the need of belonging, beyond the physiological and safety needs that we began to see addressed in the initial sensori-motor stage. Thus, we observe that the progression through the developmental stages continues to take us up the ascending needs hierarchy. In essence, as part of our development from infancy toward adulthood, we acquire physical and cognitive mechanisms that will be instrumental in our ultimately being able to respond to the stimuli engendered through needs based appetites.

During the symbolic stage, a child learns to use symbols as representative of objects or groups of objects. Children initially consider all objects from their own perspective. In a process he calls decentration, Piaget presents in The Psychology of Intelligence the steps leading children to perceive themselves as agents in an independently autonomous world. A simple example of centration is the initial perception by the child of the mountain getting higher as the walk progresses. A more intricate one is that of the child viewing pearls transferred from one vase to another and considering that, depending on the form of the second vase, there are more or fewer pearls in it than in the first. It can take up to the age of seven or eight years for the child to associate certain rotated or inverted representations of objects with the correct corresponding objects. Eventually, the process of decentration leads us to acknowledge the world as the world acknowledges us. We suggest that its progression indicates the early stages of satisfying the need for esteem. This is accomplished through reflection on one’s position in the world. We would also observe that this takes the child down the path toward metaphorical understanding and reasoning. Within this stage, the child is able to conceptualize existence, both of objects through symbolic representation and of action responses (events) through establishment of context.

During this stage, fantasy has a strong influence on the understanding and belief system of the child. This would seem to relate to the willingness to search for causality in the supernatural when one’s understanding of the physical ecosystem is limited. Indeed, given the propensity for evolutionary based development to reflect phylogenetic processes in ontogenetic characteristics, this stage suggests some parallels with the mythic cultural phase of human memory development as described by Merlin Donald.

In addition, during this stage the fact that cognitive processes are still primarily egocentric suggests that development has not yet reached the level of fully relating to the higher levels of the needs hierarchy. In particular, the individual is not yet fully capable of responding to cognitive needs at or above esteem. Full logical thought is not yet supported, which leads us to think that process-based trust lags the causality-based trust mechanisms that we discussed in the previous chapter.

Around the age of seven, a child transitions into the concrete operations stage of development. This stage lasts from about seven to about eleven years of age and is characterized by the onset of logical thought, particularly as it relates to concrete objects. One facet of this basis in logic is the ability of the mind to quantify in a number of ways, such as numbers, space, time, speed, causality and randomness. This capability of recognizing conservation represents a calibration of the mind’s involvement with the symbolic representations grounded in the sensori-motor environment of the body. Accommodation as a learning process tends to increase during this stage. Essentially, the individual’s mind becomes engaged in developing truly personal rules of interaction, with such concepts of socialization as duty, heteronomy, moral realism and autonomy. We haven’t used the term policy for a while, but this stage of development certainly invites interpretation as one in which personal preferences are developed that will guide participation in formally defined social ecosystems. During this stage, the individual’s level of egocentric cognition diminishes, with an increasing propensity for immersion in the constraints of externally defined social ecosystems.

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