Jean Piaget Quotes

There is something about the ability to externalize our thoughts and compare them with other people in a public way that is really transformative for the average person.

“The Wisdom of Crowds” suggests that if enough bumbling people act in concert, they’ll find their way to a less bumbling place.

Human learning presupposes a specific social nature and a process by which children grow into the intellectual life of those around them

We all learn from each other, and I never really hung out with guys in that way, so I missed out.

The market turns out to be just one special case of collective decision-making.

Novelists in particular love to rhapsodize about the glory of the solitary mind; this is natural, because their job requires them to sit in a room by themselves for years on end. But for most of the rest of us, we think and remember socially.

School has never really been about individualized learning, but about how to be socialized as a citizen and as a human being, so that we, we have important rules in school, always emphasizing the fact that one is part of a group.

Obviously, all of us have been influenced by those around us.

It is good to rub and polish our brain against that of others.

Human beings all mimic each other.

Time is found in the calibration of the individual to the timing of a collective endeavour, the social grace that less clock-bound societies must practise.

The information is in the people, not in your head.

An idea is always a generalization, and generalization is a property of thinking. To generalize means to think.

It is quite an illusion to imagine that one adjusts to reality essentially without the use of language and that language is merely an incidental means of solving specific problems of communication or reflection.

You as an audience can look at these things as films, but I remember them as social experiences.

If you watch a group of schoolchildren eating lunch together, you cannot help but notice how it is a comically Lilliputian version of the adult thing - the cocked eyebrows of conversation, the reaching for condiments, the shovelling of food into tiny mouths.

Communities don't think, don't believe, don't want, don't have needs, don't have interests and don't make decisions. Only individuals have minds that generate desires and needs - and only individuals can make choices and decisions.

Playing is my way of thinking, talking, communicating.

Evolutionary psychologists suggest that humans experienced evolutionary benefits from brain developments that included aversion to loss and risk and from instincts for cooperation that helped strengthen communities.

Looking ahead, future generations may learn their social skills from robots in the first place. The cute yellow Keepon robot from Carnegie Mellon University has shown the ability to facilitate social interactions with autistic children. Morphy at the University of Washington happily teaches gestures to children by demonstration.

Society exists only as a mental concept; in the real world there are only individuals.

Work for most people is really very social, and the actual thinking is often done in community.

As states we act, in general, and in most cases, exactly like the individuals of whom our society is composed.

Peers often matter more than parents.

Most of us are a lot more comfortable thinking about and writing about individuals than institutions.