Robert Kegan’s Stage Theory of Adult Development

Robert Kegan is a neo-Piagetian constructive-developmental psychologist at Harvard Graduate School of Education. He expanded Jean Piaget’s cognitive development stages of childhood to adulthood. Kegan brings two schools of thought together: constructivism and developmentalism. Constructivists believe that the persons or systems construct a reality. For example, in the below drawing by Jesper Johns, some people see an old woman in the right and see a white vase at the bottom, whereas others see an young woman in the right and two faces on the flag. Each way of seeing the picture constructs a different reality in the same picture.

Developmentalists believe that people grow over time and evolve into qualitatively different stages. Thus, constructive-developmentalists believe the systems by which people make meaning grow and evolve over time.

Kegan’s theory is based on his ideas of transformation. He differentiates transformation from learning new information or skills. Transformation is not about simply adding information into our mind, but is about changing the very form of our mind. Transformation is not just about what we know but rather the way we know. Transformation occurs when we are newly able to step back and reflect on something and make decisions about it. Putting it in another way, transformation happens when things move from subject to object. Subject is experienced as invisible and unquestioned, simply a part of the self. Object is the opposite of subject. Object is the thing in our meaning-making that we can reflect on, handle, look at, and be responsible for. Kegan writes, “We have object; we are subject.” Evolutionary activity involves the very creating of the object from the subject. Subject-object relations emerge out of a lifelong process of development. Kegan believes that there are five different levels of subject-object relations throughout the lifespan.

Stage 1: The Impulsive Balance (2 years old to 6 years old)

Young children (for example preschool children) in the Impulsive Balance are made up by their perceptions and impulses. If the child’s perception of an object changes, the object itself has changed, in the child’s experience. As Piaget’s famous experiment indicates, the child is not able to hold her perceptions of the liquid in one container with her perception of the liquid in the taller, thinner container, precisely because she cannot separate herself from her perceptions.

Stage 2: The Imperial Balance (6 years old to adolescence)

The child begins to understand the construction of the role. This permits the child to take his appropriate role as a child in relation to a parent. The child no longer lives with the sense that the parent can read his private feelings. He has a private world. He can coordinate his changing perceptions across time to conserve concrete qualities. He no longer is his perceptions, but rather he has them. On the other hand, when his own needs and another’s are not integrated, he is unable to hold the other imaginatively. He does not hold a shared reality.

Stage 3: The Interpersonal Balance (Post-adolescence)

In the Interpersonal Balance, the self becomes conversational. Those in this balance cannot know themselves separate from the interpersonal context; instead they are more likely to feel sad, wounded, or incomplete. They cannot review, reflect on, and mediated the obligations, expectations, satisfactions, purposes, or influences of interpersonalism. They may be made up by others’ expectations, responding either by cooperating or rebelling, but clearly in reaction to these expectations. “I am my relationships.”

Stage 4: The Institutional Balance (Some adults)

People in this balance come to coordinate their multiple roles and the different expectations others hold for them within their own self-generated, relationship-regulating frameworks. Compared to those in the Stage 3, they have more options because they have a larger perspective from which to judge, make sense of, and negotiate among expectations. They can create the rules from their internal system and fight hard to protect those rules.

Stage 5: The Interindividual Balance (Very few adults in their midlife or later)

Kegan claims that very few adults primarily in mid-life or beyond move towards the Interindividual Balance. Instead of viewing others as people with separate and different inner systems, those in the Interindividual Balance see across inner systems to look at the similarities that are hidden inside who used to look like differences. They are less likely to see the world in terms of dichotomies or polarities.

In Over Our Heads

Kegan believes that the constantly changing demands of modern life may be developmentally inappropriate for many – perhaps even most – adults. Today’s demands of adult life such as careers, marriage, parenting, and health are designed for the Institutional Balance (Stage 4), while around 50% of the population is at the Interpersonal Balance (Stage 3). Great leadership demands the Interindividual Balance (Stage 5) while most leaders are at the Institutional Balance or below.

ADULT DEVELOPMENT THEORY

References

Berger, J. G. (2006). Key concepts for understanding the work of Robert Kegan: Sagience.

Kegan, R. (1982). The evolving self: Harvard University Press.

Kegan, R. (1994). In over our heads: The mental demands of modern life: Harvard University Press.