Create a new account

It's simple, and free.

Interpersonal Understanding

Although sometimes - at least to adults - the moral, cognitive and emotional world of the child and especially the adolescent seems to be a chaotic place, in fact young people pass through a series of regular, predictable psychological states analogous to the progression of physical states that humans pass through as they sit up, then crawl, then walk. But while those physical states are visible and easily mapped, the cognitive and moral states are implicit, tacit and hidden. The result of this condition is that scholars disagree over the exact definition of each stage. This paper examines two of the significant models of the development of interpersonal understanding, or the evolution of the social self, explaining both theories and then exploring their points of difference and similarity.

Robert Selman has developed a model that focuses on the ways in which the perspective that an individual takes shifts as one grows older. The infant is egocentric, understanding the world through his or her own needs and believing that others act in a similar fashion. As we get older, Selman argues, we not only acquire the ability to empathize with others, to understand how they might interpret the world, but an understanding that their own complex view of the world - part egocentrism, part empathy, partly true, partly inaccurate - mirrors the complexity of the perspective that others share.

This idea - that most people with a normal emotional development become increasingly less selfish as they grow older - is of course not original to Selman. Indeed, it is both widespread throughout the world of psychological scholarship and in commonsense experience in the world. What is perhaps most important about Selman's model, and what differentiates it from a commonsense view of human development, is the careful way in which he linked these different stages of what he called "perspective-taking" (or socio-emotional development) to the stages of cognit...

Page 1 of 5 Next >

More on Interpersonal Understanding...

Loading...
APA     MLA     Chicago
Interpersonal Understanding. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 05:13, March 19, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1688279.html