Читать книгу The Handy Psychology Answer Book - Lisa J. Cohen - Страница 79

Early in his career, Piaget went to work for Théodore Simon in Paris. Simon, along with Alfred Binet, was the author of the Binet-Simon intelligence test, the first successful test of its kind. Piaget’s job was to record the answers of five- to eight-year-old children in order to determine expected scores for each age group. Although he was hired to record the correct answers, he became far more interested in the children’s mistakes, in the typical patterns of error at each age. This sparked his interest in the development of children’s intellectual understanding of the world around them. He had found his life’s work. For the next sixty years, Piaget studied children’s behavior in great detail. From this data, he generated a voluminous body of writings on the subject and changed the way we look at intellectual development.

Why is Piaget’s work important?

Freud told us about desire, the behaviorists told us about behavior, and Piaget told us about the way we think and how that develops across childhood. Perhaps more than anyone else, he has told us about how we make sense of our environment and the processes by which we interpret it. His work has been profoundly influential in many branches of psychology: developmental, cognitive, educational, and even clinical.