Module 1 discussion
Consider these examples, reviewed in Life Span Development
by John Santrock (2008, McGraw Hill, 11e).
“Ted Kaczynski
sprinted through high school, not bothering with his junior year and making
only passing efforts at social contact. Off to Harvard at age 16, Kaczynski was
a loner during his college years. One of his roommates at Harvard said that he
avoided people by quickly shuffling by them and slamming the door behind him.
After obtaining his Ph.D. in mathematics at the University of Michigan,
Kaczynski became a professor at the University of California at Berkeley. His
colleagues there remember him as hiding from social circumstances—no friends,
no allies, no networking.
After several
years at Berkeley, Kaczynski resigned and moved to a rural area of Montana
where he lived as a hermit in a crude shack for 25 years. Town residents
described him as a bearded eccentric. Kaczynski traced his own difficulties to
growing up as a genius in a kid’s body and sticking out like a sore thumb in
his surrounding as a child. In 19656, he was arrested and charged as the
notorious Unabomber, America’s most wanted killer who sent 16 mail bombs in 17
years that left 23 people wounded or maimed, and 3 people dead. In 1998, he
pleaded guilty to the offenses and was sentenced to life in prison.
A decade before
Kaczynski mailed his first bomb, Alice Walker, who later won the Pulitzer Prize
for her book The Color Purple, spent her days battling racism in Mississippi.
She had recently won her first writing fellowship, but rather than use the
money to follow her dream of moving to Senegal, Africa, she put herself into
the heart and heat of the civic rights movement. Walker had grown up knowing
the brutal effects of poverty and racism. Born in 1955, she was the eighth
child of Georgia sharecropper who earned $300 a year. When Walker was 8, her
brother accidentally shot her in the left eye with a BB gun. By the time her
parents got her to the hospital a week later (they had no car), she was blind
in that eye and it had developed a disfiguring layer of scar tissue. Despite
the counts against her, Walker overcame pain and anger and went on to become
not only an award-winning novelist but also an essayist, a poet, a short-story
writer, and a social activist.” (p. 4)
Considering that we are all products of both heredity and
environment, analyze these two cases based on what you’ve read in the first two
chapters. Specifically:
Considering the families of theories discussed in Chapter 1,
(biological theories, psychodynamic theories, behavioral theories, cognitive
theories) pick two of the broad theoretical perspectives and describe what they
would say about development as it relates to these two individuals (apply two
theories to both individuals). Be “creative” in your applications. Think of
numerous applications though they may not exactly fit. Use this as an
opportunity to drill down into the theories.
Now, think of the influence of biology (Chapter 2). What
possible hereditary influence may have contributed to the behaviors and life
choices of these two individuals? Stretch on this one.
