ACTION THEORIES OF HUMAN DEVELOPMENT

Pioneer: Jochen Brandtstädter Developmental regulation (the process of dynamic person-context relations) should be the key focus in the study of human development.

“Individual is both the active producer and the product of his or her ontogeny. The central tenet of an action-theoretical perspective thus holds that human ontogeny, including adulthood and later life, cannot be understood adequately without paying heed to the self-reflective and self-regulating loops that link developmental changes to the ways in which individuals, in action and mentation, construe their personal development” (Brandtstädter, 2006)

Shared perspective with Developmental Systems Theory: – Individuals are active, acting as producers of their own development

“A basic evolutionary feature that makes possible-and at the same time enforces-cultural and personal control of ontogeny is the great plasticity and openness of development... These features of human ontogeny imply adaptive potentials as well as vulnerabilities, and they have concomitantly evolved with mechanisms to cope with the latter. The capacities to create, maintain, and enact culture, and to plot the trajectory of life on the societal map, are rooted in this coevolutionary process. Generally, developmental plasticity is already implicated in the notion of culture, as far as this notion connotes the cultivation of some process that is open to modification and optimization.” (Brandtstädter,1999)

The regulation by individuals of their relations with their complex and changing physical, social, cultural, and historical context is the key problem for successful development across life.

This regulation needs plasticity (adaptive change) especially in later years of human development.

Actions are the means through which individuals affect their contexts and through the feedback resulting from such actions, organize their ideas about their contexts and themselves.

As a consequence of this understanding, individuals then develop a set of guides (or motivations such as intentions, goals) or regulators for future actions.

The outcome of this reciprocal “action- feedback-self organization-further action” process is human development (Brandtstädter, 2006). – Action is the engine of the development – These actions are based on intentions (especially in later life stages)

Therefore actions are behaviors: – that can be predicted and explained with reference to intentional states (goals, values, beliefs) – that are at least partly under personal control and have been selected from alternative behavioral options – that are constituted and constrained by social rules and conventions or by the subject’s representations of these contextual constraints – that aim to transform situations in accordance with personal representations of desired future states.

In analyzing the ontogeny of intentional self- development, three basic lines of development should be considered: – The development of intentional action in general, and of cognitive and representational processes related to intentionality – The formation of beliefs and competencies related to personal control over development – The development of the self as a more or less coherent structure of self-referential values, believes and standards that guides and directs self-regulatory processes.