Two, 13-year-old girls in Waukesha County Wisconsin, stabbed a classmate 19 times in an attempt to appease Slender Man. Slender Man is a fictional video game character, who is described as, “an unnaturally thin, faceless creature who preys on children” (Slender Man Stabbing). These two girls had read about Slender Man online and decided to stab their classmate to appease him, the two girls planned, after the stabbing to walk 300 miles to Nicolet National Forest, where they planned to live in Slender Man's mansion as his servant. The courts later decided that these two girls should be tried as adults for their crimes. Being tried as adults, the girls could serve up to 65 years in prison, where if they were tried as juveniles, the longest that they could serve would be…show more content… According to Piaget’s stages of cognitive development, the two teenage girls that were involved in the Slender Man stabbing, were in the stage of formal operations. This means according to Piaget, that adolescents ages 11 to 15/20 are capable of logical thinking and are able to think abstractly. They are capable of forming hypotheses and testing these hypotheses systematically (Arnett, 2013). So if you asked Piaget, he would say that those girls were capable of thinking like adults. Although, his theory of cognitive development was later expanded upon, so that formal operations was no longer the last stage of development, Postformal Operations became the final stage. Postformal operations is a “type of thinking beyond formal operations, involving greater awareness of the complexity of real-life situations, such as the use of pragmatism and reflexive judgement” (Arnett, 2013). The stage of postformal operations is not reached until at least the age of 20. That being said, these girls had not reached the post formal operations stage, thus these adolescents did not think the same way as adults
