Why Most Adults Never Learn to Think Differently
How Robert Kegan's Three Stages of Adult Development completely changed my worldview.
A year ago, in Helsinki, I attended a lecture on foresight that included a graph that has been with me ever since.
It wasn’t about technology or trends—but something far more fundamental: why some people can navigate complexity while others get lost.
The graph illustrated Robert Kegan’s research on adult development, revealing an uncomfortable truth: most of us stop growing psychologically sometime in our twenties. We collect new experiences, sure, but we don’t fundamentally transform how we make sense of the world.
Kegan, a Harvard psychologist, identified five stages of development. The first two stages typically appear in childhood and adolescence, and approximately 6% of individuals never progress beyond these stages.
The rest spread out across the following, starting with Stage 3 and what Keagan calls “The Socialised Mind.”
At Stage 3, our identity is essentially crowd-sourced. We are what our relationships, culture, and social expectations tell us we are. We seek approval and adopt beliefs from those around us, struggling to discern what we genuinely want beyond what others expect.
Sound familiar?
58% of adults are allegedly at this stage of development.
At Stage 4, “The Self-Authoring Mind”, you finally become the author of your own identity and values. You can question social norms, set personal goals free from other people’s expectations, and make decisions based on internal principles rather than external validation.
About 20-35% of adult individuals have this capacity.
And Stage 5? “The Self-Transforming Mind” represents about 1% of adults. Here, even your carefully constructed identity becomes flexible. You can hold contradictions, embrace multiple perspectives, and see your own beliefs as useful tools rather than fundamental truths.
The core mechanism of Kegan’s model is what he calls the “subject-to-object shift”—learning to step back from things that once defined you and get perspectives on them instead.
Anyone who’s been to therapy knows this process. You transition from being controlled by your patterns to being able to see, reflect on, and work with them. It’s the difference between “I am angry” and “I notice I'm feeling angry.”
But here's the thing: this development isn’t automatic. Unlike childhood development, adult psychological growth requires deliberate effort. There are no guaranteed growth spurts. Some people transform through crisis—a breakup, illness, or other life disruption. Others choose a path of intentional inner work.
I believe this model has had a profound impact on me because it has fundamentally changed my perspective on the world and the reasons behind its current state.
When I look at our world—the conspiracy theories, the tribal thinking, the inability to hold nuance—I see a population where most people are operating from Stage 3. They’re embedded in their group’s reality, unable to step back and examine it independently.
Meanwhile, I would dare to say that the complexity of our world demands Stage 4 and 5 thinking. Climate change, AI governance, global economics—these aren’t problems you can solve by following the crowd or sticking rigidly to ideology.
Having only 1% of people capable of the meta-thinking our moment requires? That might explain why everything feels so broken.
Which stage sounds like you? And what would it take to move beyond it?
If you want to learn more about this model and the different stages, you can find a longer text on my website here: How our ability to navigate the world is connected to self-development
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