The Ecology of Human Development: Experiments by Nature and Design

by Urie Bronfenbrenner

Here is a book that challenges the very basis of the way psychologists have studied child development. According to Urie Bronfenbrenner, one of the world’s foremost developmental psychologists, laboratory studies of the child’s behavior sacrifice too much in order to gain experimental control and analytic rigor. Laboratory observations, he argues, too often lead to “the science of the strange behavior of children in strange situations with strange adults for the briefest possible periods of time.” To understand the way children actually develop, Bronfenbrenner believes that it will be necessary to observe their behavior in natural settings, while they are interacting with familiar adults over prolonged periods of time.

This book offers an important blueprint for constructing such a new and ecologically valid psychology of development. The blueprint includes a complete conceptual framework for analysing the layers of the environment that have a formative influence on the child. This framework is applied to a variety of settings in which children commonly develop, ranging from the pediatric ward to daycare, school, and various family configurations. The result is a rich set of hypotheses about the developmental consequences of various types of environments. Where current research bears on these hypotheses, Bronfenbrenner marshals the data to show how an ecological theory can be tested. Where no relevant data exist, he suggests new and interesting ecological experiments that might be undertaken to resolve current unknowns.

Bronfenbrenner’s groundbreaking program for reform in developmental psychology is certain to be controversial. His argument flies in the face of standard psychological procedures and challenges psychology to become more relevant to the ways in which children actually develop. It is a challenge psychology can ill-afford to ignore.

Genres: Psychology, Education, Nonfiction, Social Work

352 pages, Paperback

First published June 4, 1979

About the author

Dr. Urie Bronfenbrenner was a Russian-born American psychologist and academic best known for his ecological systems theory.

Professor Bronfenbrenner received a bachelor's degree in psychology and music from Cornell University in 1938.
He earned a master's in education from Harvard in 1940, and a doctorate in developmental psychology from the University of Michigan in 1942. He served as a psychologist in various military units during World War II. His daughter, Dr. Kate Bronfenbrenner, followed him into academia and is a well known labor relations scholar.

Reviews

[Steven]

The understanding of the relevant features of the world sit on this book, so it can seem frivolous to read it. Maybe if you read this earlier on, it will read differently for you.

[xenia]

So the 1970s were an insane time where the micro and macro theories of the past were subjected to the fields of second-order cybernetics, complexity, and dynamic systems theories. In 1979, U. Bronfenbrenner and J. J. Gibson released the ecological masterpieces The Ecology of Human Development and The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception , works that placed the human-animal in dynamic environments co-constituted through the actions of behaviour and perception. Against simplistic formulations of the dialectic, an opening up to triads, tetrads, and multiplicitous relations. Against mechanistic intrapsychic phenomena, machinic-becomings that involved tiered engagements across different levels of emergence. Against simple loops, strange loops connecting the cosmic to the infinitesimal. The self-overcoming of the dialectic into an integrated system of incompleteness, as Grant Maxwell might put it.

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Ecological Psychology

Bronfenbrenner's main task is a pointed rejection of psychoanalytic, behaviourist, and cognitivist conceptions of consciousness, frameworks that isolate the mind from its body and empty the body of mind. Drawing instead from gestalt theory, dialectical materialism, and ecology, he argues that consciousness develops from and through multiple sites: 1) the microsystem, 2) the mesosystem, 3) the exosystem, and 4) the macrosystem.

The microsystem is analogous to psychoanalysis' traditional site of focus: that of immediate setting and one's relations with intimate others. Drawing on gestalt theory, Bronfenbrenner understands motivation in an almost Lacanian way, as emerging from without one's self, through "lines of force, valence, and vectors, that attract and repel." Motivation is formed through one's embodied and actional engagements with the world, engagements that spur desire into existence. Rather than psychodynamic drives, Bronfenbrenner ties motivation to the sociodynamics of role, a site constituted through vectors such as class, gender, ethnicity, and capacity.

These roles change depending on the microsystem one is in. Home, school, church, club, work, cafe, street. These interwoven settings form the mesosystem, the network of microsystems that one partakes in. Theorists like Goffman and Foucault zoom into microsystems, articulating in minute detail the affordances of such spaces and their discursive interpellations. What you are positioned as, and how you may respond to such positionings. The microsystem is analogous to performativity. The mesosystem is the set of relations amongst different settings, an investigation of how knowledge/behaviours flow between—transformed, translated, or dissociated across liminal passages. An abusive household may be dissociated from a validating classroom, buried deeply not just in memory, but in soma. Hunched shoulders and averted eyes may melt away on entry into a safe space, or remain present in fraught, unfamiliar settings. If the microsystem is the immediate experience that forms motivations and behaviours, the mesosystem is one level of abstraction up—a site of reflection on their differences and connections.

The exosystem consists of the settings adjacent to the mesosystem, linked through social relations not experienced in the immediate. Friends of friends' houses. Parental workplaces. Stadium concerts. Holiday locations. Second-order cybernetic information fed into the developing psyche through intimate others. These exo-settings operate as explanatory nodes for the behaviours of others, imaginary settings of indirect insight. Pavlovian terror when a clack of keys sounds and a waft of alcohol enters one's bedroom at night. An underworld of indistinct shadows that nonetheless impress the contours of one's immediate being. Here, we enter into figments and fantasy: the space of speculation and distortion.

Lastly, the macrosystem refers to what is broadly called society or culture by sociologists and media theorists. The macrosystem is enacted through institutions that prop up certain ways of being. The macrosystem is ideology and subjectivity. For instance, at the microsystem level one may be structured by one's class (as landlord, business owner, worker, student, caretaker), at the macrosystem level, however, the contradictory demands of different classes create immense oppositional forces (bourgeoisie-proletariat, producer-reproducer, landed gentry-petit bourgeoisie). At a cultural level, capitalism is reproduced ideologically through mediated representations, as well as embodied subjectivities: hustle culture, hero worship, girlbossery, and so forth. On a more Foucauldian level, the macrosystem defines the discursive limits of behaviour, separating the articulate from the inarticulate, and life from death. Those who fail to reside in these limits are inscribed as losers, parasites, terrorists, and the mad.

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Human Development

We can trace this movement of human development from the microsystem to the macrosystem. Imagine a child neglected at home. Their immediate setting invalidates. Their emotions aren't mirrored, regulated, nor validated by a caring other. This attachment wound causes issues at school. Friendships that could have buoyed them up are cut short because of their sudden emotional shutdowns and outbursts. Without exposure to the lifeworlds of others, they experience their loneliness as a failure to be a human being, as self-caused. As they grow older, they see depictions of self-made individuals, people who have to pulled themselves out of economic and emotional poverty. These macrosystem influences feed back to the microsystem, a loop that spirals the child into a psychotic break.

Bronfenbrenner argues that human development is connected to perception and interaction with one's environment. Human development isn't a moralistic term, nor a strictly psychological term. Rather, it is an increased capacity to transform one's environment. Human development is connected to labour and reflection, the differentiation of one's body into capacities, as well as their integration into a living sense of wholeness. Labour generates motivation: both the capacity to understand the world and the desire to engage with the world. One could say that one's "personality" is what persists in one's development across different settings. What capacities remain across social disjunctures.

Though this goes beyond the scope of Bronfenbrenner's book (which is concerned with research, rather than application), the same child we imagined earlier could be treated through a therapy that addresses the microsystem (attachment-based and family therapies), the mesosystem (gestalt therapy/psychodrama), the exosystem (transformative justice/community-based interventions), and the macrosystem (narrative therapy, mutual aid, and collective struggle). Every level matters, from the therapy room to the street, for all are sites of co-constructed validation, development, and integration. From symptom reduction, to individuation, to political freedom, all levels feedback into a cybernetic dialectic of collective human development.

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This is just the first chapter. Y'all better be ready for more when I return to this thicc tome.

[Nana · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have read this one for a presentation I had to make and I was plesantly surprised. It's surprisingly hard for researchers to write something so that it's still legitimate and full of useful information yet entirely consumable for the average person. Maybe, you'll find the careful disection of psychological instruments and experiments dull though, if you're not a student that is. The text flows and is incredibly smart, it seems as if Urie had a nack for writing (maybe his music degree had something to do with it?) and I would recommend this one first and foremost to anyone who isn't familar with ecological models (fr, it'll blow your mind) and even to doctors of psyhchology because I know many would benefit from reading it.

[Faith Andrews · Rating 5 out of 5]

Timeless!!! (Literally, because it doesn’t include chronosystem considerations as yet….)

Very cool & relevant & an absolute must-read for those looking to get a firm footing on the person-in-environment framework.
Bronfenbrenner writes in an accessible & clear manner, and his passion for the topic is clear. He tacks on the end some considerations of ecological models as deficit-focused (a common contemporary critique) and provides some interesting considerations for researchers in their ability to skew policy to allow the goodness of fit of environment for humans to live to their potential.

[Carlene Alexander · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really liked this and it is much easier to read than expected. Really good critique of strange situation and interesting reading about Elder’s work on the Great Depression. I’m not sure if Bronfenbrenner is still alive but if only this could be updated with the last few decades of research included … because it’s brilliant but dated.

[Mae · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well-written book with amazing examples.

[Scott Ford · Rating 5 out of 5]

Yet another important book for me! Bronfenbrenner established his research by observing behavior in natural settings over prolonged periods of time. Very productive, applicable concepts.

[Mills College Library]

155.4 B8692 1979