Wednesday, April 20, 2016

Unit 9 (Cognitive Psychology and Moral Growth) Assignment

Discussion Blog: First 3 students, give an example from your own experience of

accommodation/assimilation/equilibration; second 3 students, give an example from your

own experience of a person acting as a Stage 2 egocentric; last 4 or so students, give an

example from your own experience of a person acting as Stage 3/Stage 4 cooperation

(distinguish whether it’s incipient or genuine cooperation).

7 comments:

  1. When I was a little child, we were at the zoo in San Diego. I saw a zebra for the first time and thought it was a horse with stripes. at first I assimilated this information into the schema for a horse. My parents then explained to me that Zebras are different than horses, zebras come from a different area in the world and have different markings compared to horses. After hearing this information I accommodated the new information. I took the new information into consideration and compared the different properties of a zebras and horses. Once I learned to call this animal a zebra and not a horse or horse with stripes, I accommodated the new information and learned.

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    1. This is a great example of not only assimilation but also the way humans develop and view the world when we are younger. When you are young your view on the world is very small. It is hard for little kids to conceive of things they can’t see. While today this story is kind of funny, I think we all would have done the same thing when we were kids. It makes more sense as a little kid with a small view on the world that what you saw was a horse with stripes because you see the same thing with different colors all the time but a different type of animal just wouldn’t make as much sense to a little kid.

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  2. One of the most prevalent cases of assimilation I have been part of in my life has to do with speech. There are many cases I can think of that show how when people are together for long periods of time they will start to develop the same mannerisms. The case I will focus on is hockey teams and more specifically when I was playing hockey in Colorado at 16. At the beginning of the year we all talked like we would have back home but as the year progressed we all developed a unique accent. One of the guys had been at a party and gotten drunk and started talking in a British accent and it caught on. In the beginning it was told to the whole team as a story but then it became just a team joke and people started using the voice for everything. Another speech assimilation was the words that we all used. Hockey as a community has certain words that are unique to it just like any sport does and by about 2 months into the season everyone know all the hockey words and used them in everyday speech. Assimilation on the team was vital. We did everything together. We went to school together. Played together, every two weeks we would travel together and we generally enjoyed each other’s company. We needed this untied language to unite us. Once we were all assimilated we could play better together and that sense of unity made us stronger all around.

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  3. Very recently I took my kids into Walmart. As we were checking out my daughter blatantly asks the woman at the register what's in her belly. She was a rather large woman and I was mortified. I felt so bad for this woman and obviously irritated with my daughter for asking such a rude question. After profusely apologizing to the woman and rushing out of the store I realized that Ava did not know why that was a rude question. We had recently been talking about pregnancy and babies. She had assumed that her question would be met with a happy conversation about cute babies. In her head a big belly meant this woman was pregnant. After the initial shock of the situation and realizing her intentions were based off a scheme she had in her own mind I could not be angry with her. We had a conversation about appropriate things to ask people and the various different body types including people with disabilities, weight issues, weird clothing, or any other attribute that I could think of that would be interesting to a 3 year old. Since then she has not blurted out anything inappropriate. She has accommodated these new sights and now instead of offending others she just whispers quiet questions about odd things she notices to me. Baby steps. I'll take it!

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    1. That's pretty awesome, I have always wanted to ask an overweight lady that question, luckily I've never had the courage. Its funny that your daughter asked her like that.

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  4. Well, I guess I should of refreshed... I wrote my topic as one of the first three. Here it is anyways.

    So, this whole theory of cognitive development seems to be revolved around the development of people through their adolescence. I personally believe that my biggest cognitive development has occurred while going to college. Although I learned new things as a young child and assimilated and accommodated to understand my new surroundings. Those where marginal steps in my cognitive development compared to that that I have experienced over the past five years. Starting college as a high school graduate that understood basic physics, marginal chemistry and good at math; I am now ending my career at tech being able to understand high level physics (particle physics), time relativity, chemical bonds and their relation to mechanical properties, the behavior of materials under certain loading. These are just a few. Some of these involved some assimilation from what I have learned previously, but a lot of it is new concepts that can’t be put into a box of things I had already experienced which required equilibration through accommodation which is just the understanding of the topic at hand. What I also thought is much more impressive in the cognitive is that instead of only being able to understand and take in reality slash what is directly in front of you and can be seen. I know have the ability to theorize and think about the things that nobody can actually do like particle physics and time (gravitational waves). Although the cognitive development as a child is very critical and prominent, higher education has been the biggest cognition cultivation for myself.

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  5. Stage two of Kohlberg’s morality scale is the ‘what’s in it for me’ scale. A friend of mine that will remain unnamed acts in this stage quite a bit. To me it is comical because he is a college student and athlete, he should be more mature than stage two. I think he might be this way because he is given everything he wants and lives with his grandma. My friend will often text me to see what I’m doing, but it is only for the benefit of him. If I’m out at a party or drinking a bottle he will maybe find me and want to hang. I always want my friend to come over and play video games with me. Often times, he does not come over and nothing comes of it. If I tell him I bought a bunch of candy, then he will think about it but often times do his own thing. My most recent story of him being a stage two child is, we were studying for a lab practical, the next day and he said he would come over, with vital information and study with me. So I chill in lab for a bit studying kind of, soon I go home and it’s about 6:00 and I call him. He text me later that he is drinking and won’t be sending me the slides. This was especially childish because I had promised them to my co-students and they were upset with me. Dave needs to get by stage two maturity.

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