Theories of Social Cognition

Developmental theories of social cognition have to do with children’s ability to think and reason about their own and other people’s thoughts, feelings, motives, and behaviors. Like adults, children are active processors of social information. They pay attention to what other people do and say, and they are constantly drawing inferences, forming interpretations, constructing explanations, or making attributions regarding what they observe. They process information about their own behavior and experiences in the same way.

The complexity of children’s thinking and reasoning about the social world is related to, and limited by, the complexity of their thought processes in general. After all, the same mind that solves arithmetic and conservation problems also solves problems having to do with making friends and resolving moral dilemmas. With advances in cognitive development in general, the way that children think about themselves and other people deepens and becomes more abstract.

View of Children’s Nature

Social cognitive theories provide a sharp contrast to the emphasis that psychoanalytic and learning theories place on external forces as the primary source of development. Instead, social cognitive theories emphasize the process of self-socialization—children’s active shaping of their own development. According to this view, children’s knowledge and beliefs about themselves and other people lead them to adopt particular goals and standards to guide their own behavior.

Central Developmental Issues

The central theme of most relevance to social cognitive theories is the active child. Another prominent theme is individual differences, particularly in the comparisons that are often drawn between the thinking and behavior of males and females, aggressive and nonaggressive children, and so on. The issue of continuity/discontinuity is important in some prominent stage theories that emphasize age-related qualitative changes in how children think about the social world. Information-processing theories, on the other hand, stress continuity in the processes involved in social reasoning. In the following discussions, we will consider these two types of social cognitive theories. The first type is represented by Selman’s stage theory of role taking; the second type is represented by Dodge’s information-processing theory of social problem solving and by Dweck’s attributional account of academic achievement.

Selman’s Stage Theory of Role Taking

In formulating his theory of social cognition, Robert Selman (1980; Yeates & Selman, 1989) focused on the development of role taking—the ability to adopt the perspective of another person, to think about something from another’s point of view. He proposed that such role taking is essential to understanding another person’s thoughts, feelings, or motives.

According to Selman, young children’s social cognition is quite limited because they lack the ability to engage in role-taking behavior. Indeed, Selman, like Piaget, suggested that before the age of 6 years, children are virtually unaware that there is any perspective other than their own; they assume that whatever they think, others will think as well. Perhaps failure to recognize the discrepant view of someone else underlies those endless sibling arguments of the familiar form “‘Did so,’ ‘Did not,’ ‘Did so,’ ‘Did not.’”

Many of young children’s arguments with others stem from their difficulty appreciating that another person can have a different point of view from their own.

JOHN BIRDSALL PHOTOGRAPHY/AGE FOTOSTOCK

Selman proposed that children go through four increasingly complex and abstract stages in their thinking about other people. In stage 1 (roughly ages 6 to 8), children come to appreciate that someone else can have a perspective different from their own, but they assume that the different perspective is merely due to that person’s not possessing the same information they do. In stage 2 (ages 8 to 10), children not only realize that someone else can have a different view, but they also are able to think about the other person’s point of view. However, it is not until stage × (ages 10 to 12) that children can systematically compare their own and another person’s point of view. In this stage, they can also take the perspective of a third party and assess the points of view of two other people. In stage 4 (age 12 and older), adolescents attempt to understand another’s perspective by comparing it with that of a “generalized other,” assessing whether the person’s view is the same as that of most people in their social group.

Notice that in Selman’s stages of role taking, as children become less egocentric in their reasoning, they become increasingly capable of considering multiple perspectives simultaneously (e.g., their own, another person’s, and “most people’s”). This growth in social cognition mirrors the cognitive changes identified by Piaget (and discussed in Chapter 4). Not surprisingly, children’s progress through Selman’s stages of role taking is strongly related to their progress through Piaget’s stages (Keating & Clark, 1980).

Dodge’s Information-Processing Theory of Social Problem Solving

The information-processing approach to social cognition emphasizes the crucial role of cognitive processes in social behavior. This approach is exemplified by Dodge’s analysis of children’s use of aggression as a problem-solving strategy (Dodge, 1986; Dodge, Dishion, & Lansford, 2007). In the research that originally motivated Dodge’s theory, children were presented stories that involved a child who suffers because of another child’s actions, the intentions of which are ambiguous. For example, in one story, as a child is working hard to assemble a puzzle, a peer bumps into the table, scattering the puzzle pieces, and merely says “Oops.” The children were then asked to imagine themselves as the victim in this scenario and to describe what they would do and why. Some children interpreted the other child’s knocking into the table as an accident and said that they would simply ignore the event. Others concluded that the peer bumped the table on purpose, and they reported that they would find a way to get even (many thought that punching the offender would be a good way to achieve that goal).

The boy who was spilled on by the other boy seems to have a hostile attributional bias. Because he readily assumes that other people have the intent to harm him, he attributes a hostile intention to the other boy.

MARY KATE DENNY/PHOTOEDIT

Dodge and his colleagues have found that some children have a hostile attributional bias, that is, a general expectation that others are antagonistic to them (Crick & Dodge, 1994; S. Graham & Hudley, 1994). This bias leads such children to search for evidence of hostile intent on the part of the peer in the above scenario and to attribute to the peer a desire to harm them. They are likely to conclude that retaliation is the appropriate response to the peer’s behavior. Hostile attributional biases become self-fulfilling prophecies: a child’s aggressive retaliation to the presumed hostile act of a peer elicits counterattacks and rejection by his or her peers, further fueling the child’s belief in the hostility of others.

School systems have particular problems in dealing with children who have a hostile attributional bias. One strategy is to remove them from regular classrooms because of their disruptive behavior and put them into special classrooms in which they can be more closely supervised (Dodge, Lansford, & Dishion, 2007). However, this approach brings together children with hostile attributional biases, causing other negative consequences. First, it provides these youngsters with evidence supporting their existing expectation of hostility from others, raising the possibility that they will reinforce one another’s aggressive tendencies. At the same time, it segregates them from more well-adjusted peers from whom they might learn more moderate attitudes and social strategies.

There are many reasons why a child might develop a hostile attributional bias. However, it is noteworthy that children who have been physically abused are particularly likely to attribute anger to others, even in neutral situations (Pollak et al., 2000). It may be that the experience of physical abuse leads children to be especially sensitive to cues to anger. For example, physically abused children are better at recognizing angry facial expressions than are children who have not experienced abuse, and the speed with which they do so is related to the degree of anger and hostility to which they have been subjected (as reported by their parent) (Pollak et al., 2009). Physically abused children also have difficulty reasoning about negative emotions. In one study, abused children had difficulty determining which situations might trigger anger in parents, endorsing both positive and negative events as potential causes of parental anger (Perlman et al., 2008). For example, when presented hypothetical stories about child–parent situations, the abused children saw anger as a plausible response to positive events, such as a child’s winning a prize at school or helping around the house. A tendency to assume anger in others (even when it is not present), paired with difficulty understanding what might provoke anger in others, is likely to result in a hostile attributional bias. (We will examine child abuse in more detail later in the chapter.)

Dweck’s Theory of Self-Attributions and Achievement Motivation

Imagine two grade-school children, Diane and Megan, both hard at work trying to solve math problems, and both initially failing. Coming to the realization that the problems are quite difficult, Diane feels excited about meeting the challenge and works persistently to get the answers. Megan, in contrast, feels anxious and makes only a half-hearted effort to solve the problems. What explains this difference in the children’s reaction to failure?

According to Carol Dweck’s social cognition perspective (2006), the difference in their reaction is attributable to a difference in their achievement motivation—that is, in whether they are motivated by learning goals, seeking to improve their competence and master new material, or by performance goals, seeking to receive positive assessments of their competence or to avoid negative assessments. From this perspective, Diane has an incremental view of intelligence, the belief that intelligence can be developed through effort. She focuses on mastery—on meeting challenges and overcoming failures, and she generally expects her efforts to be successful. Indeed, her increased effort and persistence following failure will in all likelihood improve her subsequent performance.

Megan, on the other hand, has an entity view of intelligence, the belief that her intelligence is fixed. Her goal is to be successful, and as long as she is succeeding, all is well. However, when she fails at something, she feels “helpless.” Not succeeding causes her to feel bad and doubt her abilities and self-worth.

Underlying these two patterns of achievement motivation are differences in what attributions children make about themselves, particularly with regard to their sense of their self-worth. Children with an entity/helpless orientation tend to base their sense of self-worth on the approval they receive (or do not receive) from other people about their intelligence, talents, and personal qualities. To feel good about themselves, they seek out situations in which they can be assured of success and receive praise, and they avoid situations in which they might be criticized. In contrast, the self-esteem of children with an incremental/mastery orientation is based more on their own effort and learning and not on how others evaluate them. Because they do not equate failure on a task with a personal flaw, they can enjoy the challenge of a hard problem and persist in the attempt to solve it.

These different motivation patterns are evident as early as preschool (Smiley & Dweck, 1994). Given a choice of working on a puzzle they have already solved or on one they had previously failed to solve, some 4- and 5-year-old children strongly prefer the one they already know how to do, whereas others want to continue working on the one they had failed to solve.

Older children’s cognitions about themselves and their abilities follow a similar pattern but involve more complex concepts and reasoning than those of younger children. Some have what Dweck and her colleagues (Cain & Dweck, 1995; Dweck, 1999; Dweck & Leggett, 1988) refer to as an entity theory of intelligence. This theory, like Megan’s entity view of intelligence, is rooted in the idea that a person’s level of intelligence is fixed and unchangeable. Over time, it comes to include the belief that success or failure in academic situations depends on how smart one is. When evaluating their own performance, children with an entity theory of intelligence focus on outcomes—success or failure—not on effort or learning from mistakes. Thus, when they experience failure (as everyone does some of the time), they think they are not very smart and that there is nothing they can do about it. They feel helpless.

Other children subscribe to an incremental theory of intelligence. This theory, like Diane’s view of intelligence, is rooted in the idea that intelligence can grow as a function of experience. Children who hold an incremental theory of intelligence believe that academic success is achievable through effort and persistence. When evaluating their performance, they focus on what they have learned, even when they have failed, and they believe that they can do better in the future by trying harder. They feel hopeful.

The comments this teacher is offering his student on her work could be either beneficial or detrimental, depending on whether he focuses on how smart she is or on the effort she has made.

[[BLUE JEAN IMAGES/ALAMY

Given what you have just read, what kind of praise and criticism do you think would reinforce these two patterns? The answer depends on the focus of the feedback. An incremental/mastery pattern is reinforced by focusing on children’s effort, praising them for a good effort (“You really worked hard on that,” “I like the way you kept at it”) and criticizing them for an inadequate one (“Next time you need to put in some more work,” “I think you can do better if you try harder”). In contrast, an entity/helpless pattern is reinforced by both praise and criticism focused on children’s enduring traits or on the child as a whole (“You’re very smart at these problems. I’m proud of you,” “You just can’t do math. I’m disappointed in you”).

Do these two different types of internal theories have real-world ramifications? Much of the research on this question has been carried out in the domain of math education. In an important study conducted in the New York City public schools, Dweck and her colleagues found that 7th-graders with an incremental theory of intelligence showed an upward trajectory in math scores over the next 2 years, while the scores of 7th-graders with a fixed theory of intelligence remained flat (Blackwell, Trzesniewski, & Dweck, 2007). The investigators then provided an 8-session intervention to a new group of 7th-graders who had a fixed theory of intelligence. Students in this group were taught an incremental theory of intelligence based on some of the same concepts from basic neuroscience that you read about in Chapter 3: the brain is plastic and always changing; learning forges new connections among synapses; and so on. A control group received training in basic study skills. Remarkably, the children who received the intervention showed a positive change in motivation as well as improvements in grades, while the children in the control group showed a decline in grades.

Another important issue is whether these two types of internal views—entity theories and incremental theories—have implications for children’s development in domains beyond intelligence and academic achievement. Recent research by Yeager and colleagues (2013) suggests that they do. For example, recall the hostile attributional bias discussed in the previous section. Adolescents who maintain an entity theory about personality traits are more likely to demonstrate a hostile attributional bias than are adolescents who endorse an incremental theory. In other words, if they hold the view that people’s behaviors are due to fixed personality traits (some people are good, others are bad), rather than due to situations or circumstances, they are more likely to interpret other people’s harmful behavior as hostile rather than as accidental or situational. Assuming that this is the case, then learning to take a more incremental view should diminish their tendency to make hostile attributions. And indeed, this is the case: when the experimenters used an intervention (which included a brief introduction to neuroscience concepts, as described in the previous paragraph, but nothing about hostile intent) to shift adolescents’ perspectives away from the fixed-entity view and closer to the incremental view, there was a reduction in the participants’ hostile attributions. Thus, internal theories about traits of self and others have important implications for diverse aspects of development.

Where might these individual differences in internal theories come from? One obvious source is parents, who often try very hard to enhance their child’s self-esteem. Unfortunately, doing something that might seem purely positive—praising a child for being good at something—can actually undermine the child’s motivation for improvement. Another obvious source is teachers. One recent study showed that the way teachers comfort poor-performing students when the teacher has an entity perspective (as seen in teacher comments like “It’s okay; not everyone can be good at math”) can seriously undermine their students’ motivation and self-expectations (Rattan, Good, & Dweck, 2012). Parents and teachers alike should be aware that some kinds of praise and comfort are beneficial, whereas others are not.

Current Perspectives

Social cognitive theorists have made several important contributions to the study of social development. One is their strong emphasis on children as active seekers of information about the social world. Another contribution is the insight that the effect of children’s social experience depends on their interpretation of those experiences. Thus, children who make different attributions about a given social event (such as someone’s causing them harm) or an academic event (such as doing poorly on a test) will respond differently to that event. In addition, a large amount of research has supported the social cognitive position. Although these theories have provided a very healthy antidote to social theories that left children’s cognition out of the picture, they too provide an incomplete account. Most notably, they have very little to say about biological factors in social development.

Kismet is designed to shape his own development through his understanding of the behavior of humans toward him—a form of self-socialization emphasized by social cognition theorists. What would it take, however, for Kismet to go further and draw inferences about others’ cognitions, feelings, motivations? For example, will it ever be possible for Kismet to make different attributions about a given behavior, based on subtle aspects of the social context of its history with a person? Even more challenging, will Kismet come to know that people can hold points of view different from one another and from its own? Finally, can Kismet develop some sense of self-worth that will affect its attributions about itself? These questions about Kismet’s potential to mimic social cognition highlight the vast complexity of human social development and the challenge faced by theorists of social development.