Theories and Worldview Essay
Breanne Crow
Liberty University
PSYC 210-B09: Developmental Psychology
Dr. Erikson
May 11, 2020
Theories and Worldview Essay
People all over the world have something in common. Regardless of someone’s religion, skin
color, or culture, we all have our personal worldview. The Merriam-Webster dictionary (n.d.)
describes a worldview as “a comprehensive conception or apprehension of the world especially
from a specific standpoint.” Our worldview is a set of beliefs and traditions that normally differ
between cultures. These worldviews explain one’s experiences, as well as increase bias. This
creates a culture’s stereotypes and prejudices they hold against the rest of the world that does not
share that worldview. Our worldview affects how we see everything, including implementation
of developmental theories.
Development Theory
Development theories describe how changes occur in the society and people within. One of the
significant development theories is Erikson’s stages of psychosocial development by Eric
Erickson. According to the theory, an individual’s personality develops in eight stages from
childhood to adulthood (McLeod, 2018). As people grow, they experience various positive and
negative psychosocial conflicts and try to navigate the situations. A healthier personality in an
individual indicates successful completion of previous stages (McLeod, 2018). The main idea of
the theory is that a person faces crises that may be easy or difficult to solve at each level. For
instance, the first stage constitutes trust versus mistrust. If the child gets provided quality care,
they grow while trusting other people, while one who lacks attention ends up lacking confidence
(McLeod, 2018). The defining characteristic is that the crisis in each stage occurs due to
interactions between an individual’s psychological needs and the needs of society.
My Worldview
One of the greatest worldviews is the spiritual growth and life of Christians. As a Christian, I
believe in the fellowship and quest for spiritual growth. By assessing one’s religious narrative, it
is easy to attain spiritual growth. Additionally, communing with others and expressing oneself in
worship helps one get closer to God (Ashbrook, 2019). A spiritual view allows one to create
meaning in their beliefs and assumptions about the Deity.
As with psychosocial development, spiritual growth has different stages as a new believer to
maturity. A new believer seeks and tries to understand and learn about fellowship (Ashbrook,
2019). Each level has different revelations and conflicts since one knows and correlates their
initial beliefs to those they acquire. The growth of one stage results in a more informed and
aware individual for the next stage. Therefore, my spiritual growth worldview is compatible with
Erickson’s theory as it shows the different stages of development and conflicts arising in them.
In conclusion, worldviews help understand how different people interpret and analyze the society
around them. Since individuals grow in various circumstances, everyone possesses a unique
perspective in life. When studying development theory, it is, therefore, essential to learn and
understand the multiple worldviews. Consideration of worldviews when learning development
theories creates a better understanding and interpretation of people’s perspectives. This step also
promotes a clear understanding of cultures and appreciation of different individuals. This
information is helpful in future coursework since it shows the importance of worldviews and
development theories and ensures they get prioritized during the study.
Why Worldview Matters
When studying theories of development, one must take worldview into consideration.
Worldview beliefs are existential, evaluative, or prescriptive beliefs about what exists, what is
good, and how people should act. These specific kinds of beliefs are the focus of worldview
psychology, a sub-discipline that aims in part to taxonomise these beliefs and investigate their
explanative and predictive power (Koltko-Rivera, Citation2004; Nilsson, Citation2014; Taves et
al., Citation2018). The current project contributed to these aims, by developing an inventory to
measure three prominent worldviews – spirituality, naturalism, and agnosticism.
Various philosophers and psychologists have worked to identify the distinct dimensions that
worldviews might inform, that is, different categories of irreducible claims about the nature of
reality. Recently, Koltko-Rivera (Citation2004) reviewed the major 20th century interpretations
of the worldview construct, and used the work of earlier thinkers to develop a collated list that
arranges different dimensions of worldview beliefs into seven groups based on their subject
matter.
Koltko-Rivera’s (Citation2004) collated worldview model includes seven groups. Each has a set
of dimensions of belief that have specific options that may or may not be mutually-exclusive to
each other. The human nature group includes dimensions referring to beliefs about human
morality, mutability, and complexity. The will group comprises dimensions of personal agency
and determinism. The cognition group includes dimensions related to sources of knowledge and
the link between consciousness and ego. The behaviour group contains dimensions concerning
appropriate conduct, the source and scope of moral codes, and factors that influence life
outcomes.
The interpersonal group includes dimensions of belief about proper relationships and collectives.
The truth group includes dimensions of beliefs about the existence and accessibility of absolute
and objective truth. The world and life group has dimensions of beliefs about ontology,
cosmology, deities and nature-consciousness, universal justice, well-being, humans and nature,
and the value and purpose of life in general. Although upcoming research might indicate changes
to the dimensions of this collated model, we can understand worldviews to be amalgamated
structures of beliefs within these sort of dimensions.
No unidimensional construct could capture individual differences across the breadth of
worldview dimensions, and so multiple measures must be developed and refined, like trait
lexicons, into hierarchical models. This work has been hindered by the treatment of seemingly
oppositional worldviews as mutually exclusive, which has resulted in limited representation of
certain worldviews (e.g., non-religious worldviews; Taves et al., Citation2018). Worldview
beliefs are dimensional variations rather than discrete categories (Koltko-Rivera, Citation2004),
and people can hold contradictory belief-systems (Legare et al., Citation2012). Therefore, the
development of belief taxonomies must acknowledge that seemingly contradictory worldviews
can co-exist in varying degrees across individuals and over time. Psychological theories would
then provide more complete models of personhood, and benefit from the explanatory and
predictive contributions of more comprehensive worldview models (Koltko-Rivera,
Citation2004; Nilsson, Citation2014).
Spirituality, naturalism, and agnosticism
Wilhelm Dilthey was one of the first philosophers to discuss worldviews, outlining three types
(Naugle, Citation2002). First, the idealism of freedom worldview reflects modern spirituality,
emphasising the liberty of the mind (or soul, consciousness, etc.) from the material world and the
physical laws of causation. Second, the naturalist worldview described reality as a non-conscious
machine understood through the physical observation of causative laws. Third, the objective
idealism worldview reflects agnosticism in its rejection of both naturalism and idealism of
freedom, positing reality as an inseparable macrocosm impossible to know from the microcosmic
perspective, and therefore, “never fully comprehended” (Naugle, Citation2002, p. 97).
As well as being represented in the earliest worldview theories, spirituality, naturalism, and
agnosticism also appear to broadly span dimensions of Koltko-Rivera’s (Citation2004) collated
worldview model. That is, of the 42 total dimensions that cover the seven groups in the collated
model, many of the dimensions relate to beliefs that seem directly relevant to worldviews of
spirituality, naturalism, and agnosticism – for example, dimensions such as ontology, deity,
agency, well-being, and scope of truth. These three worldviews appear to have an especially
broad presence across the possible dimensions of worldview belief.
Spirituality has received attention in psychology, but non-religious constructs such as naturalism
and agnosticism have been misrepresented as a lack of spirituality, and therefore overlooked
(Streib & Klein, Citation2013; Taves et al., Citation2018). This is a problem for several reasons.
First, worldviews are dimensional rather than categorical (Koltko-Rivera, Citation2004). That is,
worldview constructs represent individual tendencies that manifest to varying levels across
person and context. This interactionist and dimensional view of worldviews is important,
because evidence shows that people can interpret events using both natural and supernatural
perspectives simultaneously (Legare et al., Citation2012). As individual difference variables,
spirituality and naturalism are conceptually contradictory but not mutually exclusive.
Another reason to represent naturalism and agnosticism as worldview constructs in their own
right is to allow for proper investigation of their explanative and predictive powers. For example,
evidence suggests that belief in science has some similar psychological outcomes as belief in
God (Farias et al., Citation2013). Naturalism may have some outcomes in common with
spirituality, and it needs to be represented as a distinct construct in order that these be accounted
for in research.
Accurate conceptualization and measurement of spirituality, naturalism, and agnosticism as
distinct worldviews would benefit future investigations into their comparative impacts, potential
interactions, and broader psychological functions. The following sections define these
worldviews, and report three studies that together present a new measure for spirituality,
naturalism, and agnosticism as related yet distinct worldviews.
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