Document Type

Book Chapter

Publication Date

4-25-2025

Keywords

conversation experiments, child development, preoperational thinking

Disciplines

Developmental Psychology

Abstract

When it comes to assessing the magnitude of a quantity, the mind has several options. For example, to determine the amount of juice in a glass, one could merely look at the height of the juice in the glass; or one could incorporate both the height and the width of the glass. The latter would be the correct approach: The height alone can be misleading, for example when the glass is very narrow. Thus, in order to behave rationally, one has to look past the salient dimension of height and instead focus on integrating several dimensions. According to Jean Piaget, such rational behavior takes time to develop – which he proved with the findings of the so-called ‘conservation experiments’. In this essay, we describe the classical experiments as well as the conclusion Piaget drew from his findings.

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