18.1: Metaphors and Meta-theories in Human Development

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Ellen A. Skinner, Thomas A. Kindermann, Robert W. Roeser, Cathleen L Smith, Andrew Mashburn & Joel Steele
Portland State University via Portland State University Library

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When we consider these assumptions all at once, it becomes clear that they seem to cluster into “packages” of assumptions that go together. These clusters are organized around metaphors— “as-if” statements that liken humans and their development to other entities and processes. For example, the metaphor of the “river:” “Human development is like a river, always flowing, never the same.” Or the metaphor of the “scientist:” “Humans are like little scientists, exploring, investigating, and testing out their theories.” A wide variety of metaphors have been used to depict humans over the centuries—humans are like demi-gods, like grasshoppers and ants.

Metaphors are at the root of meta-models of humans and their development. These metaphors anchor our subject matter in analogues that call up rich associations. As pointed out by Reese and Overton (1970), “the characteristic of models that permits their utilization in the deployment of theories, and increase in their scope, is that they have ‘excess meaning’ (p. 120), meaning that can be useful in suggesting new ideas for theories and places to look for empirical investigation. As long as scientists do not reify these metaphors and come to think that they are the targets of study, the use of metaphors can expand and enrich our work. To do so, we must surface the metaphors that are guiding our current thinking and study.

Reese and Overton (1970) suggested meta-models that are inspired by two metaphors: Humans as machines, as depicted in Mechanistic meta-theories, and humans as butterflies, as depicted in Organismic meta-theories. We consider two more meta-models and their metaphors: Humans as seeds, as depicted by Maturational meta-theories, and human development as a tennis game or dance, as depicted by Contextualist meta-theories (Lerner, 1977). The key characteristics of each meta-theory are presented in Table 7.1. Each of these higher-order meta-theories has sets of lower-level theories that are nested within it. These are called “families” of theories to denote that they share common properties, based on their similarity to the root metaphors and characteristics of the guiding meta-models. Table 7.2 contains several examples of “big” theories of development and provides an analysis of their defining features according to the set of meta-theoretical assumptions we have been discussing. Based on this analysis, we indicate the higher-order family to which we think each big theory belongs.