20 Examples of Assimilation and Accommodation

According to the constructivist model of the psyche, also known as Theory of cognitive development, proposed by the Swiss Jean Piaget, there are two fundamental concepts for the acquisition of knowledge in man, which are those of assimilation and accommodation.

Examples of assimilation

1. A child sees a zebra for the first time, and misnames it a horse, a animal more familiar to the order of his experiences.
2. When we start to learn a new language, we use the one we already use as a reference to “translate” everything to already conceived mental schemes.
3. An infant receives a bottle for the first time and immediately tries to suck it, as the experience with it maternal nipple has prepared him to relate to the object (to almost everything, actually) in that way.
4. A child plays with rubber balls, until he receives a rag one. The similar shapes of the ball will allow you to recognize it as such, despite later discovering its differences.
5. The Darwinian grasp: Babies hold everything that comes close to their hands, as it is an evolutionary reflex incorporated into the very early psyche.
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6. The child learns the concept of a dog from illustrations of large dogs or perhaps a large dog at home. Later, he is confronted with a small dog and mistakenly thinks that it is another animal, such as a cat.
7. The Rorschach psychological test, consisting of showing the patient a series of ink spots, goes to perspectives already assimilated as an exploratory form of the patient's psyche: “what do you see here?".
8. When the Spanish conquerors arrived in America, they described the New World in their chronicles based on the patterns already incorporated into their culture. That prevented them from seeing reality as it was, as they expected it to be like theirs.
9. An eleven-year-old has an idea of ​​a structured family (father and mother), which is in check before the divorce of his parents, which subjects the idea to a crisis, as it does not fit into their concepts previous.
10. A person with low self-esteem he can interpret, based on his own precepts, a congratulation for his work performance as a form of pity or aggression.

Examples of accommodation

1. The same child who contemplates the zebra for the first time is struck by the fact that it is another animal, and the child learns to distinguish it from horses, incorporating a new learning.
2. When we have already learned a new language, their mental structures are in common management and we do not need "Translate" the thought to a previous language, but we can elaborate the thought directly in the new.
3. The same infant with the bottle eventually learns to hold it in order to suck it, which he should not do with the mother's womb, incorporating a difference to similar objects.
4. The same child with the rag ball tries to bounce it and realizes that it does not react in the same way as the rubber balls. His ball concept is expanded to accommodate the new distinction between similar objects.
5. Despite the Darwinian grasp, the baby will grow up and learn to discriminate what to hold and what not to hold.
6. The same child who has learned the idea of ​​a dog as something big and confronts the small dog will learn by being corrected to accommodate the new possibility of dog within the higher category and to distinguish it from the category of cats
7. A scientific discovery often starts from ideas assimilated and accepted as true, but it can also force scientists to reorganize what they took for granted and to rethink previously learned content in order to finding.
8. The openness towards foreign cultures goes through the accommodation of diversity in more worldly schemes. broader, more democratic, and more pluralistic, all of which challenge easy and easy ethnocentric structures preconceived.
9. The same eleven-year-old of divorced parents, over time, will learn to accommodate more complex ideas that will allow him to maintain the bond with her parents even though they are not together in that moment.
10. With psychotherapy and inner work, the person with low self-esteem will learn to discern the congratulations of the pity and you will have to internally accommodate the social reality of your environment from a different way.

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