Growth Rings: How We Get Connected
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About this ebook
Growth Rings makes concepts from developmental psychology relevant to peoples’ daily lives. This book describes the eight stages of development and shows how those stages influenced key historical figures. It then links developmental psychology with current legal topics.
The developmental stages begin with self-centeredness and gradually transition to awareness of our insignificance and magnificence.
Robert Perrine
Robert is a wayfarer on this journey through life. He was born in Pennsylvania and now resides in California. During his career he has been a civil engineer, computer programmer, professor and a project manager. Throughout this journey Robert has tried to fit all the pieces together into a holistic framework. His goal now is to describe an integrated model of psychology that he found by delving deeply into a study of project management.
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Growth Rings - Robert Perrine
Growth Rings: How We Get Connected
By Robert E. Perrine.
Smashwords Edition.
Copyright 2010 Robert E. Perrine.
Copyright
Copyright held by Robert Perrine and Marlene Weldon, Long Beach, California. You may not copy or distribute this document without advanced written permission from the document authors. Contact Robert E. Perrine at http://www.robertperrine.biz.
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Acknowledgements
I want to thank all of our friends who volunteered to read the drafts and give us feedback. My special thanks goes to Swan Tan, a true friend.
Table of Contents
Introduction
Topic 1 – Stages of Growth
Stage 0 – Infant
Stage 1 – Selfish
Stage 2 – Me-first
Stage 3 – Team-Player
Stage 4 – Role-Player
Stage 5 – Statesman
Stage 6 – Humanitarian
Stage 7 – Ecological
Recap of the Stages
Topic 2 – Trailblazers
Chapter: Abraham Lincoln
Chapter: Martin Luther King, Jr.
Recap on Trailblazers
Topic 3 – Social Evolution
Chapter: Social Evolution in the Christian Bible
Primitive Governance
Harmonious Governance
Empires
Vision for the Future
Chapter: Social Evolution in the USA
The Question
Collecting the Data
Analyzing the Data
The Governed
Drug Policy
Addicts as a Minority
Trimming the Edges
Alternative Harmonies
Recap regarding the United States
Topic 4 – Growth
Famously Challenged
What Does This Mean to Me?
What about Him? (or Her?)
And Then We Find Stage-Six
Bibliography
--
Introduction
The purpose for this book is to describe the way people mature. This book starts out with developmental psychology and then delves into sociology and current events. The phrase Growth Rings
alludes to the way we can tell the age of a tree by counting its rings. I believe we get information about the social maturity of people by examining how broadly they spread their ring of caring.
This book is the second volume in a series that began with Coping Styles: Dealing with Life on Life’s Terms
. The book on coping styles described my understanding of a unified theory of psychology that merges existential, humanistic and cognitive-behavioral into a two-dimensional framework. This book describes developmental psychology as a third dimension. In an effort to keep each book focused, this book does not show how to link this third dimension with the other two dimensions. It is my intent to show that linkage in the third volume in this series.
This book is divided into four topics.
The first topic in this book gives a brief description of developmental psychology. This is the foundation that supports the remainder of this book. The ideas in this topic come from research done by Sigmund Freud, Jean Piaget, Lev Vygotsky, Erik Erikson, Lawrence Kohlberg, Urie Bronfenbrenner, Jane Loevinger, Robert Kegan and others. The expression of those ideas, however, is my own. I branch off from the research done by those experts and I focus on the hypothesis that we leave clues about our developmental maturity in the way we express our concern for others.
In the second topic in this book I merge developmental psychology with the concept called circles of compassion
created by Albert Einstein and Albert Schweitzer. In that topic I use quotes from speeches given by Mahatma Gandhi, Abraham Lincoln and Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. My goal is to show that each of these three learned to be concerned with broader groups of people as they aged. The purpose for this topic is to show evidence that developmental change occurs – even though developmental changes are slow.
The third topic is divided into a chapter on ancient history and a chapter on modern history. In this topic I merge developmental psychology, circles of compassion
and social evolution into the arrangement I call growth rings
. In the first chapter I quote from the Christian Bible to show that society is changing gradually. In the second chapter I quote from the inaugural speeches given by the Presidents of the United States of America and the laws of the State of California. My point in the third chapter is that we have written evidence of society growing from stage-zero up to stage-three. We also have clues about experiments with stage-four and stage-five social structures. I chose to work with the Christian Bible, the Presidents of the USA and the laws of the State of California because this is my culture. I hope you can see the pattern I describe and then apply these techniques to your own culture.
The fourth topic focuses on three points:
People need to be challenged in order to grow.
People cannot grow properly if the challenge is too large.
People filter their experiences to avoid change.
The conclusion from the fourth chapter is that individuals and social structures grow when we focus on a discipline. It is my intent to link the concepts of coping styles and growth rings into a third volume that will focus on how a disciplined life allows us to grow. Before we can get there, however, we need to understand the basics about our growth rings.
Stage 0, Infant: I am not ready to care for anyone else.
Stage 1, Selfish: I care about myself, but I can learn to share.
Stage 2, Me-first: Me and my family come first.
Stage 3, Team-player: My team is right.
Stage 4, Role-player: My teams and those who help us are important.
Stage 5, Statesman: I value diversity and care about people.
Stage 6, Humanitarian: I care about all humanity.
Stage 7, Ecological: I care about all life.
Topic 1 – Stages of Growth
We know that a child thinks differently than does an adult. We arrange things so that the very young have time to play and explore the world. We create a buffer called middle school to help youth transition into early adulthood. We try to keep teenagers in school so that they can learn everything our society needs them to know.
There are many psychological theories about how our mind changes as we mature. Jean Piaget, Lawrence Kohlberg and others focused on how to educate children. Sigmund Freud, Erik Erikson, Jane Loevinger, Robert Kegan and others focused on adult transitions. Lawrence Kohlberg, Urie Bronfenbrenner, Lev Vygotsky, Elliot Turiel and others described the effects that our culture and environment have on the mental maturity of youth and adults. Much of this research is typically grouped into a concept called developmental psychology.
The idea behind developmental psychology is that we are capable of continuing to grow and mature throughout our adult lives. Growing up is not supposed to stop once we become eligible to vote. We are capable of being more than we are. Religions have been saying this for thousands of years. Science, however, has struggled to find proof that it actually occurs.
We see children grow before our eyes. No one doubts that an adult thinks differently than does a child. We also know fifty year olds that are capable of thinking in ways that a twenty year old cannot. The concept of developmental psychology is that the difference between a child and a twenty-year old is similar to the difference between a twenty and a fifty year old. That concept, however, is difficult to prove. The question is whether you actually think differently or is it just that you have more information to use?
For example, when did you realize that loaning your car to a stranger you meet in a parking lot is bad? A six year old might do it as long as the stranger promises to bring the car right back. A twenty year old might do it as long as the cause seems worthy enough. A fifty year old is not likely to agree regardless. We can see that the twenty year old thinks about the situation with complexity that escapes the six year old. Does a fifty year old think more complexly than a twenty year old or is it just that by the time we reach fifty we have accumulated thirty years of experience at being a twenty year old? The way I propose to answer this question is to first explore each of the stages of development and then show examples to illustrate that development exists.
The stage names and descriptions used in developmental theory vary based on who the author studied. Piaget, for example, studied children and found that their ability to think is constrained by their mental development. He learned that rules mean different things at different developmental ages. Loevinger summarized Piaget’s observations about rules as follows:
No conception of obligation
Arbitrary revenge
Enjoys No
Rules sacred, unchangeable, given by adults
Asks Why?
Cooperative rules
Uses But
Rules changeable by mutual agreement, founded on mutual respect
Focus on community
Interest in rules per se
Understands Although
We learn at an early age that we live in a world where there are things we can do and things we cannot do. We learn and our mind develops new ways of thinking. Adults who stop developing at a young age enter the adult world thinking like a child. Rules are something that you impose on me after the fact. Rules that are broken without being detected might as well have never existed.
Somewhere around age seven a typical child undergoes a change. Rules stop being something elusive