Overture

Discussions of human behavior and aesthetic representations of the nature of human relationships are to be found in the earliest documents of recorded history and no doubt preceded them. In the time during which the human organism has inhabited this planet a certain amount of knowledge and wisdom have accumulated, much of it regulating our daily lives and codified into cultural values, legal systems, and everyday practices. Only recently, somewhat after the rise of the physical and biological sciences, has there been a large-scale systematic enterprise devoted to the scientific understanding of human behavior and development. Not everyone has welcomed this activity. Some consider that the folk wisdom about human behavior that each of us possesses and that has so affected the nature of the societies we have designed is sufficient for our needs. Others, mindful of the enormous problems our societies face, look expectantly and repeatedly for solutions based on knowledge that goes beyond the intuitive and the culturally transmitted. These people have been disappointed repeatedly both because we know too little to deal effectively with the most serious and complex problems in our world today, and because we often have promised solutions we could not possibly deliver given our knowledge base. Further, within the behavioral science community there has been a widespread lack of consensus about the theoretical orientation that will serve us best and even, sometimes, as regards what we will agree we know. On the other hand, there has been an enormous explosion of information about human behavior and development in the last 30 years. Attempting to form a consensus and to consider adopting a kind of theoretical umbrella may be particularly timely. Even if the result is not fully acceptable to the broad range of opinions in developmental science, such an effort could be productive. These considerations and concerns gave rise to the ideas that shaped this book. The major focus revolves around the questions related to how we might best account for the development of human behavior in each individual person. The major conclusion involves the proposal of a model of human development that could represent the largest consensus given our current knowledge base. To arrive at this conclusion we must consider the basic concepts and issues that characterize current theories of development and we must also examine the concepts and issues in relation to the data available to us. In this book there is no attempt to represent, in text-like fashion, the full set of facts that populate university courses on human development; nor do we engage in a theory by theory analysis and critique. Rather, our journey through issues is a matter of theme and variations. ¹