Psychosocial development theory is one of the key theories in Unit 3 of AP Psychology. But if often flies under the radar. After all, it's hard to compete with the likes of Sigmund Freud and Jean Piaget.
Yet, this is a critical topic to understand before you take The Exam in May. It's also important to understand before you take your Unit 3 Chapter exam. So if things are a little fuzzy, look no further for all the details and AP Psych specific tips.
Table of Contents
Stage One: Trust and Mistrust (Infancy)
Stage Two: Autonomy and Shame/Doubt (Early Childhood)
Stage Three: Initiative and Guilt (Late Childhood)
Stage Four: Industry and Inferiority (Late Elementary/Middle School)
Stage Five: Identity and Role Confusion (Adolescence)
Stage Six: Intimacy and Isolation (Early Adulthood)
Stage Seven: Generativity and Stagnation (Middle Adulthood)
The Details for AP Psych
The Basics
Psychosocial development is a stage theory of human development. It proposes that each stage of a human's life is shaped by their interactions with other people. Over the course of a person's life, interactions with other people change in predictable ways. A toddler does not have the same relationships, conversations, or emotional connections as his parents do. Psychosocial theorists, like Erik Erikson, propose that these shifting relationships create specific psychological conflicts that arise in specific periods of life.
It's important to understand that these are internal conflicts. Psychosocial theorists are not particularly concerned with external conflicts between people, like fights, disagreements, exclusion, gossip, dragging, and so on. Instead, they focus on the internal impacts of social interactions. Good or bad, our interactions with others influence how we think and feel. They also impact our sense of self. That is, who we are and how we fit into the world.
Furthermore, these conflicts are thought to shape the development of a person's personality and relationships. If the conflict is resolved productively, a person gains a solid foundation for their future relationships or helpful insight into themselves. Erikson referred to these as "virtues." If the conflict is not resolved, or if it is resolved in a negative way, a person may struggle to form meaningful relationships and develop a healthy sense of self. These positive and negative effects are long-term, meaning they affect a person during future stages of their life, potentially until they die.
There are eight stages of development in psychosocial theory. These eight stages cover the entirety of a person's life.
Let's look at each of these stages and the associated underlying conflict. For each of these stages, you'll see two paired words, like trust and mistrust. The first word describes the ideal outcome. The second describes the outcome if the conflict is not resolved productively during that stage of life. You'll also see the period of life where this conflict occurs in parentheses.
Stage One: Trust and Mistrust (Infancy)
The first stage is trust and mistrust. This stage occurs during infancy.
An infant is entirely dependent on their parents for everything they need. They cannot feed themselves, change their own diapers, or move away from danger. Psychosocial theorists propose that this dependency is the root of trust. A child learns that other people can be trusted if his parents feed, change, and keep him safe from danger. If the child's parents don't (or can't) care for the child, he will learn that others are unreliable or threatening. In other words, he learns to mistrust people.
Stage Two: Autonomy and Shame/Doubt (Early Childhood)
The second stage revolves around conflict between autonomy on one hand, and shame or doubt on the other. This conflict is resolved in early childhood.
Young children have considerably more control over themselves than infants do. A child can walk and talk. He can pick out a toy to play with. He can decide to put the toy in his mouth, or beat it against the floor. He can decide which of several foods he wants to eat first. He can crawl toward his parents and away from a spider.
Erikson thought these actions helped children develop a sense of autonomy. In other words, the child can make his own independent decisions. These low-stakes decisions help children strengthen their ability to decide and act based on their decisions.
However, some people feel anxious or ashamed when making decisions. They may feel like they cannot make the right decision, or they don't believe they can successfully follow through. Psychosocial theory proposes that some of these feelings may stem from childhood. If others make decisions for the child, or if the child is reluctant to be independent, he may not productively resolve this conflict. This may also happen if a child has negative experiences while developing his sense of autonomy.
Stage Three: Initiative and Guilt (Late Childhood)
The third stage is characterized by a conflict between initiative and guilt. This stage occurs during late childhood, which overlaps with when children are in elementary school.
As children mature, they gain the physical and psychological characteristics that support increased independence. They can make more sophisticated decisions and act with intention. For example, a child may see a new student in his class. He could invite the new student to sit with him at lunch. He could also decide to make fun of the new child, knowing that the new student won't have friends to back him up. He could also decide to ignore the new student altogether so he can focus on evading Creepers.
All of these are examples of initiative - staring things intentionally to achieve a specific goal. Children in this stage have opportunities to set goals and begin activities that they think will help them reach those goals.
Unfortunately, there's no guarantee that starting something means you will get the result you want. A child's invitation to play may be rejected. The child may not be able to figure out how to create the epic base of his dreams in Minecraft. A child may realize his bullying has hurt another person. If this happens enough, then the child may develop a sense of guilt because their good intentions don't lead to good results. This may discourage later attempts to begin meaningful tasks.
Stage Four: Industry and Inferiority (Late Elementary/Middle School)
Next up is stage four! In stage four, the central conflict is between industry and inferiority. This conflict emerges around the the transition between elementary and middle school.
Industry, in this sense, doesn't mean that Erikson thought we should be shipping kids off to the factory for a 12 hour shift. Instead, he recognized that middle school students have the option to be involved in far more things then younger children. A middle school child may be able to participate in sports, clubs, and academic activities. He may also be expected to do more work independently. His teachers likely expect him to work for a longer period of time.
Children who learn to manage these higher expectations develop a sense of how much they are able to accomplish.
Like before, success is not guaranteed. A child child may try very hard, but find that nobody is noticing the effort he puts in. A child may feel that they will never be as good as his peers at soccer. He may struggle to work as hard or get the same grades as his peers. All of these things may lead the child to believe that he is not a good as his peers and fundamentally deficient. To be clear, everyone has strengths and weaknesses, and there's nothing wrong with quitting things to pursue other things more deeply. Erikson was concerned with long-term, persistent feelings of being deficient or less-than others.
Stage Five: Identity and Role Confusion (Adolescence)
Stage five is dominated by the tension between identity and role confusion. This is the stage of adolescence.
Many psychologists have noted that adolescence is a time when people try on different identities. Adolescence often gives people a chance to experiment with new activities, new friend groups, new personalities, and new interests. A child may be very rebellious one year, then get into sports, then stop sports to be in a play, and then join the Honor Society. Many of these activities will be shucked aside for a new thing. Psychosocial theory doesn't see this as a bad thing. It's just part of this stage of life, and ideally helps a person understand what he does and does not like. That can help people understand who they are, and just as importantly, how they might contribute to society.
But if a person does not develop a sense of who he is, he may feel like he doesn't really belong anywhere. He may experience being rejected from different groups. He mail fail at multiple activities and quit. Without success or personal insight, Erikson worried that adolescents would not develop a sense of themselves. Without this, he thought they would struggle to see how they could contribute to society as an adult. This is role confusion.
Stage Six: Intimacy and Isolation (Early Adulthood)
The next stage occurs in early adulthood. Adulthood begins around the time a person graduates from high school, and this stage may last into a person's 30s. The central conflict here is between intimacy and isolation.
In this sense of the word, intimacy means all meaningful, close social relationships. This includes friends, family, romantic partners, and mentor. Children and adolescents also develop meaningful relationships. But many of these relationships are transitory. As people experiment with new identities in adolescence, they often change peer groups or break up with romantic partners. A young adult may find himself working or studying in a different city than the one he grew up. These circumstances mean that he often must find new friends, mentors, and romantic interests around the time he becomes an adult.
Relationships during young adulthood often last longer. A high school sweetheart becomes a spouse. A college roommate becomes a business partner. A colleague at work becomes a life-long mentor. This stage of life comes with many opportunities to forge these relationships. People who succeed here have a strong foundation for developing meaningful, lasting relationships for the rest of their life.
Some people struggle with this. A person may feel hurt if he is rejected by potential romantic partners. He may struggle at work if he can't get help from more experienced coworkers. He may feel worthless and pull away from existing friendships. He may also unintentionally (or intentionally) push away or alienate others for fear of being rejected. This results in isolation.
Stage Seven: Generativity and Stagnation (Middle Adulthood)
Next up is the conflict between generativity and stagnation in middle adulthood. This period of life starts in ones 40s and continues until the post-retirement years.
All those close relationships come with expectations and responsibilities. That means this period of life is often characterized by caring for and about others. Parents have children to raise and support. They also have to support each other during stressful experiences. Coworkers count on each other, and people in the middle of their careers often have more work responsibilities then when they started. Adults may have roles in their church, civic organization, volunteer group, or neighborhood.
For many people, these relationships generate feelings of love, security, and meaning. Caring for others often gives people a sense of purpose and connection with others. That's generativity. For others, these relationships and the expectations that come with them may feel like a burden. They may feel stuck or unable to pursue their true goals.
Stage Eight: Integrity and Despair (Late Adulthood)
The final stage starts around the time people retire. The final psychological conflict is between integrity and despair.
Old age also comes with many transitions. A person's children may move away and start their own families. People retire from their jobs. Spouses and close friends grow older and die. As people age, they are less able to do the things they used to do. These events cause many people to reflect on their lives. Psychosocial theory holds that the final conflict happens because of these reflections.
A person may look back on their life and view it positively. For Erikson, this mean that a person believes the life they lived is aligned with their values, and was therefore meaningful. A person may look back and see that he showed his family love and care. He may recognize that his hard work helped his coworkers succeed. He may find meaning in the time he contributed to a volunteer or spiritual organization. His actions and values matched, and therefore they have integrity.
But others may look back with regret. A person may regret the time they spent working overtime instead of caring for his children. He may realize his job allowed him to get wealthy only by damaging the environment and backstabbing his coworkers. He may regret not spending time with people who he loved, and now they aren't around anymore. He may sense that he missed an opportunity to do something important with his life. Erikson used the word "despair" to characterize these late-in-life regrets.
The Big Picture
Science Practices!
Let's talk about the science principles!
Erikson was heavily influenced by Freud, so it is perhaps no surprise that this theory has many of the same criticisms. Namely, that it's really hard to prove that someone's deep-seated mistrust for others is rooted in a period of life that they do not remember. There are many competing explanations, and many events that could happen later in life and cause the same outcome.
In fairness, it's really hard to experimentally test any aspect of childhood development. No IRB is going to approve a trust and mistrust study involving not feeding children. For this, we can all be grateful. In the absence of human experiments, animal studies remain. But how do you study trust in a mouse? As a result, a lot of childhood development is studied using observational methods. And, all together now, correlation does not equal causation. It simply is very challenging to prove that x caused y type of development.
Unit 3 Connections
Erikson was heavily influenced by Sigmund Freud. Let's look at some similarities between the two.
First, they both believed that childhood was an important developmental phase. They argued that events in this time could have long-term impacts on a person's life, personality, and well-being. They also believed this period was characterized by tension and conflict, and that these conflicts needed to be resolved in order to avoid negative consequences. Finally, they both agreed that a person could be affected by these conflicts without being aware of their impact.
However, there are some significant differences. Freud proposed that conflict in childhood was driven by sex, and his stages reflect this belief. He also spent a lot of time talking about the relationship between children and their parents. Erikson rejected these aspects of Freud's work. He believed that the ego existed, but that the conflicts it resolved dealt with human relationships, the environment, and history. Unlike Freud, Erikson believed that development continued into adulthood. This is a marked departure from most other developmental theories that are covered in AP Psychology.
Erikson also inspired future work in human development. The term "emerging adulthood" wasn't introduced until long after Erikson's death, but he helped inspire this area of study. He emphasized adolescence as a key period in the formation of an identity, which was critical for finding a profession or occupation as an adult. Later psychologists, notably Jeffrey Arnett, studied how this period has changed in the 20th century.
The Exam
Some Memory Tricks
This theory has a lot of moving parts, and it can be difficult to remember them all. Here are some tips.
First, the name "psychosocial" gives two big hints about the nature of the theory. "Social" can help remind you that this theory is fundamentally about social relationships. Our interactions with others shape our development. The other key aspect of this theory is the concept of internal, psychological conflicts. "Psycho-" is the hint to this part. Not because of the negative connotation of the word, but for the same reason it shows up in psychology. It's a hit that the word about how people think, feel, and behave.
Second, the eight stage are pretty easy to jumble up. It does not help that five of the eight start with I. So, here's a pair of mnemonics:
"Trusty aunts initiate industrious identities. Intimacy generates integrity."
"Mistrusting Shane guilts inferior Roland (into) isolation, stagnation, and despair."
Each word in the sentence cues you to remember one of the word pairs for the stages. "Into" in the second sentence is the sole exception. It just makes the sentence work.
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