On Kegan’s developmental stages
Harvard psychologist Robert Kegan’s “constructive-developmental” theory posits that adults pass through five discrete stages of cognitive and ethical development, each strictly more sophisticated than the last. The model became popular in parts of the rationalist and self-improvement world after blogger David Chapman wrote a series of accessible introductions to it. On the CFAR alumni mailing list, another member (Ethan Dickinson) had defended Kegan’s metric by linking to evidence that scores on the test were stable over time and tracked some real psychological variation. The reply below grants that — the metric measures something — and then asks the harder questions: is what it measures a single coherent construct, does Kegan’s book actually cite evidence for its developmental claims, and do the specific stage descriptions hold up against history and basic psychology?
So there’s substantial evidence that the metric is measuring real things, and that it’s relatively stable, at least over a time span of months. Box #1 checked.
However, the links don’t really address the question of how strongly correlated the sub-components of the metric are. Eg., there are lots of existing tests for Extraversion, within the OCEAN five-factor model. If you knew how a person answered the questions on some components of the test, you could predict pretty well how they answered the others, which implies that Extraversion is a strongly coherent category. However, one could also construct a metric like: add 1 point if the person is green-eyed, add 1 point if the person is in good physical condition, add 1 point if the person likes the color purple, and so on. Of course, some people would get lots of points on this metric, and others would get fewer, and this would be stable over time. But the metric wouldn’t be very useful, because the category that’s been constructed doesn’t have any strong correspondence to real categories within person-space (see Words as Hidden Inferences , etc.).
Since Kegan’s metric is intended as a development model, there’s also the question of how strongly it correlates with age, and (insofar as it does) to what extent the connection between age and the things it measures have already been well-established (or, alternatively, disproven) by psychologists. Eg., there’s already a bunch of literature on the relationship between age and crystallized intelligence, so that wouldn’t be anything new. On the other hand, there might be other relationships (eg. people in their 50s reliably use sentences of type X) which haven’t been found yet.
Finally, and I think most importantly, the blog post doesn’t refer to (and I haven’t been able to easily Google) any real evidence or well-grounded arguments for Kegan’s claims. Some of them appear to be unsupported, while others seem so poorly defined as to be unfalsifiable. Eg, the Chapman blog post says: “If you are at a later stage, you also have the ability to operate in any of the earlier modes; but not vice versa.”
This is probably falsifiable, at least in theory. However, there’s no evidence or arguments for it. Of course, an introductory blog post might not cover the evidence in detail, but the only reference cited in the post is the book by Kegan himself. Kegan’s book isn’t available online, but Google Books has a preview, and from what I can see it’s very light on references, with almost no cites to established science in psychology, psychiatry, neurology, economics, biology, or any other field. Eg., here’s what seems to be the references for chapter 4 .
The first cite is a three-act play (a work of fiction). The second cite is a poem . The third appears to be a pop psychology book ( You Just Don’t Understand ), as does the fourth ( Intimate Strangers ). The fifth and last is a paper by Kegan himself, and while it sadly isn’t online, it appears to be a purely theoretical paper. There’s no way that would fly on eg. reddit.com/r/AskScience.
Practically speaking, in some cases, it’s obvious that older people can replace younger people but not vice-versa: adults remember being children, while the reverse isn’t true. However, in other cases it’s also obvious they can’t. Eg., fluid intelligence (Gf) is known to decline, on average, starting in the late 20s. The average 80-year-old simply can’t think as well as the average 25-year-old, as a biological fact. Even if the former were true in this case, how could Kegan know that?
Other parts seem clearly false, to the extent they’re falsifiable. Eg., the blog post says: “Stage 3 also becomes intensely sensitive to ‘what others think of me,’ which stage 2 is mostly oblivious to.”
It’s hard to make an airtight case here, without doing a big literature search… but this just seems implausible on the face of it. Of course, different people care in different ways about who thinks what of them, and that varies a lot by age. But even babies a few days old respond to facial expressions . Do five-year-olds not care whether their parents are happy, sad, or angry at them? Of course, one could respond that the quote only says “mostly” oblivious, and that parents (or whatever other categories one finds) are exceptions. But then, the statement has become so broad as to be non-disprovable.
Other parts seem contradictory. Eg., in one section, the blog post says: “The communal mode is characteristic of pre-modern (‘traditional’) cultures. It’s impossible to base a large-scale society on the communal mode, because it’s so ineffective at coordinating complex group activities. (If individuals frequently fail to do their specific, agreed tasks, nothing can get done.) Modern societies are based on the systematic mode (stage 4).”
Okay, so here a “modern” society is defined as one with large-scale organization and complex group activities. No problem with that. But it then goes on to say: “Stage 4 is definitional of modernity, in the sense of European culture and society over the past 250 years or so.”
But that isn’t even close to being the same thing. The definition has been switched out from under us. I could go on almost forever here, but large-scale cities have existed for ~9,000 years now, the Roman Empire had a population approaching 100 million, the largest city in 900 AD was Baghdad (well outside Europe) with about a million people, the Mayans developed large-scale civilization totally independent of the Europeans or Chinese, etc. etc. etc. The section on stage 4 seems to talk about large organizations, bureaucracy, hierarchy, duty, rules, etc., but this just doesn’t make sense in the historical context, given their definition of “modernity”. If you interpret it as whether such organizations exist , then eg. the Roman army of 100 AD was uniform, disciplined, operated under a single set of rules, etc., and had roughly half a million soldiers at its peak, comparable to 19th-century or 21st-century national armies. If you interpret it as whether the median person is inside such an organization, the rural/urban migration is much more recent, with the switchover to majority-urban happening circa 1920 (in the US). It just doesn’t make sense either way. They seem to be equating “modernity” with industrialization and capitalism, but then there’s no reason why a factory should be psychologically distinct from the Roman army, the Catholic Church religious hierarchy, or the bureaucracy of the Tang Chinese. There’s no way that would fly on eg. reddit.com/r/AskHistorians.
(It’s true that the main claims are psychological and not historical, but I don’t think this is just a nitpick; eg. Kegan’s book is subtitled The Mental Demands of Modern Life , so a clear definition of how a “modern” life differs from a “non-modern” life is central to what the book discusses.)
Still other parts don’t define their terms well enough to make them testable. Eg., the section on stage 5 says: “Systems become objects of creative play rather than constitutive of self, other, and groups. Fluidity can hold contradictions between systems comfortably while respecting the specific functioning and justification-structure of each.”
The words “system” and “fluidity” aren’t completely meaningless; they aren’t nonsense words like “wakalixes”. However, they’re sufficiently broad that it’s important to define exactly what they mean in context, because otherwise different people will see the word and imagine a mess of distinct, contradictory concepts. Eg., the concept of “democracy” is not meaningless, but it’s too vague to talk about in an empirical study of politics, because then different people would have contradictory internal assumptions about whether countries were or weren’t democracies. That’s why people use more specific terms like “nominal democracy” (does this country use the word “democratic”?), “multi-party democracy” (does the leader have a significant chance of being replaced in an election?), “liberal democracy” (can you call the leader nasty names without getting thrown in jail?), etc. Feynman talks about this sort of problem in philosophy : “After some discussion as to what ‘essential object’ meant, the professor leading the seminar said something meant to clarify things and drew something that looked like lightning bolts on the blackboard. ‘Mr. Feynman,’ he said, ‘would you say an electron is an essential object?’
Well, now I was in trouble. I admitted that I hadn’t read the book, so I had no idea of what Whitehead meant by the phrase; I had only come to watch. ‘But,’ I said, ‘I’ll try to answer the professor’s question if you will first answer a question from me, so I can have a better idea of what essential object means. Is a brick an essential object?’ (…)
Then the answers came out. One man stood up and said, ‘A brick as an individual, specific brick. That is what Whitehead means by an essential object.’
Another man said, ‘No, it isn’t the individual brick that is an essential object; it’s the general character that all bricks have in common – their brickiness – that is the essential object.’
Another guy got up and said, ‘No, it’s not in the bricks themselves. Essential object means the idea in the mind that you get when you think of bricks.’
Another guy got up, and another, and I tell you I have never heard such ingenious different ways of looking at a brick before. And, just like it should in all stories about philosophers, it ended up in complete chaos. In all their previous discussions they hadn’t even asked themselves whether such a simple object as a brick, much less an electron, is an ‘essential object.’”