Can someone give me an example of cognitive disequilibrium?
A good example would be the age-old game of “peek-a-boo” with an infant. When you cover your face, the infant thinks that you disappeared. But then you remove your hands from your face, and you appear. To resolve the conflict between how you could be there one moment and gone the next, the infant learns “object constancy,” i.e. a person still exists even though they are temporarily gone. At a higher level, how could International Falls, Minnesota recently have set a record low temperature of -40F, when we hear so much about Global Warming? That question creates a cognitive disequilibrium until a person resolves the disequilibrium by understanding that temperatures on the earth’s surface can fluctuate wildly, even though the average (the mean) temperature for the surface of our planet is rising. That realization then restores cognitive equilibrium.
