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18.2: What are Mechanistic meta-theories of human development?

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    9366
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    Mechanistic meta-theories can be understood using the metaphor of a machine. It is as if humans are composed and change the same way as machines. As summarized in Table 7.1, people are assumed to be made up of parts that can be removed and studied apart from the rest of them. In the social sciences, those parts are typically discrete behaviors or responses. People are assumed to be generally static and passive, with the energy coming from external forces (like gasoline for a car).

    The person can only react to the environment that is controlling them (like a car responding to the gas pedal or the brake). All causes for development come from the outside, from environmental forces, which have their own agenda for the machine (like a driver has a destination). From this perspective, development is continuous (a car stays a car) and any changes are quantitative and incremental (like adding new seat covers). The underlying hypothesized cause of development in Mechanistic meta-theories is social conditioning that occurs over time, leading to changes in observable behavior.

    The prototypic Mechanistic theories are behaviorist, operant, and classical conditioning learning theories (see Table 7.2), like the social learning theory described by Gewirtz and analyzed in the previous chapter. This family of theories dominated psychology from the early to the mid 20th century (Cairns & Cairns, 2006), and was in the middle of being overthrown when Reese and Overton (1970) wrote their seminal chapter. It is important to note, however, that Mechanistic theories are still alive and well in many areas, such as learning and motivation, and especially those theories that have been adapted for use in educational systems. In fact, the default for theories of the effects of people of higher power on people of lower power (e.g., adults on children, parents on offspring, teachers on students, supervisors on workers, leaders on followers, mentors on apprentices) seems to reflect a mechanistic cast which largely assumes unidirectional external forces emanating from people higher in the hierarchy and exerting an impact on people at lower levels.

    As the popularity of behaviorism waned in the mid-1900s, new classes of machines have begun to serve as prototypes for mechanistic theories of memory, learning, and automatic functioning—focusing, of course, on the computer, the robot, and the automaton, as detailed in Bargh and Chartrand’s (1999) cleverly titled paper, “The unbearable automaticity of being.” Such assumptions have even pervaded our metaphors for biological systems, as seen in metaphors like “the brain is a computer.” There are also traces of mechanistic assumptions in certain progressive and feminist analyses of the effects of societal and social conditions, such as poverty, oppression, and discrimination, which sometimes seem to imply that these external forces are the sole determinants of development.

    Metaphor: reflex; human as “host” to behaviors

    “Cognitive revolution” human as an information processing machine? Slife & Williams