Piaget Developmental Tests

Worldview:  Ethno-Centric
Attribute: Concrete Operational Awareness (Conop);  Rule-Role Mind
Age:  ~ 7-14 yrs.

Conserve Volume Test
Test: pour water from a short glass into a tall glass.
Conop children will say both glasses have the same amount of water.  They can hold the volume in their mind.  They have an internal rule that automatically does this (concrete operational rule).  If you show them a video tape when they were younger (before ‘conop’), when they said that the tall glass has more water, they will deny it’s them.   In the previous Ego-Centric worldview the child cannot “conserve volume”. They think you’ve doctored the videotape.  They cannot imagine somebody so stupid as to think the tall glass has more water.  So they underwent a massive paradigm shift, and not a bit of it remains in awareness.  The self completely rewrites its history from within the new and higher paradigm.

Memory is the last thing you can depend on to “report” childhood. The Romantics often imagine that childhood is a wonderful time where you see the world just like you do now, only in a marvelously “spontaneous” and “free” fashion.  The ‘Archaic’ state is nondual paradise, magic is holistically empowered wonderfullness, mythic is alive with spiritual powers, and it’s all so marvelous and free.  Whereas what is probably happening is that the Romantics, with access to the higher worldview of awareness, are simply reading all sorts of wonderful things back into a period which, if they could actually see it (on videotape, for example), they would deny any reality to it at all (a previous state of consciousness unknowingly rewritten).

Repressed Memory Cases
Some criminal cases have been based on a witness' testimony of recovered repressed memories, often of alleged childhood sexual abuse. In some jurisdictions, the statute of limitations for child abuse cases has been extended to accommodate the phenomena of repressed memories as well as other factors. The repressed memory concept came into wider public awareness in the 1980s and 1990s followed by a reduction of public attention after a series of scandals, lawsuits, and license revocations.

In 1995, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, ruled in Franklin v. Duncan, that repressed memory is not admissible as evidence in a legal action because of its unreliability, inconsistency, unscientific nature, and subject to influence by hearsay and suggestibility. The court overturned the conviction of a man accused of murdering a nine-year-old girl purely based upon the evidence of a 21-year-old repressed memory by a lone witness, who also held a complex personal grudge against the defendant.

2-Color Ball Test
Test: A ball colored green on one side and black on the other is placed ball between the examiner and the child.  The child is asked “What color do you see?” and “What color do I see?”
The Conop child will say “I see green, you see green”.  The child has learned to take the role of the other.  Her worldview involves the capacity to form mental rules and to take mental roles (rule/role mind).  In the previous Ego-Centric worldview the child doesn’t know that you are seeing black and will answer both questions the same.  The child is still locked into his own perspective, which is still very egocentic, very self-centric, very literal.

Worldview:  World-Centric
Attribute: Formal Operational Awareness (Formop);  Formal-reflexive
Age:  ~ 11-15+ yrs.

Mixing Clear Liquid Test
Test:  3 glasses of clear liquid are given and the young adult is told that he can mix them in a way that will produce a yellow color.  The young adult is asked to produce the yellow color.
Formop adolescents will create a formal operation in their mind, a scheme that tests all the possible combinations.  Conop children will perform concrete operations—mixing the liquids together haphazardly.  They actually have to do it in a concrete way.

At the World-Centric level the person can begin to imagine different possible worlds.  “What if” and “as if” can be grasped for the first time.  And this ushers the person into the wild world of the true dreamer.  Adolescence is such a wild time, not just because of sexual blossoming, but because possible worlds open up to the mind’s eye—it’s the “age of reason and revolution.”  Formal operational awareness operates on thought itself.  It’s thinking about thinking.

Also, the person can start to judge the roles and the rules which were simply swallowed unreflexively.  Moral stance moves from conventional to postconventional.   Worldview transcends from sociocentric to worldcentric.   Another decline in narcissism.

Since approximately WWII there has been a slow shift from rational-industrial society to vision-logic informational society.  Not a necessarily a ‘trans-personal’ transformation.

The following test was not developed by Piaget.  It was developed to explain a principle.

Worldview:  Existential (centaur; vision-logic)
Attribute: Integrative (mind & body).  Aperspectival: no privilege of any perspective.

Something Greater Than Yourself Test
Test:  Ask, “Do you believe in God?”  or “Do you believe in Angels” or “Do you believe in Life after Death?

The reply might be, ‘No’, ‘I’m an atheist’ (or ‘agnostic’).

Possible that the person is at the “Centaur” (F-6) level - existential level.  The highest stage most conventional researchers tend to recognize.  The observing self begins to transcend the mind and the body.  It no longer has blind faith in the conventional roles and rules of society.  One is longer egocentric or ethnocentric. 

Pathology:  the Centaur doesn’t privilege any perspective—it is aperspectival.  Risk in getting lost because all perspectives start to become relative and interdependent; nothing absolutely foundational.  Because existentialists recognize no sphere of consciousness higher than this, they are stuck with the existential worldview.  The existentialist claims that if there are any modes of awareness that go beyond existential angst, then you are lapsing into death-denial, immortality projects, inauthenticity, bad faith.  Any claim of a higher horizon is met with the heinous charge of “inauthentic!” 

The concern of with meaning, and with it pervasive lack, is the central feature of Existential pathologies:  what good is the personal anyway—it’s just going to die.   This is a soul for whom the personal has gone totally flat.  The good news is that the soul on the brink of the transpersonal.