The Development of Social Cognition

Suzanne Hala

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781317775003
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Developmental Psychology
• Index: Psychology

The Development of Social Cognition presents a lively, up-to-date examination of both the classical issues and contemporary understanding of theory and research in social cognitive development. The initial chapters highlight one of the central, theoretical tensions in the field, which is whether the development of understanding people is fundamentally different from understanding things. Subsequent chapters are devoted to development across specific areas of social cognition from infancy through to adolescence. The text ends with a comprehensive examination of the development of moral aspects of social cognition.

PART ONE

Theoretical and Conceptual Issues

CHAPTER ONE

Introduction

Suzanne Hala

University of Cambridge, UK

Social cognition, very broadly defined, is thinking about people. More specifically it involves our attempts to make sense of human action in terms of factors such as how people think, perceive, infer, feel, react, and so on. Consider the following passage from Charlotte Bronte’s Villette (1853/1984). Earlier in the day, Lucy Snowe, the central protagonist, has quarrelled with an old acquaintance. She now regrets her previous outburst, believing herself to have behaved badly.

Long I tried to catch his eye. Again and again that eye just met mine; but, having nothing to say, it withdrew, and I was baffled. After tea, he sat, sad and quiet, reading a book. I wished I could have dared to go and sit near him, but it seemed that if I ventured to take that step, he would infallibly evidence hostility and indignation. I longed to speak out, and I dared not whisper. His mother left the room; then, moved by insupportable regret, I just murmured the words “Dr Bretton”.

He looked up from his book; his eyes were not cold or malevolent, his mouth was not cynical; he was ready and willing to hear what I might have to say: his spirit was of a vintage too mellow and generous to sour in one thunder-clap. (p. 272)

In this excerpt we can see that Lucy has certain expectations as to how Dr Bretton will act in this encounter. The first thing we are struck by is Lucy’s attempt to communicate with Dr Bretton through making eye contact, and her surprise when the attempt failed to engage her partner in a communicative exchange. We understand too, her apprehension about seeking closer contact with her friend. We might explain her reluctance as caused by her conviction that Dr Bretton has every reason to feel angry and to react to any approach from her with scorn or condemnation. When Lucy does overcome her fear, because it is superseded by the remorse she feels, she is surprised that Dr Bretton responds with unexpected civility. Lucy has been wrong in her original prediction as to how Dr Bretton would react, a prediction based on her belief that she had wronged him. To make sense of Dr Bretton’s seemingly anomalous reaction, Lucy is forced to look beyond the situation at hand and to look for personal characteristics within Dr Bretton himself – perhaps in the form of enduring traits such as generosity and kindness.

This passage reflects a very complex interweaving of several cognitive, affective and personality factors. Nonetheless, it is almost impossible to imagine even the simplest of human interactions devoid of social cognition. Take emotions for instance: how we feel in relation to another’s actions is dependent in important respects on what we think and know, how we interpret that other person’s intentions. If, for example, someone breaks your favourite mug, whether you feel angry or perhaps just disappointed, depends partly on whether you think the other person smashed the mug deliberately or whether it was simply an accident. So your emotional reaction in part depends on how you think about or cognitively assess the situation. A young child who has not yet achieved the maturity to distinguish between intentional and unintentional acts, however, is more liable to respond similarly in both instances.

The development of an awareness and understanding of what people think, feel and do is important for children’s effective functioning in their social worlds. Such understanding enables children to predict, explain, and even manipulate people’s actions. But what exactly do young children understand about people? Where does this understanding come from and how does it develop? The chapters in this book take up these and other questions as they provide a survey of development across various domains of social cognitive understanding.

The study of social cognition does not reflect a unitary perspective but encompasses a variety of theoretical and research traditions. This diversity has given rise to a number of tensions in the literature, that will become evident throughout this book. One such conflict, reflected in several of the chapters, is the question of whether understanding of persons primarily results from individual cognitive growth or is better explained by social processes. As will be evident throughout this volume, contemporary research in social cognitive development is moving away from such dichotomies and towards an increasingly integrated view.

A corollary question to consider is whether our understanding of the social world develops differently from our understanding of the physical world. Clearly, people have different properties from objects. People have intentions, beliefs, desires, emotions, perceptions, personalities; objects do not. When acted upon, people usually act back in ways quite different from inanimate objects. People act and react in ways that are connected to their internal states and traits. This difference between the qualities characteristic of people as compared to objects has led to a second ongoing debate in the study of developing social cognition: the question of whether understanding persons involves a fundamentally different acquisition process than does understanding things. To introduce these and other points of deliberation, this volume begins with a look at two of the most important theories that historically shaped the current study of social cognitive development.

THEORIES OF SOCIAL-COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT – TWO PERSPECTIVES

In order to learn how children think about themselves and others, developmental psychologists need, at a minimum, to observe what children of various ages do and to listen to what they say in relation to their social world. But simply gathering the so called “facts” of development would leave a great many gaps in our knowledge of the development of children’s thinking. For, isolated from a cohesive framework for understanding development, such a collection of facts may tell us little about how children grow in their conceptions of their social world. Hence, developmental psychologists turn to theories to provide important frameworks for understanding how children’s knowledge about people matures. One goal of a developmental theory is to provide a description of what develops: obviously a two-year old child’s understanding of the social world is different from an adult’s – but in what sense? Developmental psychologists thus seek to map out how social understanding differs across different ages. Yet developmental psychologists are equally interested in going beyond simply describing what develops to gain an understanding of how more mature ways of thinking emerge from less mature ones. A second important focus of developmental theories then, is attempting to explain the process of development itself – what are the processes that drive development?

The two chapters that follow in this first section provide accounts of the two most influential theories of social cognitive development, the theories of Jean Piaget and Lev Vygotsky. These theoretical underpinnings will be reflected throughout many of the chapters in this book. The chapters by Carpendale (Ch. 2) and Fernyhough (Ch. 3) serve to highlight for readers the major claims made by both of these important theorists and their impact on the current study of social cognitive development.

It is unlikely that any student of developmental psychology could entirely bypass exposure to Piaget’s highly influential theory. Jean Piaget’s theory of genetic epistemology continues to have enormous impact and much of contemporary developmental psychology is either an elaboration of Piaget’s original theory or a challenge to some aspect of it. In Chapter 2, Carpendale provides an in-depth examination of some of the major tenets of the theory, as well as addressing several of the apparent challenges to the original theory. These challenges, according to Carpendale, come about at least partly because of differences in interpretation of Piaget’s original (and changing) theory.

Piaget was interested in developmental changes in both the process of knowing and in the nature of knowledge itself. For Piaget, cognitive growth in general involved a process of adaptation to the environment. Much in the same way that a biological organism adapts to life in its physical environment, the development of children’s thinking was seen as an adaptation to the psychological environment. Though his theory is rooted in biology, Piaget also recognized the importance of the environment. Piaget’s is an interactionist theory wherein the process of development is viewed as a dynamic one in which children play a major role in bringing about advances in their own thinking.

Piaget’s general approach was to say that children actively construct knowledge by selecting and interpreting information in the environment. Piaget argued that all experience is filtered through the child’s current level of understanding. Children’s minds are not like cameras simply taking in copies of reality but the view of reality is dependent in part on the child’s existing cognitive structures. As the mind develops, thinking becomes more in line with reality.

Piaget proposed that the mechanisms driving cognitive development were the same regardless of whether children were trying to understand the animate or inanimate world. Thus, while not viewed as a social theory per se, Piaget’s mechanisms for development can be seen to apply to the emergence and growth of all areas of intelligence, including social understanding. Piaget has been heavily criticized, however, for failing to include social factors directly in his theory. In Chapter 2, Carpendale counters this criticism and proposes an alternative view in which he claims that Piaget’s theory was far from being entirely devoid of social aspects. In support of his view, Carpendale points to new translations of previously unpublished work that highlight some of the early accounts of the development of social understanding.

Certainly the bulk of Piaget’s writings indicate that Piaget’s primary interest was in mapping out children’s understanding of the physical world and the development of logical-mathematical thought. This focus has been taken by some critics as an indicator that Piaget’s theory was inadequate in accounting for how children come to understand their social worlds. Against this criticism, Carpendale argues that the “cold cognition” view focuses only on one aspect of Piaget’s theory. Though Piaget himself devoted most of his work to the emergence of logical scientific thought, Carpendale asserts that such a focus does not preclude social factors in development being accounted for by a broader reading of the theory and that Piaget himself had included several accounts of social development in his works.

While one might well interpret Piaget’s theory to account for development of social understanding, as does Carpendale, it still remains the case that he treated the emergence of social knowledge as essentially no different from other forms of knowledge. In spite of his inclusion of social interactions as contributing to cognitive development, the emphasis in Piaget’s theory was, nevertheless, on the individual child constructing his or her own knowledge. In contrast to this focus on the individual, Vygotsky afforded a central role to social contributions in influencing cognitive growth.

In Chapter 3, Fernyhough introduces readers to Vygotsky’s social-cultural theory, including some important comparisons with Piaget’s theory. There are, in fact, several areas of overlap between these two major theories. Both Vygotsky and Piaget were interested in studying development genetically – or as it unfolds. Both were committed to the idea that development involves some sort of qualitative transformation as new ways of knowing supplant previous ones. In both theories the child arrives at knowledge of the world through activity. The nature of that activity, however, differs substantially between the two theories. For Vygotsky individual development was necessarily embedded in the social context. He saw this embeddedness as central to understanding development, and viewed higher mental functions as primarily derived from interpersonal interactions. In contrast, Piaget emphasized the individual’s own construction of logical systems, and while he does allow that this takes place within a social context, the context is not prime as it is in Vygotsky’s theory.

Most notably, as Fernyhough points out, while Piaget may have characterized the social life of children as developing slowly through the early years, Vygotsky, alternatively, viewed the infant as placed at the centre of social exchanges right from the start. According to Fernyhough, this view of the infant allows developmentalists to ask questions regarding the emergence and nature of social understanding from the very beginning of life. This theme of the social infant will re-emerge with greater elaboration in Franco’s chapter (Ch. 4) on the development of meaning in infancy.

For Vygotsky the process of knowledge acquisition was strongly rooted in social origins. Thinking itself was viewed as a social process. According to this sociocultural approach, children’s emerging abilities appear first in the social plane and only later become internalized. For this reason parents and more able peers were seen to play a prime role in fostering cognitive development. By contrast, Piaget focused more on intra-individual processes, highlighting the importance of children making their own discoveries. Social interactions were important, but it was peers, not parents, who provided the prime social impetus for cognitive advance. In Chapter 2, Carpendale describes the difference between parent and peer relationships as the former being a relationship of constraint and the latter one of co-operation. Co-operation in this sense does not mean “getting along” so much as it means attempting to solve a joint problem. In this way interactions with peers are seen as vital because they provide conflicting viewpoints that potentially result in internal cognitive conflict. This cognitive conflict in turn stimulates the need for accommodation, or adjusting the way one currently understands the world, and in this way works to help children move towards more adequate ways of knowing about the world.

In the Vygotskian view, learning and cognitive growth takes place primarily in a social context or in what he terms the zone of proximal development. Vygotsky was interested in the problem of how a child can become “what he is not yet”. He argued that it is just as important to know what a child’s level of potential development is at a given time as it is to be able to measure the level of actual ability. The zone of proximal development is the distance between the two levels and includes tasks that are just beyond the child’s own current level of functioning but which could be accomplished with the aid and co-operation of persons more skilled in these areas – an adult or an older peer for example. The effective tool that the adults and older peers use to help younger children to develop more mature ways of thinking is a process termed scaffolding. Scaffolding works to build on the child’s own existing abilities while encouraging or assisting in areas beyond those current abilities.

The Vygotskian model thus maintains that, through this process of scaffolding, parents play an especially important role in facilitating intellectual growth in their children. While parents were seen by Piaget as less crucial to cognitive growth, he did not entirely neglect parent–child interactions. Children do interact with their parents and are instructed by their parents, but, as Carpendale relates in Chapter 2, for Piaget this interaction was in the main a relationship of constraint wherein adults simply impart their views to their children. According to Piaget, the most important interactions for cognitive growth were those that provided the necessary cognitive conflict to push children’s thinking to a higher level. Peer interactions, because they more often require justification of one’s own way of thinking, were seen by Piaget as more apt to push children towards a new understanding.

The two theoretical approaches lead to different views of the infant. For Piaget, infants acquire knowledge about their world, social or otherwise, by their own actions upon it. In contrast, Vygotsky maintained that social influences on cognitive advances show their first effects very early in life. As Fernyhough maintains in Chapter 3 (and a theme that is taken up in later chapters), infants seem to come innately prepared for social exchanges. Very early on, infants exhibit different patterns of interaction with humans versus nonhuman objects. As elaborated in the chapters in Section 2, infants demonstrate a number of behaviours which suggest that they especially...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Part One Theoretical and Conceptual Issues
• Part Two Early Precursors and Beginnings of Social and Cognitive Understanding
• Part Three Social Cognitive Development in Childhood and Adolescence
• Author Index
• Subject Index