ABSTRACT
In his preface to the combined Russian edition of The Language and Thought of the Child and Judgement and Reasoning in the Child, Piaget 1 wrote that he was grateful to his Soviet colleagues for their willingness to organize ‘a series of investigations which aim to complement and correct the work we succeeded to carry out in Geneva’. He added that the work of his Soviet colleagues would be useful to tease apart the respective influences of individual and social factors in child development. As he himself had been forced to work in only one social milieu, Piaget writes, he had not been able to solve this methodological question.
That is why it is such a great pleasure for me to have such skilled colleagues, such as several Soviet psychologists, who study children in a social environment which is entirely different from the one I myself studied. Nothing can be more useful for science than this rapprochement of the investigations of Russian psychologists with the work done in other countries. 2
