Initial Research: How Do Adults Use Logical Thought?

Abstract

My interest in the process of adult thinking on complex tasks started with my disappointment with adults’ failures on what I thought of as comparatively simple Piagetian thinking tasks. When I was doing research on adult performance on Piagetian tasks as a graduate student, I encountered the small number of studies in which older adults had been tested with Piaget’s concrete or formal operational test materials. I thought it a bit ironic that the mature adult investigators never seemed to test adults between the ages of 20 and 60,only children and people over 60 but it did not strike me as unusual at the time. After all, when we “rounded up the usual suspects” as volunteers for developmental research, mature adults were seldom invited. It seemed a step forward when a developmental study had any mature and older adult respondents, yet experimentalists often performed adult and old age studies.

Like the unassembled pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, discoveries about our developmental possibilities are scattered across the intellectual landscape, isolated from one another in separate lines of inquiry.

Michael Murphy