The Social Development of the Child

Abstract

The manifestations of human social behavior and the individual properties of man's personality are extremely diverse and dynamic. The whole variety of behavior is complexly socially governed. Many facts of a person's mental life cannot be thoroughly understood without uncovering the social situation in which the development of that person's personality took place. The elucidation of determinants influencing the social behavior of the individual enables representatives of the social sciences (psychology, sociology, education, history, anthropology, etc.) to understand many seemingly contradictory and difficult to explain manifestations of the person among other people. The same determinants, however, can give rise to a variety of different forms of behavior and lead to different personality structures; in human behavior, much depends on what significance a particular social situation acquires for the individual and what personal meaning some system of values has for him. Lomov was quite correct in his view that psychology should explain the sources of real contradictions, the underpinnings of qualitative transformations in the psychological development of the individual, and the systemic nature of psychological phenomena and their determinants and, furthermore, should examine mental phenomena in all their complex dynamics [10. P. 14].