c perspective views people as active agents in their own development. In other words, Piagetian theory holds that people initiate action; they do not merely react to events.
Organistic theorists such as Piaget view life experiences not as the cause of development but as factors that can speed up or slow down an individual's development. Piaget does not try to determine how external reinforcements shape a person's responses. Nor does his model focus on any underlying motivational forces of which a person is unaware as the psychoanalytic perspective does. Instead, Piaget's theory views humans as doers who actively construct their worlds.
Although Piaget and Erikson's models differ in nature, one similarity is that they both postulate that human development occurs in qualitative stages (Erikson, 1950; Piaget, 1952). Also, both models hold that at each of the discrete stages which their theories postulate, people develop different kinds of abilities and cope with different problems (Erikson, 1964; Piaget, 1950).
Each stage, in both Piaget and Erikson's models, is said to build upon the previous one and lay the foundation for the next (Erikson, 1950; Piaget, 1952). Further, both theories also hold that all people go through the same stages in the same order but that the timing varies making any cutoff age only an approximation (Erikson 1950; Piaget & Inhelder, 1967).
As might be expected on the basis of the differing nature of their theories, both the number of stages and the nature of the stages differ in each theory. Erikson postulates eight stages of developmental growth, stressing societal and cultural influences at each stage (Erikson, 1952, 1964). Piaget, on the other hand, postulates four stages; although each of these larger stages are said to be accompanied by several substages (Piaget & Inhelder, 1967).
For Piaget (Piaget, 1952), humans develop cognitively on the basis of their sensory, motor, and reflex...