In this video I discuss Piaget’s last two stages of cognitive development; the concrete operational stage and the formal operational stage. The concrete operational stage (from about age 6-11) is characterized by improved understanding of the operations of the physical world but errors in abstract reasoning and hypothetical thinking. These appear in the formal operational stage, which begins around age 11 and continues through adulthood, though Piaget believed that not everyone would reach this stage.

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Video Transcript

Hi, I’m Michael Corayer and this is Psych Exam Review. In this video we’re going to look at the last two stages of Piaget’s theory of cognitive development and these are the concrete operational stage and the formal operational stage.

Now in the previous video, I talked about the preoperational stage, which lasts from about age 2 to age 6 and what we saw in this stage is that children frequently make an error when it comes to conservation. They don’t understand that matter is conserved and this means they don’t recognize that if you change the shape of a ball of clay, it doesn’t change how much clay there is. Or if you pour liquid from one glass to another, it doesn’t change the amount of liquid. But as children move into the concrete operational stage, they show an improved understanding of the concrete operations of the physical world. This stage lasts from about age 6 to about age 11 and during this stage, children also show a reduction in their “magical thinking” for trying to explain how things happen or how the world works.

But they still struggle with abstract reasoning. They struggle with applying hypothetical rules. So for instance if you ask a child to apply a hypothetical rule that follows the physical world, then they don’t have problems with this. So you tell them “ok, if I hit this glass with a hammer, the glass will break. That’s the rule.” And then you say “Tommy hit the glass with a hammer, what happened?”. They’ll say “the glass broke, of course”. That’s a hypothetical situation but it follows the physical concrete operations of the world and so they don’t make an error. But if you ask children in this concrete operational stage to apply a rule that doesn’t follow the physical rules of the world, then they start making errors. If you tell them “if I hit this piece of glass with a feather, the glass will break. That’s the rule.” then you say “Tommy hit the glass with the feather, what happened?” the children will say “nothing, the glass didn’t break”. Because that is not something they’re able to apply this hypothetical. They think “if you hit it with a feather nothing will happen, that’s how the world operates” and so they sort of stick to that conclusion of “if you hit the glass with a feather, nothing will happen”.

Now Piaget also tested this by asking children hypothetical questions like “where would you put a third eye? If you had a third eye and you could put it anywhere on your body, where would you put it?”. And he found children in the concrete operational stage tended to put it on their forehead, because that’s where their other eyes are. They think “well that seems to be where eyes should go” and so that’s what they put it. And they weren’t able to think about the possible outcomes; they weren’t able to imagine hypothetical situations where they could use a third eye in other ways. And children as they got older and moved into this next stage, they started having more novel solutions to this problem saying things like “well I could put the eye on my hand and then I could see around corners”, right? And so they’re able to think in a different way that doesn’t follow the usual rules of the world and that means they’re now entering the formal operational stage.

And this is the final stage in Piaget’s theory and this starts sometime around age 11 and continues for the rest of life, although Piaget thought that not everybody reaches this formal operational stage. Some people are stuck in sort of concrete thinking about the world and they’re not good at abstract reasoning. They’re not capable of thinking about these hypothetical situations. But for those who move into the formal operational stage, they can deal with abstract concepts. They can engage in if-then thinking; they can imagine how things might happen and they can use inferential reasoning. So they can take some hypothetical situation and they can imagine the possible outcomes and then from there they can reason about which of those outcomes might be better given those hypothetical rules before. And once somebody can do all these things, then they would clearly be in this last stage the formal operational stage.

Ok, so those are the four stages of Piaget’s theory of cognitive development; the sensorimotor stage, the preoperational stage, the concrete operational stage, and lastly this formal operational stage. I hope you found this helpful, if so, please like the video and subscribe to the channel for more. Thanks for watching!