Hi Nick,

Thank you for your comments.

Politicians (and other public speakers) are strongly counseled to make their messages accessible to a given audience. I think that explanation is more than adequate in this context.

After decades of active research into how people’s thinking develops over time, I can say with confidence that there is no such thing as a “strategist” level (as characterized in post-Loevinger accounts of the SCT). Development is not that simple. This is one reason why my colleagues and I avoid labels. The other is that labeling feeds several built-in cognitive biases that contribute to prejudice.

BTW: Even young children learn to manipulate others by adapting their verbal behavior. Their efforts are less sophisticated than those of adults but can be quite effective. For example, when I was 10 years old, my family moved to North Carolina in the middle of the school year. My new 5th-grade teacher year joined my classmates in a bullying campaign against the “Yankee,” who had just arrived in their classroom. I was devastated. Over the following summer, I learned to sound like a native (accent & vocabulary). In essence, I learned to “pass,” and the rest of my time in North Carolina was much easier. In this example, we see both the power of a label to reinforce prejudicial behavior and the power of changing verbal behavior to improve an outcome. Neither is a feature of a particular developmental level. Both teacher and children became bullies, and it was a child who discovered an adaptive strategy.