Adolescents and Adults: Decision Making, Essay

Adolescents and adults are forced to make a variety of decisions every day that will impact their lives. Some of these decisions can be based on abstract and logical thinking (formal stage), but others require dialectical thought (post-formal stage).

For this task, you will need to ask your family and friends to help you by telling you various situations in which they had to make important decisions (e.g., buying a car or home, which college to attend, or whom to date/marry). It would be best if you had at least one person between the ages of 15 to 20 and one person older than 30.

Ask your family and friends to tell you about at least three of their biggest decisions and collect the following information:

What were the three decisions?

How did they figure out what decision to make (e.g., they made a list of pros/cons; they compared benefit and consequences; they evaluated based on their previous experiences or those of others)?

Did parents/teachers/friends help them to decide and, if so, how?

Did they make the best decision, based on what they knew at the time? What would they have done differently if deciding today?

Evaluate the stories you collected. For each person, determine If you would classify them as formal operational or post-formal operational, based on how they made their decisions (i.e., basically using concepts in formal thinking, dialectical/post-formal thinking, or combination).

What is the evidence for your evaluation?

Based on the answer to whether they would make a different decision today, are they still in formal operational or have they progressed to post-formal operational?