Developmental Psychology
Developmental psychologists, Lev Vygotsky, Jean Piaget, Erik Erikson, Harry Stack Sullivan, and social learning theorists have all argued that peer relationships provide a unique context for cognitive, social, and emotional development. Modern research echoes these sentiments, showing that social and emotional gains are indeed provided by peer interaction.
Vygotsky's Sociocultural Theory focuses on the importance of a child's culture and notes that a child is continually acting in social interactions with others. He also focuses on language development and identifies the zone of proximal development.
Piaget's theory of cognitive development identifies four stages of cognitive development. He believes that children actively construct their understanding of the world based on their own experiences.
Erikson's stages of psychosocial development include eight stages ranging from birth to old age. He has emphasized the idea that the society, not just the family, influences one's ego and identity through developmental stages.
Harry Stack Sullivan has developed the Theory of Interpersonal Relations.
Social learning theorists such as John B. Watson, B.F. Skinner, and Albert Bandura, all argue for the influences of the social group in learning and development. Behaviourism, Operant Learning Theory, and Cognitive Social Learning Theory all consider the role the social world plays on development.
In The Nurture Assumption, JR Harris suggests that an individual's peer group significantly influences their intellectual and personal development. Several longitudinal studies support the conjecture that peer groups significantly affect scholastic achievement, but relatively few studies have examined the effect peer groups have on tests of cognitive ability. However, there is some evidence that peer groups influence tests of cognitive ability.
Read more about this topic: Peer Group
Famous quotes containing the word psychology:
“Psychology has nothing to say about what women are really like, what they need and what they want, essentially because psychology does not know.... this failure is not limited to women; rather, the kind of psychology that has addressed itself to how people act and who they are has failed to understand in the first place why people act the way they do, and certainly failed to understand what might make them act differently.”
—Naomi Weisstein, U.S. psychologist, feminist, and author. Psychology Constructs the Female (1969)