should occur.

Let’s imagine that your goal is to be a nurse, but you get an F on your first test in this course. If your academic self-efficacy is low, you might conclude: “I’m basically not smart.” You might not put forth any effort on the next exam. You might even drop out of school. But if you have high self-efficacy, you will think: “I just need to work harder. I can do it. I’m going to get a good grade in this class!”

How do children develop low or high self-efficacy? Can efficacy feelings predict success decades later in life? What role does self-efficacy play in happiness at any age? These are the kinds of questions we will explore in examining efficacy feelings throughout life.

By now, you may be impressed with behaviorism’s simple, action-oriented concepts. Be consistent. Don’t reinforce negative behavior. Reinforce positive things (from traditional behaviorism). Draw on the principles of modeling and stimulate efficacy feelings to help children and adults succeed (from cognitive behaviorism).

Still, many developmentalists, even people who believe that nurture (or the environment) is important, find behaviorism unsatisfying. Aren’t we more than just efficacy feelings or reinforced responses? Isn’t there a basic core to personality, and aren’t the lessons we learn in childhood vital in shaping adult life? Notice that behaviorism doesn’t address that core question: What really motivates us as people? To address these gaps, developmental scientists, particularly in the past, turned to the insights of that world-class genius, Sigmund Freud.

Freud’s ideas are currently not in vogue in developmental science. However, no one can dispute the fact that Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) transformed the way we think about human beings. Anytime you say, “I must have done that unconsciously” or “My problems are due to my childhood,” you are quoting Freudian thought.

Freud, a Viennese Jewish physician, wrote more than 40 books and monographs in a burst of brilliance during the early twentieth century. His ideas revolutionized everything from anthropology to the arts, in addition to jump-starting the modern field of mental health. Freud’s mission, however, was simple: to decode why his patients were in emotional pain.

Freud’s theory is called psychoanalytic because it analyzes the psyche or our inner life. By listening to his patients, Freud became convinced that our actions are dominated by feelings of which we are not aware. The roots of emotional problems lay in repressed (made unconscious) feelings from early childhood. Moreover, “mothering,” during the first five years of life, determines adult mental health.

Specifically, Freud posited three hypothetical structures. The id, present at birth, is the mass of instincts, needs, and feelings we have when we arrive in the world. During early childhood, the conscious, rational part of our personality—called the ego—emerges. Ego functions involve thinking, reasoning, planning, and fulfilling our id desires in realistic ways. Finally, a structure called the superego—the moral arm of our personality—exists in opposition to the id’s desires.

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According to Freud and his followers, if our parents are excellent caregivers, we will develop a strong ego, which sets us up to master the challenges of life. If they are insensitive or their caregiving is impaired, our behavior will be id driven, and our lives will be out of control. The purpose of his therapy, called psychoanalysis, was to enable his patients to become aware of the repressed early childhood experiences causing their symptoms and liberate them from the tyranny of the unconscious to live rational, productive lives. (As Freud famously put it, where id there was, ego there will be.)

In sum, according to Freud: (1) Human beings are basically irrational; (2) lifelong mental health depends on our parents’ caregiving during early life; and (3) self-understanding is the key to living a fulfilling adult life.

By now many of you might be on a similar page as Freud. Where you are apt to part serious company with the theory relates to Freud’s stages of sexuality. Freud argued that sexual feelings (which he called libido) are the motivation driving human life, and he put forth the shocking idea—especially in that time—that babies are sexual human beings. As the infant develops, he argued, sexual feelings are centered on specific areas of the body called erogenous zones. During the first year of life, the erogenous zone is the mouth (the famous oral stage). Around age 2, with toilet training, sexual feelings center on elimination (the anal stage). Finally, around ages 3 and 4, sexual feelings shift to the genitals (the phallic stage). During this time, the child develops sexual fantasies relating to the parent of the opposite sex (the Oedipus complex), and the same-sex parent becomes a rival. Then, sexuality is repressed, the child identifies with that parent, the superego is formed, and we enter latency—an asexual stage that lasts through elementary school.

Partly because his sexual stages seem so foreign to our thinking, we tend to reject psychoanalytic theory as outdated—an artifact of a distant era. A deeper look suggests we might be wrong. Like Freud, contemporary developmentalists believe that self-understanding—being able to reflect on and regulate our emotions—is the defining quality of being mature. Like Freud, developmental scientists are passionate to trace the roots of lifelong development to what happens in our earliest months and years of life. As you read through this book, perhaps you will agree with me, that—despite its different terminology and approaches—our field owes a great philosophical debt to Freud. Moreover, psychoanalytic theory gave birth to that important modern perspective called attachment theory.

British psychiatrist John Bowlby formulated attachment theory during the mid-twentieth century. Bowlby, like Freud, believed that our early experiences with caregivers shape our adult ability to love, but he focused on what he called the attachment response.

In observing young children separated from their mothers, Bowlby noticed that babies need to be physically close to a caregiver during the time when they are beginning to walk (Bowlby, 1969, 1973; Karen, 1998). Disruptions in this biologically programmed attachment response, he argued, if prolonged, might cause serious problems later in life. Moreover, our impulse to be close to a “significant other” is a basic human need during every stage of life.

How does the attachment response develop? Are Bowlby and Freud right that our early attachments determine adult mental health? How can we draw on attachment theory to understand everything from adult love relationships to our concerns as we approach death? Stay tuned for answers as we explore this influential theory throughout this book.

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Why did Bowlby’s ideas eclipse psychoanalytic theory? A main reason was that Bowlby agreed with a late-twentieth-century shift in the way developmentalists understood human motivations. Yes, Bowlby did believe in the power of caregiving (nurture), but he firmly anchored his theory in nature (genetics). Bowlby (1969, 1973, 1980) argued that the attachment response is genetically programmed into our species to promote survival. Bowlby was an early evolutionary psychologist.

Evolutionary psychologists are the mirror image of behaviorists. They look to nature, or inborn biological forces that have evolved to promote survival, to explain how we behave. Why do pregnant women develop morning sickness just as the fetal organs are being formed, and why do newborns prefer to look at attractive faces rather than ugly ones? (That’s actually true!) According to evolutionary psychologists, these reactions cannot be changed by modifying the reinforcers. They are based in the human genetic code that we all share.

Evolutionary psychology lacks the practical, action-oriented approach of behaviorism, although it does alert us to the fact that we need to pay close attention to basic human needs. Still, as we look at how far flung topics—from the timing of puberty (Chapter 8), to the purpose of grandparents (Chapter 12)—are being viewed through an evolutionary psychology lens, you will realize just how influential this “look to the human genome” perspective has become in our field. What first convinced developmentalists that genetics is important in determining the person we become? A simple set of research techniques.

Behavioral genetics is the name for research strategies devoted to examining the genetic contribution to the differences we see between human beings. How genetic is the tendency to bite our nails, develop bipolar disorders, have specific attitudes about life? To answer these kinds of questions, scientists typically use twin and adoption studies.

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In twin studies, researchers typically compare identical (monozygotic) twins and fraternal (dizygotic) twins on the trait they are interested in (playing the oboe, obesity, and so on). Identical twins develop from the same fertilized egg (it splits soon after the one-cell stage) and are genetic clones. Fraternal twins, like any brother or sister, develop from separate conceptions and so, on average, share 50 percent of their genes. The idea is that if a given trait is highly influenced by genetics, identical twins should be much more alike in that quality than fraternal twins. Specifically, behavioral geneticists use a statistic called heritability (which ranges from 1 = totally genetic, to 0 = no genetic contribution) to summarize the extent to which a given behavior is shaped by genetic forces.

For instance, to conduct a twin study to determine the heritability of friendliness, you would select a large group of identical and fraternal twins. You would give both sets of twins tests measuring outgoing attitudes, and then compare the strength of the relationships you found for each twin group. Let’s say the identical twins’ scores were incredibly similar—almost like the same person taking the tests twice—and the fraternal twins’ test scores varied a great deal from one another. Your heritability statistic would be high, and you could conclude: “Friendliness is a mainly genetically determined trait.”

In adoption studies, researchers compare adopted children with their biological and adoptive parents. Here, too, they evaluate the impact of heredity on a trait by looking at how closely these children resemble their birth parents (with whom they share only genes) and their adoptive parents (with whom they share only environments).

Twin studies of children growing up in the same family and adoption studies are fairly easy to carry out. The most powerful evidence for genetics comes from the rare twin/adoption studies, in which identical twins are separated in childhood and reunited in adult life. If Joe and James, who have exactly the same DNA, have similar abilities, traits, and personalities, even though they grow up in different families, this would be strong evidence that genetics plays a crucial role in who we are.

Consider, for instance, the Swedish Twin/Adoption Study of Aging. Researchers combed national registries to find identical and fraternal twins adopted into different families in that country—where birth records of every adoptee are kept. Then they reunited these children in late middle age and gave the twins a battery of tests (Finkel & Pedersen, 2004; Kato & Pedersen, 2005).

While specific qualities varied in their heritabilities, you might be surprised to know that the most genetically determined quality was IQ (Pedersen, 1996). In fact, if one twin took the standard intelligence test, statistically speaking we could predict that the other twin would have an almost identical IQ despite living apart for almost an entire lifetime!

Behavioral genetic studies such as these have opened our eyes to the role of nature in shaping who we are (Turkheimer, 2004). Our tendencies to be religious, vote for conservative Republicans (Bouchard and others, 2004), drink to excess (Agrawal & Lynskey, 2008), or get divorced—qualities we thought must be due to how our parents raised us—are all somewhat shaped by genetic forces (Plomin and others, 2003).

These studies have given us tantalizing insights into nurture too. It’s tempting to assume that children growing up in the same family share the same nurture, or environment. But as you can see in the How Do We Know research box on page 18, that assumption is wrong. We inhabit different life spaces than our brothers and sisters, even when we eat at the same dinner table and share the same room—environments that are influenced by our genes (Rowe, 2003).

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The bottom line is that there is no such thing as nature or nurture. To understand human development, scientists need to explore how nature and nurture combine.

Let’s now lay out two basic nature-plus-nurture principles, and then introduce cutting-edge developmental science research relating to how nature and nurture interact.

Principle One: Our Nature (Genetic Tendencies) Shapes Our Nurture (Life Experiences)

Developmentalists understand that nature and nurture are not independent entities. Our genetic tendencies shape our wider-world experiences in two ways.

Evocative forces refer to the fact that our inborn talents and temperamental tendencies evoke, or produce, certain responses from the world. A joyous child elicits smiles from everyone. A child who is temperamentally irritable, hard to handle, or has trouble sitting still is unfortunately set up to get the kind of harsh parenting she least needs to succeed. Human relationships are bidirectional. Just as you get grumpy when with a grumpy person, fight with your difficult neighbor, or shy away from your colleague who is paralyzingly shy, who we are as people causes other people to react to us in specific ways, driving our development for the good and the bad.

Active forces refer to the fact that we actively select our environments based on our genetic tendencies. A child who is talented at reading gravitates toward devouring books and so becomes a better reader over time. His brother, who is well coordinated, may play baseball three hours a day and become a star athlete in his teenage years. Because we choose activities to fit our biologically based interests and skills, what start out as minor differences between people in early childhood snowball—ultimately producing huge gaps in talents and traits. The high heritabilities for IQ in the Swedish Twin/Adoption Study are lower in similar behavioral genetic studies conducted during childhood (Plomin & Spinath, 2004). The reason is that, like heat-seeking missiles, our nature causes us to gravitate toward specific life experiences, so we literally become more like ourselves genetically as we travel into adult life (Scarr, 1997).

Principle 2: We Need the Right Nurture (Life Experiences) to Fully Express Our Nature (Genetic Talents)

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Developmentalists understand that even if a quality is mainly genetic, its expression can be 100 percent dependent on the outside world. Let’s illustrate by returning to the high heritabilities for intelligence. If you lived in an impoverished developing country, were malnourished, and worked as a laborer in a field, having a genius-level IQ would be irrelevant, as there would be no chance to demonstrate your hereditary gifts.

The most fascinating example that a high-quality environment can bring our human genetic potential relates specifically to IQ. As you will see in Chapter 7, over the past century, scores on the standard intelligence test have been rising. The same correct items a twenty-first-century teenager needed to be ranked as “average” in intelligence would have boosted that same child into the top third of the population in l950. A century ago, having the identical number of items correct would get that child labeled as gifted, in the top 2 percent of his peers (Pinker, 2011)!

What is causing this upward shift? Obviously, our “genetic,” intellectual capacities can’t have changed. It’s just that as human beings have become better nourished, more educated, and more technologically adept, they perform better, especially on the kinds of abstract-reasoning items on the IQ test (see Flynn, 2007; Pinker, 2011). So even when individual differences in IQ are “genetic,” the environment makes a dramatic difference in how people perform.

My discussion brings home the fact that to promote our human potential, we need to provide the best possible environment. This is why a core goal of developmental science is to foster the correct person–environment fit—making the wider world bring out our human “best.”

Now that I’ve highlighted this book’s basic nature combines with nurture message, it’s time to explore the ideas of two psychologists who view human development as occurring in defined stages. Let’s start with Erik Erikson.

Erik Erikson’s Psychosocial Tasks

Erikson, born in Germany in 1904, was an analyst who, like Bowlby, adhered to most tenets of psychoanalytic theory; but rather than emphasizing sexuality, Erikson (1963) saw becoming an independent self and relating to others as our basic motivations (which explains why Erikson’s theory is called psychosocial to distinguish it from Freud’s psychosexual stages). Erikson, however, is often labeled the father of lifespan development because, unlike Freud, he believed development occurs throughout life. He spelled out unique challenges we face at each life stage.

You can see these psychosocial tasks, or challenges, listed in Table 1.2. Each task, Erikson argued, builds on another because we cannot master the issue of a later stage unless we have accomplished the developmental milestones of the previous ones.

Notice how parents take incredible joy in satisfying their baby’s needs and you will understand why Erikson believed that basic trust (the belief that the human world is caring) is our fundamental life task in the first year of life. Erikson’s second psychosocial task, autonomy, makes sense of the infamous “no stage” and “terrible twos.” It tells us that we need to celebrate this not-so-pleasant toddler behavior as the blossoming of a separate self! Think back to elementary school, and you may realize why Erikson used the term industry, or learning to work—at friendships, sports, academics—as our challenge from age 6 to 12. Erikson’s adolescent task, the search for identity, has now become a household word.

How have developmentalists expanded on Erikson’s ideas about identity? Is Erikson right that nurturing the next generation, or generativity, is the key to a fulfilling adult life? These are just two questions I’ll be addressing as we draw on Erikson’s theory to help us think more deeply about the challenges we face at each life stage.

Erikson offered a general emotional roadmap for our developing lives. But—in brilliance and transformational thinking—there is only one human development rival to Freud: Jean Piaget.

Piaget’s Cognitive Developmental Theory

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A 3-year-old tells you “Mr. Sun goes to bed because it’s time for me to go to sleep.” A toddler is obsessed with flushing different-sized wads of paper down the toilet and can’t resist touching everything she sees. Do you ever wish you could get into the heads of young children and understand how they view the world? If so, you share the passion of our foremost genius in child development: Piaget.

Piaget, born in 1894 in Switzerland, was a child prodigy himself. As the teenaged author of several dozen articles on mollusks, he was already becoming well known in that field (Flavell, 1963; Wadsworth, 1996). Piaget’s interests shifted to studying children when he worked in the laboratory of a psychologist named Binet, who was devising the original intelligence test. Rather than ranking children according to how much they knew, Piaget became fascinated by children’s incorrect responses. He spent the next 60 years meticulously devising tasks to map the minds of these mysterious creatures in our midst.

Piaget believed—in his cognitive developmental theory—that from birth through adolescence, children progress through qualitatively different stages of cognitive growth (see Table 1.3). The term qualitative means that rather than simply knowing less or more (on the kind of scale we can rank from 1 to 10), infants, preschoolers, elementary-school-age children, and teenagers think about the world in completely different ways. However, Piaget also believed that at every life stage human beings share a hunger to learn and mentally grow. Mental growth occurs through assimilation: We fit the world to our capacities or existing cognitive structures (which Piaget calls schemas). And then accommodation occurs. We change our thinking to fit the world (Piaget, 1971).

Let’s illustrate by reflecting on your own thinking while you were reading the previous section. Before reading this chapter, you probably had certain ideas about heredity and environment. In Piaget’s terminology, let’s call them your “heredity/environment schemas.” Perhaps you felt that if a trait is highly genetic, changing the environment doesn’t matter; or you may have believed that genetics and environment were totally separate. While fitting (assimilating) your reading into these existing ideas, you entered a state of disequilibrium—“Hey, this contradicts what I’ve always believed”—and were forced to accommodate. The result was that your nature/nurture schemas became more complex and you developed a more advanced (intelligent) way of perceiving the world! Like a newborn who assimilates every new object to her small sucking schema, or a neuroscientist who incorporates each new finding into her huge knowledge-base, while assimilating each object or fact to what we already know, we must accommodate, and so—inch by inch—cognitively advance.

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Piaget was a great advocate of hands-on experiences. He felt that we learn by acting in the world. Rather than using an adult-centered framework, he had the revolutionary idea that we need to understand how children experience life from their point of view. As we explore the science of lifespan development, I hope you will adopt this hands-on, person-centered perspective to understand the human experience from the perspective of 1-year-olds to people aged 101.

By now, you may be overwhelmed by theories and terms. But take heart. You have the basic concepts you need for understanding this semester well in hand! Now, let’s conclude by exploring a worldview that says, “Let’s embrace all of these influences on development and explore how they interact.” (For a summary of the theories, see Table 1.4.)

An influential child psychologist named Urie Bronfenbrenner (1977) was among the earliest lifespan theorists to highlight the principle that real-world behavior has many different causes. Bronfenbrenner, as you can see in Figure 1.3, viewed each of us at the center of an expanding circle of environmental influences. At the inner circle, development is shaped by the relationships between the child and people he relates to in his immediate setting, such as family, church, peers, and school. The next wider circles, that indirectly feed back to affect the child, lie in overarching influences such as his community, the media environment, the health-care community, and the school system itself. At the broadest levels, as you saw earlier in the chapter, our culture, economic trends, and cohort crucially shape behavior, too. Bronfenbrenner’s plea to examine the total ecology, or life situation, of the child forms the heart of a contemporary perspective called the developmental systems approach (Ford & Lerner, 1992; Lerner, 1998; Lerner, Dowling, & Roth, 2003). Specifically:

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For example, let’s consider that basic marker: poverty. Growing up in poverty might affect your attachment relationships. You are less likely to get attention from your parents because they are under stress. You might not get adequate nutrition. Your neighborhood could be a frightening place. Each stress might overload your body, activating negative genetic tendencies and setting you up physiologically for emotional problems down the road.

But some children, because of their genetics, their cultural background, or their cohort, might be insulated from the negative effects of growing up poor. Others might thrive. In a classic study tracing the lives of children growing up during the Great Depression, researchers discovered that if this event occurred at the right time in the life cycle (adolescence, when the young person could take action to help support the family), it produced an enduring sense of self-efficacy (Elder & Caspi, 1988). During adulthood, as you will learn, we even need life traumas to become fully mature! In sum, development occurs in surprising directions for good and for bad. Diversity of change processes and individual differences are the spice of human life.

Question 1.6

1. Ricardo has low academic self-efficacy. Let’s improve his sense of competence at school.

2. Ricardo, like other boys, is biologically programmed to run around. If the class had regular gym time, Ricardo’s ability to focus in class would improve.

3. Ricardo is being reinforced for this behavior by getting attention from the teacher and his classmates. Let’s reward appropriate classroom behavior.

4. Did you or your husband have trouble focusing in school? Perhaps your son’s difficulties are hereditary.

5. Ricardo’s behavior may have many causes, from genetics, to the reinforcers at school, to growing up in our twenty-first-century Internet age. Let’s use a variety of different approaches to help him.

6. Ricardo is having trouble mastering the developmental task of industry. How can we promote the ability to work that is so important at this age?

7. By refusing to pay attention in class, Ricardo may be unconsciously acting out his anger at the birth of his baby sister Heloise.

(1) c; (2) a; (3) g; (4) b; (5) d; (6) f ; (7) e

Question 1.7

b. As Ricardo and other children need to run around, regular gym time would help to foster the best person–environment fit.

Question 1.8

Dr. Kaplan is working in a field called epigenetics.

Question 1.9

assimilation; accommodation

Question 1.10

Samantha might argue that behaviorism is an ideal approach to human development because it is simple, effective, and easy to carry out. Behaviorism’s easily mastered, action-oriented concepts—be consistent, reinforce positive behavior, draw on principles of modeling, and stimulate efficacy feelings—can make dramatic improvements in the quality of life. Also, because behaviorism doesn’t blame the person but locates problems in the learning environment, it has special appeal. Sally might argue that behaviorism’s premise that nurture is all-important neglects the powerful impact genetic forces have in determining who we are. So the theory is far too limited—offering a wrongheaded view about development. We need the insights of attachment theory, evolutionary psychology, behavioral genetics, plus Piaget’s and Erikson’s theories to fully understand what motivates human beings.