Harry Harlow
Through his controversial monkey studies, he established that attachment is formed based on comfort contact rather than having nutritional needs met. He also studied the importance of attachment on socialization.
Mary Ainsworth
Her famous experiment, The Strange Situation, was used as a way to identify different types of attachment. Through this, she discovered secure attachment, avoidant attachment and anxious/ambivalent attachment.
Lev Vygotsky
He is credited with the social development theory of learning. He suggested that social interaction influences cognitive development and that people learn best in a social context.
Erik Erikson
He created the 8 Psychosocial stages of development. he modeled his stages from Freud's psychosexual stages.Erikson believes events in our past, in each stage, can have a lasting effect on how we develop later in life.
The 8 stages are:
Trust v Mistrust
Autonomy v Shame & Doubt
Initiative v Guilt
Industry v Inferiority
Identity v Role Confusion
Intimacy v Isolation
Generativety v Stagnation
Integrity v Despair
Lawrence Kohlberg
He created the theory of moral development. He believes there are 3 levels: Preconventional, Conventional, and Post Conventional. He used a moral dilemma, asked boys what they would do, and then asked them why they made that choice.
Carol Gilligan
She looked at Kohlberg's work and noticed he only tested the theory on boys. She said potential differences between boys and girls were overlooked during this. Through further experimentation, she concluded men are more concrete in how they analyze a moral dilemma than women who perceive it as much more situational.
Konrad Lorenz
He was an Austrian zoologist who studied the behavior of birds and emphasized the importance of innate as opposed to learned behaviors. He developed the theory of imprinting in the animal world.
Jean Piaget
He was a Swiss psychologist remembered for his studies of cognitive development in children (1896-1980). His four stage theory of cognitive development is what he is most known for.
The stages are:
1. Sensorimotor
2. Preoperational
3. Concrete operational
4. Formal operational