Developmental Psychology and the Stories We Live By

From the moment that we are born we are bathed in stories and from a very young age we begin our own life as story tellers. But the stories we hear, and those that we tell reflect the cognitive development of the teller and the listener. The great developmental psychologist Jean Piaget decribed four levels of development. How we interpret our world and selves are very different based on the developmental level of the stories we live by. The political stories now dominating public discourse increasingly seem to be structured around the type of logic and perception that defines early and middle childhood rather than those we might expect from adults. We will discuss the nature of these differing types of stories and the disastrous consequences taking place here in the US as well as all over the world.