David C. Witherington

Department of Psychology; University of New Mexico

Witherington has been a developmental scientist at the University of New Mexico since 2002. His conceptual work focuses on delineating, elucidating, and resolving conceptual confusions within psychological and developmental research and theory. His metatheoretical writings have targeted such topics as how to conceptualize development and its process dynamics as well as how to conceptualize relations between developmental and evolutionary change. His empirical work focuses on perception-action, cognitive, and emotional development in infancy and early childhood, as well as on the phenomenological study of lived experience at various points of development.

David Witherington received his B.A. in Psychology from the University of Iowa and his Ph.D. in Developmental Science from the University of California Berkeley in 1998. He did a post-doc at the University of Virginia from 1998-2001 and has been at the University of New Mexico in the Department of Psychology from 2002 to the present, becoming an Associate Professor in 2008.

He is currently Editor-in-Chief of the journal Human Development, has served on the editorial boards of the International Journal of Behavioral Development (2018-present) and Educational Psychologist (2019-present), and has served as President of the Jean Piaget Society from 2020 to 2023. In 2022, alongside Robert Lickliter and David S. Moore, he served as a conference organizer for the 51st Annual Meeting of the Jean Piaget Society, the theme for which concerned what the extended evolutionary synthesis means for reintroducing development into the study of evolution.

Witherington’s work is devoted to examining the metatheoretical assumptions underlying the conceptualization and study of processes of systematic change at different levels of organization and in relation to one another, from the microgenetic level of real-time change to the ontogenetic level of developmental change to the phylogenetic level of evolutionary change.

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"Selective pressures do not consolidate, stabilize, or fine-tune developmental variation at the level of individual ontogeny, only at the level of the population in evolutionary time. Rather, it is ahistorical laws of self-organization that characterize what is possible in the dynamics of relation among developmental resources – that account for which combinations of developmental resources are viable and stable in relation to one another and for how those resources interrelate as systems. Thus, the statistical regularities that reflect an increased representation of phenotypic form in a population should not be reified into antecedent forces of guidance in the construction of individual ontogenies."

(Human Development, 2016, Volume 59, p. 219)

Selected Publications

Witherington, D. C., Lickliter, R., & Moore, D. S. (2023). What taking development seriously means for evolutionary theory. Human Development, 67, 318–327. https://doi.org/10.1159/000535723

Witherington, D., & Vandiver, T. (2023). Metatheory. In J. Mattingly (Ed.), The SAGE encyclopedia of theory in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (Vol. 1, pp. 592-594). SAGE Publications, Inc., https://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781071872383.n134

Narvaez, D., Moore, D. S., Witherington, D. C., Vandiver, T. I., & Lickliter, R. (2022). Evolving evolutionary psychology. American Psychologist, 77, 424-438.

Witherington, D. C., & Boom, J. (2019b). Developmental dynamics past, present, and future. Human Development, 63, 264-276.

Witherington, D. C., & Lickliter, R. (2016). Integrating development and evolution in psychological science: Evolutionary developmental psychology, developmental systems, and explanatory pluralism. Human Development, 59, 200-234.

Witherington, D. C. (2015). Dynamic systems in developmental science. In W. F. Overton & P. C. M. Molenaar (Vol. Eds.) & R. M. Lerner (Ed.-in-Chief), Handbook of child psychology and developmental science. Vol. 1: Theory & method (7^th ed., pp. 63-112). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.

Witherington, D. C. (2014). Self-organization and explanatory pluralism: Avoiding the snares of reductionism in developmental science. Research in Human Development, 11, 22-36.

Witherington, D. C. (2011). Taking emergence seriously: The centrality of circular causality for dynamic systems approaches to development. Human Development, 54, 66-92.
Complete List of Publications

For a complete list of publications, click here.

David C. Witherington

Department of Psychology; University of New Mexico

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Publications

Selected Publications

Complete List of Publications

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