From: jimruttshow8596
Zach Stein, a writer, educator, and futurist, works to bring a greater sense of sanity and justice to education [00:00:52]. He has appeared on The Jim Rutt Show previously, discussing his book “Education in a Time Between Worlds” in episodes 57, 60, and 62 [00:01:05]. Stein’s academic background includes studying philosophy and religion at Hampshire College, and educational neuroscience, human development, and the philosophy of education at Harvard [00:01:41]. He is also the co-founder of Lectica, a non-profit organization focused on research-based, justice-oriented reform of large-scale standardized testing in K-12, higher education, and business [00:01:50].
Hierarchical Complexity: A Core Concept
Hierarchical complexity is a central concept in developmental psychology [00:03:10]. Its emergence in psychology has a historical story, dating back almost a hundred years to Piaget’s 1923 publication, “The Language and Thought of the Child” [00:04:02]. Earlier shades of the concept can be found in the works of James Mark Baldwin, Herbert Spencer, and even natural philosophies of mind [00:04:15].
The concept of hierarchical complexity is seen as a ubiquitous property of mental processes [00:04:25]. In the 1980s and 1990s, a “neo-Piagetian consensus” emerged on the formal definition of stages across lifespan development [00:04:36]. This consensus distilled a core property that characterizes developmental differences from infancy to adulthood [00:04:56]. Hierarchical complexity is a universal characteristic used to describe development across the lifespan, cultures, and individuals [00:05:37].
Vertical vs. Horizontal Complexity
- Horizontal complexity refers to doing more of the same task at the same level of difficulty [00:06:40]. An example is tying a thousand shoes, which is difficult due to quantity rather than a qualitative increase in skill [00:07:14]. Similarly, taking an elevator from the lobby to the seventh floor involves a series of discrete, equally complex tasks that don’t significantly affect each other [00:11:25].
- Vertical complexity or hierarchical complexity involves performing a qualitatively more complex task, which is difficult in a different way [00:06:44]. For instance, making a shoe is hierarchically much more complex than tying a shoe [00:07:07]. Disassembling and reassembling a lawnmower engine is a hierarchically complex task, as every step depends on others and requires ancillary skills like organizing parts [00:11:55]. This requires coordinating sensory-motor systems with abstract processes held in mind, often mediated by language and diagrams [00:13:51].
Hierarchical Integration and Skill Construction
Hierarchical complexity unfolds throughout a lifespan and even minute-to-minute during learning, as it is a ubiquitous process in constructing new skills from existing ones [00:08:03]. For example, before tying a shoe, one needs to master manipulating individual laces and understanding concepts like tension at a muscular level [00:08:25]. This mastery is then applied to a higher-order skill like folding strings in a particular way to make a knot [00:08:42]. This process of “hierarchical integration” means that many lower-order skills combine to form a single, qualitatively new, more complex skill [00:09:01].
Connection to Cognitive Science and Neuroscience
The concept of hierarchical complexity is deeply connected to “chunking,” where a lot more information can be loaded into a single term as experience grows [00:16:37]. Chunking sensory-motor systems is different from chunking multiple theories of biological evolution into a higher-order theory [00:17:40]. Chunking is a ubiquitous property that extends to reflexes and nervous system action, such as the eye distilling signals for the visual cortex [00:18:01].
Kurt Fischer, a prominent neo-Piagetian, argued that neurological structures are organized hierarchically in terms of hierarchical complexity [00:18:56]. Michael Commons’s articulation of hierarchical complexity suggests it is a general property of information across the biological spectrum [00:19:05]. Fischer’s dissertation observed the growth of hierarchical skill in monkeys and pigeons [00:19:17]. The “chunking” process, where lower-order processes are integrated into an emergent higher-order process, is a fundamental, almost ontological, property [00:19:37]. This aligns with the science of complexity, which describes the emergence of complexity from simplicity over multiple levels [00:19:54].
Piaget’s insight was that epistemology and psychology after Darwin must weave the human into a larger evolutionary story [00:22:43]. Hierarchical complexity is consistent with evolution’s account of how things evolve [00:22:23].
Working Memory and Environmental Demands
The limited capacity of working memory (e.g., seven plus or minus two items) is a significant driver for the emergence of hierarchical complexity [00:27:27]. To tackle more difficult problems, chunks of information must become denser and more abstract [00:29:05].
However, the working memory bottleneck is not the sole driver [00:29:50]. The complexity of the environment and the innate human “epistemic motivation” (the need to understand, not just succeed) also propel the mind to higher levels of inquiry and knowledge [00:29:40]. Piaget distinguished between success (accomplishing something) and understanding (knowing why it worked) [00:30:02]. Humans cross a threshold where they desire to understand, which is largely absent in most animals [00:30:13].
If an environment lacks complexity or consistency, the nervous system does not expect or seek out complexity, potentially hindering development [00:32:03]. Early childhood environments are crucial for developing sensory-motor skills through exploration of diverse environments [00:45:40]. Deprivation of such exploration can lead to developmental delays [00:45:49].
The Hierarchical Complexity Stack
The “hierarchical complexity stack” describes levels of development:
- Sensory-Motor Tier (Actions): This is the earliest tier. It begins with single actions like focusing on a face [00:42:58]. This progresses to coordinating actions (e.g., looking and reaching to knock something off a table) [00:43:08], and then to coordinating systems of sensory-motor skills (e.g., looking, reaching, grasping, and drinking from a cup) [00:43:17]. Hierarchical integration occurs very rapidly in younger ages [00:44:44].
- Representational Tier: This tier involves using linguistic signs to represent non-present realities [00:48:12]. It allows for entertaining counterfactuals or talking about Santa Claus [00:48:19]. Early representations are single utterances or gestures (e.g., “mommy,” “doggy,” “bedtime”) [00:48:32]. These can be mapped together (e.g., “mommy water” meaning “Mom, I would like some water”) [00:48:40]. Eventually, “representational systems” emerge, allowing children to tell complex, descriptive stories and memorize vast amounts of information [00:49:02]. Representations “chunk” or contain sensory-motor experience and processes [00:50:03].
- Abstract Tier: Abstractions integrate many examples of representations into higher-order concepts [00:50:25]. Unlike representations, abstractions cannot be directly pointed to (e.g., “quality family time” is an abstraction of bedtime, dinner time, etc.) [00:50:36]. This tier is crucial for civilization and democratic participation, requiring formal and systemic thinking [00:51:00]. Abstraction requires education [00:51:09].
- Principled Tier: This tier involves multi-systemic integration, such as creating a single theory of justice based on a notion of fairness that transcends and includes prior notions [01:09:32]. It allows for “norming the norms” or making rules about the making of rules [01:10:37].
Societal Complexity and Individual Capacities
The evolution of societies can be thought of in terms of the requisite complexity needed to achieve social coordination [00:52:45]. Jürgen Habermas, building on Kohlberg and Piaget, explored this by analyzing historical documents like European constitutions to demonstrate increasing hierarchical complexity in conceptions of government legitimacy [00:53:30].
However, applying hierarchical complexity to cultural evolution needs caution [00:53:34]. It is a “misapplication” to view indigenous or medieval cultures as “children” or “young adolescents” compared to modern “adults” [00:55:08]. While societies have become more complex, placing greater educational demands on individuals [00:56:27], this does not mean prior cultures were less complex in their own domains or individual experience [00:53:06]. Technology, especially digital technology, has also made individuals handle a great deal more complexity [00:57:06].
Hierarchical Complexity vs. General Intelligence (Spearman’s G)
Hierarchical complexity measures differ significantly from concepts like “general intelligence” or Spearman’s G [00:58:50]. While IQ tests may correlate with hierarchical complexity in particular domains, they act as a “summary statistic” that oversimplifies the human mind [00:59:05].
Unlike general intelligence tests, hierarchical complexity assessments do not assign a fixed “level” to an entire person [00:59:18]. Instead, they assign a hierarchical complexity level to a particular task accomplished by a person [00:59:23]. For example, someone might demonstrate paradigmatic reasoning in physics but only sensory-motor work in small engine repair [01:01:29]. Over-classifying individuals or populations based on a single number is seen as a “demi-reality” and a “holdover from eugenics” [01:00:08].
While some generalizations can be made about how well populations adapt to society’s task demands [01:04:26], classifying whole populations as being at a specific level is highly problematic due to insufficient empirical data and the risk of misuse as a “social sorting mechanism” or “bludgeon” [01:03:12].
Lectica and its Application
Lectica, co-founded by Zach Stein, applies the model of hierarchical complexity to create standardized developmental assessments [01:13:20]. These assessments analyze open-ended human performance, typically linguistic, to identify the deeper hierarchical structure being expressed [01:13:26].
Lectica’s innovation, pioneered by Theo Dawson, involved applying standard psychometric tools, specifically the Rasch model, to hierarchial complexity to enable standardized cognitive development assessment [01:14:01]. The goal is to replace traditional multiple-choice, curriculum-constraining standardized tests (like the SAT) with diagnostic, developmental assessments [01:15:21].
Traditional tests simply state pass or fail, whereas Lectica’s assessments provide a diagnostic report that shows what a person understands and suggests the next best thing for them to learn [01:15:46]. This is possible because the assessments are based on empirically grounded, rational reconstructions of specific learning sequences [01:16:03].
Lectica developed assessments for the K-12 system and also for adults in leadership, management, business, and government contexts [01:17:03].
Leadership Development
In leadership development, hierarchical complexity is used to identify and grow leaders [01:18:28]. A “complexity gap” exists between the increasing task demands of most leadership roles (e.g., in the NSA or a major urban school district) and the capacities of leaders [01:19:19].
Research found that struggles often emerged in domains of:
- Perspective-taking: The ability to imagine others’ reactions [01:19:54].
- Perspective-seeking: Proactively gathering others’ perspectives [01:20:00].
- Perspective-integration: Combining multiple perspectives [01:20:01].
It was observed that individuals highly developed in one area of expertise (e.g., engineering problem-solving) might have a complexity deficit in other areas, like perspective-taking, and may not even realize it [01:20:45]. This “expertise fallacy” is seen in professions where specialized knowledge doesn’t transfer to other domains (e.g., medical doctors in investing) [01:21:52].
While some leaders physically could not handle the number and complexity of perspectives required due to too many reports, many simply did not see it as relevant to take others’ perspectives unless prompted [01:29:29]. This suggests that non-democratic and zero-sum competitive work environments can disincentivize or lower the salience of perspective-taking [01:30:07].
Lectica’s leadership assessments are designed for promoting leadership development, not for hiring or firing [01:24:06]. They provide diagnostic reports with educational supports [01:24:02]. They can also be used to set a minimum complexity threshold for roles, but the primary value is diagnostic [01:24:26]. These measures are more “ecologically valid” (relevant to the job) than personality or IQ tests [01:25:20]. Training and certification are required for using Lectica assessments to ensure appropriate and responsible application, avoiding their misuse as a “bludgeon” like medical measures or IQ tests [01:26:22].