Stages of Personal Development:

Theories About How People Develop Their Beliefs

When we consider the results of the longitudinal study of 65+ gifted people from their early years to 20 years later, we can look at how age, experience, and environment interact with gifted individuals as they take what they learn as children and develop what they think and believe as adults. We continue the examination we started in earlier posts about the subjects’ potential for inner growth and being Searchers. As background for the next series of posts, we consider concepts about higher level reasoning and inner growth related to Kohlberg’s stages and Dąbrowski’s levels of psychosocial development [1].

The topics of religion and politics can reveal different examples of how adults carry lessons from childhood into their own viewpoint formation. Both religion and politics often become issues where parents and their adult children diverge as the young adults continue either to accept what their parents and culture told them was right or develop their own, possibly different, views. This post reviews selected “stages of growth” theories of psychosocial development that show a generally aged-related progression. There are some age progression exceptions, however, and the goal here is to see if Level of giftedness and degree of giftedness are relevant to how the now-grown gifted…