Stability and oscillation in interpersonal awareness: a clinical-developmental analysis

Abstract

This paper has examined the research questions and strategies used by those who attempt to study social development from a cognitive-developmental orientation. It began by pointing to the need to integrate the descriptive work done by social-cognitive developmental researchers with some of the approaches taken by clinical and social psychologists in studying the same general phenomenon: interpersonal relations. An issue-by-stage social-cognitive map developed on the basis of both conceptual and empirical investigations was described, as were some of the properties which defined these stages. Following this, empirical evidence was cited from several ongoing studies which both supported the theoretical claims of logical coherence and pointed research in several new directions. One direction of particular importance is the naturalistic study of social and interpersonal reasoning and relating. Taken together, the interview data and the naturalistic observations appear to present a paradox. Evidence from the descriptive research appears to support the principle of stage consistency across categories of experience. On the other hand, the impact of the naturalistic findings is to point out oscillations in reasoning across varying real-life conditions. It should be noted, however, that several of the children in the classroom study did reason fairly consistently across a wide range of contexts; these children, perhaps not coincidentally, were the ones who had shown the greatest improvement in their interpersonal functioning and were soon to return to a more traditional educational milieu. Such clinical evidence points to the strong need to study better-adjusted children under similar conditions to see if real-life oscillation is as pronounced as it is in more pathological groups (Inhelder, 1943/1968). Our conclusion is that the cognitive-developmental approach, viewed in the proper perspective, can accommodate and make coherent data which suggest both variability and uniformity of reasoning, but that for such an accommodation to take place, greater attention must be paid to the critical social psychological and clinical variables which reciprocally interact with level of social-cognitive capability.