Advanced Social Role-Taking and Cognitive Development in Gifted Adults

Abstract

Examined the possible parallelism between social role-taking and cognition in forty-four gifted adults. The men and women, aged twenty-one to fifty-five were white and middle class. They were administered measures of advanced role-taking levels formulated for this study and measures of formal operations and of post-formal operational development based on category theory. The three hypotheses were: (1) role-taking levels termed “interactive effect” and “interactive empathy” would form an invariant sequence; (2) measures of formal operations and of post-formal operational levels would form an invariant sequence; and (3) the formal operations and post-formal operational levels would provide the necessary cognitive prerequisites for role-taking levels of interactive effect and interactive empathy, respectively. The findings supported all three hypotheses. Age was correlated significantly with role-taking behavior. In the discussion, category theory was suggested as one way to define post-formal operational thinking.

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