In a post I unfortunately ‘marked read’ (yeah yeah I should look it up in Google, I know) a netfriend
I’m supposed to earn a living figuring out why people
1. Anybody – how much do you know about Transactional Analysis? Simplistically it’s the dynamics of the parent or child or adult within each of us trying to communicate with the parent/child/adult in the other. If there are oblique (adult to child for example) or crossed communications (adult to adult-child back to ‘parent’ for example) there’ll be a degree of dysfunctionality in the communication.
2. Piaget’s theory about cognitive development, and the normal progression of children’s concrete thinking to teenagers’/adults’ ability to think ‘formally’ or have ideas-about-ideas. Many adults have not made that progression very well, and it reflects in their ideological/theological thinking.
From a book I wrote about Evangelicals:
~~~ This leads us to posit an important dictum: theological stance is probably largely a matter of temperament. Certainly, persons at any point along a theological spectrum can be hard-line (Ian Paisley, Jim Wallis) or soft-line. Three psychologists can help us at this point. Jean Piaget’s theories of cognitive development suggest a differentiation in our mode of thinking when we become adolescent. He says the child (7-11 years) thinks ‘concretely’, whereas from adolescence we acquire the ability to think ‘formally’ (having ‘ideas about ideas’). It is a short step from this hypothesis to believing that adults think both ways too: there’s a mix of concrete and formal modes in the way we think. How we think about something will depend most importantly on the amount of risk we’re willing to take with novelty. And this is, of course, a function of our emotional security and maturity as well as our intellectual integrity. When you think about it, this is the reason fundamentalists are preoccupied with evangelising children and teenagers, but often don’t get very far with well-educated adults.
James Fowler builds on the contributions of Piaget and others and suggests six stages that emerge in working out the meaning of our lives: from the intuitive imitative faith of childhood, through conventional and more independent faith, to the universalising, self-transcending faith of fuller maturity. He explains how many people do not complete the stage sequence, but remain on a plateau. The ‘stage six’ persons are heedless to self-preservation and have a feel for transcendent moral and religious actuality: ‘Their enlarged visions of universal community disclose the partialness of our tribes and pseudo- species… it is little wonder that (stage six persons) so frequently become martyrs for the visions they incarnate’ (‘Stages of Faith’, Dove Communications, 1981, p.200).
Now put this together with Leon Festinger’s main contribution to social psychology, his theory of cognitive dissonance. He says discrepant cognitions (ideas in conflict) produce an uncomfortable psychological state, dissonance, that we are motivated to reduce or eliminate. If our security is bound up with our belief-system and our peers who also hold to these beliefs are ‘significant others’ for us then there is significant psychological pressure to retain ideas that are compatible with each other and incorporate new ideas which reinforce, or complement, existing ones.
~~~
(For the full text – visit http://jmm.org.au/articles/12129.htm and work backwards).
Comment: on these (three) newsgroups the ‘child’ with us (myself included)
sometimes overrides the adult. If I can be frank, such childishness is not especially a function of theological stance, but of many other factors.
(Rowland are you saying that a liberal person theologically *here* can be as ‘childish’ as a fundamentalist? Yep: and I’ve said as much to the people concerned. The difference: liberal thinkers respond with ‘I’d like to think about that. Tell me more’. Fundamentalists: ‘Don’t confuse me with any new ideas; my mind’s made up.’)
Shalom!
Rowland Croucher
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