A Blueprint for Social Cognitive

Development
Kristina R. Olson
1
and Carol S. Dweck
2
1
Harvard University and
2
Stanford University
ABSTRACTThe eld of social cognitive development
(SCD) has historically failed to emerge as a dominant
approach in developmental psychology. We take this op-
portunity to articulate the assumptions, goals, and con-
tributions of SCD with the aim of invigorating research
from this perspective. We begin by describing the current
landscape of social and cognitive development, suggesting
what they have and have not given us. We then outline
major goals of the social cognitive developmental ap-
proach and walk through examples of successful SCD re-
search. Finally, we examine the unique potential of the
social cognitive approach to cross-fertilize social and
cognitive development (as well as related elds such as
social psychology and neuroscience) and to answer new
questions about development.
Over the last 50 years, psychology has become divided into more
and more specic subelds. Cognitive psychology is separate
from social psychology, which is separate from clinical and
developmental psychology. Even within areas, there is often
further separation as represented by our many journal clubs, lab
groups, and brown bags. Yet recently, the pendulumhas begun to
swing back, with more research programs and journals devoted
to the explicit crossing of traditional boundaries, such as the new
work emerging in social cognitive and affective neuroscience.
One advantage of these new intersecting elds is that they unite
diverse psychologists around common methods, research
questions, and terminology, thus producing not only new
knowledge, but new knowledge that is accessible to more psy-
chologists. In this article, we argue for the importance of another
such integrative eld: social cognitive development (SCD).
At present, developmental psychologists live at the edges of a
great divide. On one side are cognitive developmentalists, and
on the other social developmentalists, each going about their
research with differing methods and goals. (Despite often being
housed in the same departments, and even within the same ar-
eas, there may be little collaboration between the researchers
involved in these two lines of work.) In the valley between them
sits SCD. In this article, we explain why researchers should
venture into that territory and show how this will generate dis-
tinct, important knowledge while enriching traditional research
in both social and cognitive development. As we will suggest,
SCD also provides a bridge to other areas of psychology in-
cluding social psychology, cognitive psychology, and neu-
roscience.
At its core, SCD is a eld concerned with how mental repre-
sentations and mental processes relevant to social development
change across development. It also involves the study of how
these mental representations and processes may mediate or
moderate the impact of particular antecedents (e.g., parental
input) on childrens outcomes (e.g., well-being). In this article,
we describe what makes SCD unique, but we start by sketching,
in greatly simplied form, the elds of social development and
cognitive development as they currently exist, suggesting how
each might benet from a social cognitive developmental ap-
proach. As with any summary such as this, there are research
programs that do not t our general characterizations. Despite
this limitation, we intend our summary to serve as a springboard
for our later points.
In addition, we emphasize that we are not arguing that one of
these elds is superior to the other or that either eld should be
replaced by SCD. Rather, we would suggest that each of these
elds has set out to answer a particular set of questions and has
evolved a sophisticated set of methods and statistical techniques
to address those questions. We do argue, however, that the
methods of each eld have limited the kinds of questions it can
answer and that only by the full inclusion of a social cognitive
developmental approach can we begin to attain a complete
picture of development.
Following our descriptions of the elds of social and cognitive
development, we set forth the SCD approach, including four
research goals. We then provide examples of fruitful SCD re-
search to date, examples of current research topics within social
and cognitive development that are prime for the adoption of a
more thorough social cognitive developmental approach, and
Address correspondence to Kristina R. Olson, who is now at De-
partment of Psychology, Yale University, Box 208205, New Haven,
CT 06520-8205; e-mail: kristina.olson@yale.edu.
PERSPECTIVES ON PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE
Volume 3Number 3 193 Copyright r2008 Association for Psychological Science
points of contact between research in SCD and other areas of
psychology.
SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT
Much of the study of social development at the beginning of the
21st century focuses on antecedents (e.g., parental practices,
social or cultural contexts) of child outcomes (e.g., social, psy-
chological, and academic well-being; Damon, Sigel, & Ren-
ninger, 1998). Social developmentalists often undertake large-
scale, correlational studies that typically occur in eld settings,
taking advantage of the natural variations in social input or
context to determine how these factors affect childrens well-
being. They study a range of outcomes including social relations,
identity, emotion- and self-regulation, and achievement, as well
as the effects of parental, academic, or cultural inuences on
these developmental outcomes. Because many variables of in-
terest, such as parental abuse, divorce, school experience, or
culture, cannot be manipulated, these researchers apply sta-
tistical techniques to patterns of change over time to infer
causation.
This eld represents an enormously valuable tradition in
terms of the research questions it addresses, with their emphasis
on outcomes that are central to childrens lives. However, cur-
rent research often pays too little attention to the role of mental
representations or underlying social cognitive processes that
may lead particular groups of children with similar experiences
to function better than others. We too rarely gain knowledge
about what children are taking away from a socialization expe-
rience in the form of beliefs, attitudes, or attributions, and how
they may bring these mental representations to bear in new
situations in the future. Until the role of mental representations
and processes are recognized and understood, we cannot fully
understand the social phenomena of interest or the development
of these phenomena.
An example of traditional social development research is the
study of the relationship between maternal depression and
childrens school performance or behavior (Anderson & Ham-
men, 1993; Chronis et al., 2007; Forehand, Long, Brody, &
Fauber, 1986; Goodman, Brogan, Lynch, & Fielding, 1993;
Petterson & Albers, 2001; Wright, George, Burke, Gelfand, &
Teti, 2000). Although such a topic is interesting and the results
are provocative, studies on this topic often fail to capture the
precise process by which childrens school performance is in-
uenced by (and inuences) maternal depression, in large part
because researchers have often failed to examine the mediating
social-cognitive variables or processes. The reader leaves
without understanding how parental depression inuences
childrens school performance. Adding a social cognitive de-
velopmental approach would introduce questions about the at-
titudes, beliefs, or attributions children take away from
experiences with maternal depression that contribute to poor
outcomes. For example, Pomerantz, Grolnick, and Price (2005),
taking a more social cognitive developmental perspective,
demonstrate how parenting can affect childrens perceptions
of competence and how those perceptions go on to impact
achievement.
Other important examples of the critical role of childrens
mental representation in social development are found in
studies of the effects of domestic violence (e.g., Grych, Jouriles,
Swank, McDonald, & Norwood, 2000) and sexual abuse (Fei-
ring, Taska, & Lewis, 2002). These studies show that the attri-
butions children learn as a result of these negative events play a
key role in their subsequent well-being. Those who adopt neg-
ative attributions about the self (tending more toward self-
blame) or negative attributions about others (tending to impute
hostile intent to others actions) fare more poorly than those who
do not develop these negative attributional tendencies. Thus, it
is when we examine the mental representations that children
bring to subsequent events that we gain a better understanding
of the impact of antecedents on subsequent child outcomes.
COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT
In contrast to social development, much of the current work in
cognitive development investigates how cognition operates in
infants and children and when specic cognitive abilities arise.
Researchers in this eld are interested in young childrens basic
cognitive skills, including how children understand and repre-
sent numbers, space, objects, events, and other people. This
approach relies on tightly controlled laboratory studies, which
focus on the mental representations children form and the
cognitive processes they engage in as they confront precisely
specied objects and events.
We believe that the cognitive developmental approach can
contribute to the emerging eld of SCD through its use of con-
trolled studies, its analysis of mental processes, and its focus on
mental representations. Continuing in their research traditions,
some researchers in cognitive development have begun inves-
tigating social variables. For example, there is much current
research on theory of mind and perspective-taking and on the
perception of agency, animacy, and intention that focuses on
examining young childrens understanding of the social world
(Gergely, Nadasdy, & Csibra, 1995; Gopnik & Wellman, 1992;
Johnson, Booth, & OHearn, 2001; Kuhlmeier, Wynn, & Bloom,
2003; Leslie, Friedman, & German, 2004; Moll & Tomasello,
2006; Woodward, 1998).
However, although cognitive developmentalists have begun
showing an interest in social phenomena, they have been less
concerned with what childrens emerging cognitive skills, social
understanding, and social representations might mean for their
social, psychological, and academic well-being in the world
outside the laboratory. Specically, researchers in this tradition
have generally been less interested in (a) how children may
differ from each other in their representations, processing, and
understandings, (b) why children may differ from each other, or
194 Volume 3Number 3
Social Cognitive Development
why they might formdifferent representations, develop different
processing strategies, and arrive at different understandings,
and (c) what implications these differences might have for
childrens well-being. For example, work on understanding in-
tentions and goals during infancy has not yet begun asking
questions about what this understanding or the lack of under-
standing means for the child. How does ones environment or
context inuence the development of intentional or goal-di-
rected understanding? Does learning to understand goals earlier
affect ones later life in meaningful ways? As described below,
these are the kinds of questions an SCD perspective could an-
swer, giving us a deeper understanding of these phenomena.
WHAT IS SCD AND WHY STUDY IT?
SCD is not new and does not originate with us (e.g., Aboud,
1988; Bigler &Liben, 1990; Bussey &Bandura, 1999; Dweck &
Elliott, 1983; Gergely et al., 1995; Jacobs, Lanza, Osgood, Ec-
cles, & Wigeld, 2002; Karafantis & Levy, 2004; Killen &
Stangor, 2001; Martin, Ruble, & Szkrybalo, 2002; Tomasello,
Carpenter, Call, Behne, &Moll, 2005; Wimmer &Perner, 1983;
Woodward, 1998). Over the years, several prominent SCD the-
ories and books have emerged, and although some have made a
conscious attempt to encourage collaboration across the tradi-
tional boundaries of social development, cognitive develop-
ment, and social psychology (Bandura, 1986; Colby &Kohlberg,
1987; Higgins, Ruble, & Hartup, 1983), they have failed to
capture large enough audiences to make SCD one of the domi-
nant approaches in developmental psychology. For this reason,
we hope this article will serve as a call to current social and
cognitive development researchers, to researchers at the
boundary of this eld such as social and personality psycholo-
gists, and to young psychologists in the process of forming their
professional identities.
SCD, as we have noted, is the study of the relationship be-
tween antecedents (e.g., parental practices, social or cultural
contexts), the resulting mental representations
1
(e.g., attitudes,
beliefs, and attributions), and the ensuing child outcomes (e.g.,
childrens social, psychological, and academic well-being) over
the course of development. It is also the study of the normative
development of mental representations/processes and their
impact on social outcomes. So, for example, if we know that most
or all children undergo a change in their cognitive processes or
mental representations at a particular point, we can study the
ramications of that change for how children function in the
social world.
Like cognitive development, SCD is the study of childrens
processing and understanding of the (social) world across de-
velopment. Like social development, SCD cares deeply about
the social antecedents of childrens representations, as well as
the consequences of those representations for childrens social,
psychological, and academic well-being. It is important to note
that our conception of the eld of SCDand our discussion of SCD
throughout this article concerns the eld of SCD and should not
be confused with a specic theory such as Banduras (1986)
social cognitive theory.
In terms of its methodological approach, SCD, like cognitive
development and adult work on social cognition, is concerned
with analyzing or distilling specic mechanisms, processes, and
mental representations and then testing the impact of individual
variables in the laboratory. However, like social development,
SCD is concerned with how those variables function in the real
world as well. Whereas laboratory studies isolate variables,
manipulate them, and test causation directly, eld studies test
hypotheses in ecologically valid ways to determine how the
variables act within real social contexts. Thus, SCD benets
from adopting aspects of both approaches and ultimately gives
us that which neither eld contributes individuallyan un-
derstanding of normative and idiographic SCD with attention to
mental processes and representations in lab and eld settings.
In sum, SCDfocusing on the relationship between ante-
cedents, mental representations, and outcomescombines
features of both the cognitive and the social development ap-
proaches. With this in mind, we articulate four goals that have
previously remained implicit in SCD research. These goals can
serve as a framework for future research programs in SCD and
will help the eld gain both a broader and deeper understanding
of socially relevant processes.
1. Identify and measure a social cognitive mental representation
or process that is believed to be important in development.
Sometimes investigators may begin with an interest in a
particular mental representation or process, and sometimes
they might begin with an outcome and formhypotheses about
the mental representations that foster that outcome. In either
case, specication and measurement of the mental repre-
sentation or cognitive process is a major goal. In addition,
understanding how that mental representation changes
across and affects development is a crucial aspect of studying
SCD.
2. Manipulate the mental representation, and observe its impact
on outcomes of interest over development. Once a mental
representation is isolated, it is important for researchers,
when appropriate, to manipulate that mental representation
to show how that manipulation changes important aspects of
childrens personal or social functioning. This manipulation
can sometimes take place in the real world, as when we ask
whether changing childrens beliefs or attributions can
change their aggression or achievement in natural settings,
or it can take place in a laboratory setting, where we can
experimentally manipulate these representations and pro-
1
Throughout this article, we discuss how children process and mentally
represent their experiences, and therefore we emphasize the input children
receive. However, it is important to note that, as other researchers have pointed
out (e.g., Bell, 1979), it is the childrens own actions that shape the input they
receive, and this should not be seen as a one-way relationship.
Volume 3Number 3 195
Kristina R. Olson and Carol S. Dweck
cesses through intervention or training studies and observe
their impact on behaviors that represent personal and social
functioning. Researchers also need to pay close attention to
whether developmental changes in mental representations
and processes result in changes in behaviors or outcomes.
3. Investigate the antecedents of the mental representation
or process of interest. Research from a social cognitive devel-
opmental perspective should examine the impact of
both real-world antecedents, such as parental input, and
laboratory-based antecedents, such as exposure to patterns
of input or feedback that might simulate parental input, on
mental representations. In this way, it can also help us un-
derstand when (under what circumstances and at what points
in development) particular experiences might affect social
cognitive processes and mental representations and when
they might not.
4. Compare how the mental representation operates in the labo-
ratory and in the real world. To ensure that one is modeling
real-life processes in the laboratory, it is important to un-
derstand how the mental representations operate both within
a controlled setting and within the dynamic social world and
to explain any resulting differences.
These goals are merely that, and, as will be discussed, may be
harder to fulll in some areas than others.
Examples of Current SCD Research
We turn now to a few examples of work that has beneted from a
social cognitive developmental approach. For each area of re-
search, we briey summarize the literature, specify what has
been gained by employing a social cognitive developmental
approach, and explain how this research program has met many
of the goals we have laid out above. These examples are not an
exclusive list; rather, they are clear examples selected to dem-
onstrate how social cognitive development contributes above
and beyond traditional social or cognitive approaches.
Aggression
The work conducted by Dodge and his colleagues stands as an
example of successful SCD research. Dodge and Frame (1982)
identied and measured a key social cognitive mediator of ag-
gression: childrens hostile attributional biasa tendency to
attribute hostile intent to another under circumstances of am-
biguous provocation (Goal 1). They found that rapid and inap-
propriate aggressive retaliation in the face of an ambiguous
provocation stemmed substantially from the aggressive childs
hostile attributional bias. After showing that the hostile
attributional bias was a predictor of aggression in a laboratory
setting (Dodge & Frame, 1982), researchers then showed that
this bias was a cause of aggression in the real world as well
(Goal 4). For example, Graham, Hudley, and Williams (1992)
found that students identied by teachers and peers as aggres-
sive were more likely than nonaggressive peers to perceive
hostility in ambiguous action, feel anger in response
to those actions, and endorse hostile reactions in response to
ambiguous actions. In addition, hostile attributions appear to
mediate increases in aggression over time (Zelli, Dodge, Loch-
man, & Laird, 1999) primarily by creating greater accessibility
of aggressive responses.
Dodge and his colleagues have also examined the develop-
mental antecedents of the hostile attributional bias (Goal 3).
For example, it was shown that several types of nega-
tive childhood experiences, such as physical abuse (Dodge,
Pettit, Bates, & Valente, 1995), harsh discipline (Weiss,
Dodge, Bates, & Pettit, 1992), and peer rejection (Dodge et al.,
2003) resulted in increases in the tendency toward hostile
attributions, supporting the idea that harsh treatment can shape
the mental representations that children carry with them to
future situations.
Finally, Hudley, and Graham (1993) showed that changing
aggressive childrens attributional tendencies had the effect of
reducing their aggressive retaliation both in the laboratory and
the classroom (Goal 2), supporting the idea that social-cognitive
variables not only play a key causal role in social behavior, but
that they also provide a guide to effective intervention.
Many developmental questions remain. For example, at what
age do children begin to process information from the environ-
ment in a way that promotes hostile attributions? Do tempera-
mental factors predispose some children to develop hostile
attributions more readily than others? Despite unanswered
questions, this example nicely illustrates the importance of an
SCD approach. Although knowing that negative childhood ex-
periences lead to aggression in children is interesting, it is only
through Dodges social cognitive approach, and in particular the
examination of specic mental representations, that we are able
to better understand how this process works.
Achievement Motivation
Before the social cognitive developmental approach, achieve-
ment motivation was viewed as a trait. Some children were be-
lieved to have a large amount and some were believed to have a
small amount, but where achievement motivation came fromand
how it operated remained largely a mystery. However, research
within SCD has now shown that mental representations play a
central role in achievement motivation, and has given us insight
into how achievement motivation operates, how environments
may foster it, and how interventions may change it.
More specically, researchers have identied childrens self-
theories, particularly their theories about their intelligence, as
key factors in achievement motivation processes (Goal 1; Butler,
2000; Dweck & Leggett, 1988; Pomerantz & Ruble, 1997).
First, they have found that children who represent intelligence
as a xed quality rather than a malleable one have
different goals (to look smart vs. to learn), make different
attributions for their setbacks (lack of ability vs. lack
of effort), and therefore show different reactions to difculty
196 Volume 3Number 3
Social Cognitive Development
(helpless vs. mastery-oriented; corresponding with Goal 2; see
Dweck, 1999).
Next, research has examined the developmental course (Cain
& Dweck, 1995; Heyman & Dweck, 1998; see Dweck, 2002, for
a review) and the antecedents of childrens theories of intelli-
gence (Goal 3; Kamins & Dweck, 1999; Kempner & Pomerantz,
2003; Mueller & Dweck, 1998). As an example of the former,
Heyman, Dweck, and Cain (1992) and Heyman and Dweck
(1998) demonstrated that these patterns of achievement moti-
vation are rooted in young childrens theories about their
goodness (xed vs. malleable)being that goodness is a focus of
socialization at that age. As an example of the latter, experi-
mental laboratory studies have shown that when adults praise
children for their intelligence (person praise)as opposed to
praising them for their effort or strategy (process praise)they
foster the xed-intelligence theory with its goals, attributions,
and response to difculty (Kamins & Dweck, 1999; Mueller &
Dweck, 1998). Moreover, this antecedent process has been
shown to operate in the real worldparents who deliver person
praise rather than process praise have children who adopt the
xed versus malleable theory of intelligence (Goal 4; Kempner
& Pomerantz, 2003).
Finally, this social-cognitive variable has been shown to op-
erate in the real world. Blackwell, Trzesniewski, and Dweck
(2007) have shown that childrens theories of intelligence pre-
dict their grade trajectory over time (see also Stipek &Gralinski,
1996), and that an intervention that changes childrens theories
of intelligence alters their motivation and achievement (Goals 2
and 4; see also Good, Aronson, & Inzlicht, 2003; cf. Aronson,
Fried, & Good, 2002). Thus, the identication of a social cog-
nitive variable opened the door to a fuller understanding of
the origin and workings of achievement motivation in a way
that was not done prior to the social cognitive developmental
approach.
Future research on achievement motivation can continue in
using these four goals: for example, asking what other factors
determine whether children develop a xed versus malleable
theory of intelligence and whether different manipulations of
these theories are more or less effective at different points in
development. Much research in adult social cognition has found
that similar beliefs play a role in adults functioning, for ex-
ample, in achievement settings (Hong, Chiu, Lin, Wan, &
Dweck, 1999) and relationships (Beer, 2002). Future research
could investigate the ways in which these processes may func-
tion differently in children and adults, as well as the ways in
which childhood beliefs do or do not predict adult ones.
Gender
Not all antecedents, social-cognitive variables, or outcomes are
amenable to experimental manipulation. For example, abuse
and divorce are not possible or ethical to manipulate. Yet, if
researchers can distill the mental representations that result
from these real-world experiences, they can focus on studying
these representations to better understand how experiences
operate to produce their outcomes.
As another example, researchers cannot manipulate gender,
nor would it seem wise to tamper with the development of
childrens gender identity. However, researchers are making
great progress in understanding childrens developing repre-
sentations of gender in early childhood and how these repre-
sentations affect childrens behavior.
Before the social cognitive developmental approach to gen-
der, it was assumed that sex-typed behavior was inuenced
solely by a childs history of reinforcement and social learning.
However, cognitive developmental theorists (Kohlberg, 1966)
and social cognitive developmental theorists (Martin & Little,
1990; Martin & Ruble, 2004) began to suggest that sex-typed
behavior was notably inuenced by childrens self-representa-
tionsthat is, by their categorization of themselves as a girl or a
boy (corresponding with Goal 1). This meant that self-repre-
sentations could have motivational properties, and that chil-
drens gender-related motivation was not simply a result of the
contingencies programmed by socialization agents.
There is now wide agreement that categorizing the self ac-
cording to gender ushers in an upsurge in childrens sex-typed
behavior (Martin et al., 2002). By measuring childrens beliefs
about gender and mapping them on to sex-typed behavior, re-
searchers have been able to showa link between the two (Goal 2;
Fagot & Leinbach, 1989; Martin & Little, 1990). Moreover, it
appears that sex-typed behavior increases with rst use of
gender labels (Zosuls, Ruble, Tamis-LeMonda, Haddad, &
Greulich, 2006), with the onset of gender self-labeling (Zosuls et
al., 2006), and with changes in gender self-representation from
identifying oneself as a boy or girl to realizing that ones sex is
stable over time (Martin & Little, 1990).
In addition to monitoring the development of gender self-
representations, researchers have examined their environmen-
tal antecedents (Goal 3). For example, Fagot and Leinbach
(1989) found that parents of early gender self-labelers paid more
attention (positive or negative) when their children played with
sex-typed toys, perhaps communicating that gender is an im-
portant dimension. In addition, in an experimental study, Bigler
(1995) demonstrated that when teachers made functional use of
gender categories, childrens gender stereotypes increased.
Bigler has also conducted research aimed at the issue of the
manipulation of gender categories. Although, of course, gen-
der per se cannot be manipulated, Bigler has borrowed methods
from social psychology (e.g., Sherif, Harvey, White, Hood, &
Sherif, 1961) and attempted to mimic categories like gender by
creating novel groups and exploring which factors are necessary
for the development of biased attitudes and discrimination.
To further this goal, Bigler has manipulated factors such
as teachers functional use of category labels, the majority or
minority status of a group, and the previous social status (high
vs. low status) of the group (Bigler, Brown, & Markell, 2001;
Brown &Bigler, 2002). She conducts these studies in the context
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Kristina R. Olson and Carol S. Dweck
of actual summer school programs, meeting our fourth goal of
examining these processes in the real world. Thus, even when a
variable cannot be manipulated in the laboratory, social-cog-
nitive variables can be pinpointed, their effects monitored, and
their antecedents identied.
Using a Social Cognitive Developmental Approach
in New Areas
Our hope is that, in addition to the SCD work currently being
done within the connes of either social or cognitive develop-
ment, additional research in SCD can be conducted by building
bridges between these two elds, as well as between SCD and
such elds as neuroscience and social cognition. Below, we
describe recent, current, and future research that integrates
social and cognitive development or connects SCD with other
elds. The studies mentioned are, again, by no means exhaus-
tive, but they are examples that we believe capture the spirit of
our proposal.
One way in which social and cognitive development can begin
speaking to one another is to integrate methods from one area
with research questions of another area. For example, social
developmentalists in the area of attachment have long proposed,
following Bowlby (1958), that infants form internal working
models of relationships based on their early experiences with
caretakers. Yet little has been done to specify or measure these
representations of relationships in young children. Indeed,
mental representations are difcult to capture in young children
because of their limited response repertoire. However, new work
by Johnson and colleagues has applied a traditional cognitive
development method (measuring young infants looking time) to
this traditional social development question to examine whether
securely and insecurely attached infants have different internal
working models of attachment (Johnson, Dweck, &Chen, 2007).
This study involved exposing young infants to a video in which a
large sphere (the parental icon) moved up a hill and away froma
smaller sphere (the child icon), who remained the bottom of a
hill. (These abstract forms were used to test for a more gener-
alized relationship representation that went beyond the infants
particular relationship with their caretaker.) As the parental
icon moved away, the child bounced, pulsed, and began to wail.
This event was shown repeatedly until children became bored
and showed sharply reduced looking time. Then, on the test
trials, the infant was shown the parent either returning to the
child or continuing to move away. The data indicated that the
securely attached infants looked longer (showed violated ex-
pectations) when the parent continued to move away from the
child than they did when the parent returned to the child. On the
basis of much infant cognitive development work, we can sug-
gest that these infants had expected the parental icon to return
to the crying child and were surprised (i.e., showed renewed
interest) when it did not. In contrast, the insecurely attached
infants showed no such expectation and in fact tended to look
slightly longer when the parent returned to the crying child.
This work nicely demonstrates that young children have an
internal representation of the way parents and children interact,
and it has therefore tested a theoretical claim of central im-
portance to social development by employing a key method of
cognitive development research. In this way, we hope that re-
searchers in other areas of social and cognitive development will
begin to see possible connections between their work and cur-
rent work in the other eld.
Another way to integrate the ideas of social development with
those of cognitive development is to combine research questions
and theories from both elds. For example, cognitive develop-
mental work on goals and intention can be broadened, perhaps
in combination with other work on theory of mind, to ask how
children represent people and their motivations, ideas, emo-
tions, and knowledge. Following the goals we laid out above, we
can then ask how differences in understanding goals or inten-
tions affect childrens social, psychological, and academic well-
being across development.
In a related vein, bridges are being built between cognitive
developmental work on the impact of language that expresses
generic kinds (e.g., birds y, which implies universal and
enduring qualities) and social development work on how such
usages can affect the development of gender stereotypes (Gel-
man, Taylor, & Nguyen, 2004) or self-perceptions (Cimpian,
Arce, Markman, & Dweck, 2007). This work asks whether
childrens understanding of generic kinds, originally studied in
nonsocial contexts, might have important implications for social
understanding and social development.
Finally, work in cognitive development on statistical learning
suggests that children can represent the statistical properties of
language input (Saffran, Aslin, & Newport, 1996) and
visual input (Kirkham, Slemmer, & Johnson, 2002). It would be
fascinating to know whether children similarly represent
the statistical properties of their social input. The research
on internal working models of relationships may suggest
that they do, but adopting the paradigms from language
and cognitive development may allow us to track the
more precise ways in which infants process and represent social
input.
Even in areas of social and cognitive development that do not
have a clear partner on the other side of the valley, there is much
room for researchers to adopt an SCD approach. For example
social development work on self-regulation has focused on what
we are calling antecedents and outcomes, and it could benet
from a better understanding of the role of childrens mental
representations. Indeed, as shown by the classic work of Mischel
and his colleagues (e.g., Mischel, Ebbeson, & Raskoff Zeiss,
1972), childrens ability to delay gratication can be dramati-
cally affected by the manner in which they represent the desired
object. This may lead us to ask how socialization practices
known to affect self-regulation (e.g., high discipline or low
maternal warmth; Colman, Hardy, Albert, Raffaelli, & Crockett,
2006) may affect the representational processes children recruit
198 Volume 3Number 3
Social Cognitive Development
to aid their self-regulation. Such a question is one that social
cognitive developmentalists might well pursue.
On the cognitive development side, one theory that has had
little impact on social development but that could have a large
impact on SCD is that of core knowledge. This is a thesis put
forth by Spelke and colleagues (Spelke, 2003; Spelke &Kinzler,
2007) that some human cognitive capacities are innate and
domain-specic, including core knowledge of objects, actions,
space, and number. Such a thesis is extremely relevant to SCD,
as researchers can begin to ask what social cognitive abilities
might be early emerging and domain-specic. There is emerging
work with infants and toddlers suggesting the possibility that
very young children might have core knowledge of morality as
evidenced by what looks like early concepts of moral goodness
and badness. The early evidence includes infants and toddlers
attributions of goodness and badness to helpful agents versus
harmful ones, their preference to accept a toy from a safe adult
versus a harmful one, and their close visual attention to harmful
agents over helpful ones (Hamlin, Wynn, & Bloom, 2007; Nu-
rock, Jacob, Margules, & Dupoux, 2008). If these ndings
continue to hold and are supported by additional ndings with
even younger infants, they might pose the idea of innate or early-
emerging social cognitive mechanisms and processes that are in
place even before the antecedents traditionally studied by social
developmentalists.
Finally, although the theory-of-mind research program within
cognitive development has, in our opinion, come close to
meeting the four goals outlined above, we believe more can be
done to meet these goals. For example, research has specied
the social cognitive representations associated with different
aspects of theory of mind (Goal 1), showing, for example, that
autism causes a decit in the shared-attention mechanism (i.e.,
the mechanism that represents the fact that the self and another
person are attending to the same stimulus) and that this has
downstream social consequences for such things as how people
with autism interact with others (Goals 2 and 3; see Baron-Co-
hen, 2001, for a review). In addition, researchers have demon-
strated that even after training autistic children on mental state
understanding, children with autismstill fail other tasks, such as
conversational ability and the use of mental state terms in
speech, which are thought to be downstream consequences of
theory-of-mind failures (Hadwin, Baron-Cohen, Howlin, &Hill,
1997). Although there is much good empirical research and
theorizingfor example, asking at what age children begin to
demonstrate theory of mind (a controversy still brewing, see
Leslie, 2005; Onishi & Baillergeon, 2005; Ruffman & Perner,
2005; Wellman, Cross, & Watson, 2001) or what mechanism
might underlie theory of mind (Gallese & Goldman, 1998; Go-
pnik & Wellman, 1992; Saxe, 2005)less research has been
done on the input or experiences that foster theory of mind or on
the impact of individual differences. For example, how might
earlier or later theory-of-mind development affect subsequent
social outcomes within the normal range? Thus, additional work
could examine what factors besides autism spectrum disorders
predict early or late theory-of-mind development, how manip-
ulations of theory of mind processes (e.g., teaching an aspect of
theory of mind and monitoring its consequences) might
impact individuals social functioning, and how theory of mind
is involved in social functioning outside the laboratory
environment.
SCD not only involves building bridges between social and
cognitive development, but it also allows researchers interested
in the development of social representations and processes to
nd connections with other areas of psychology. For example,
SCDresearchers could quite easily connect with current work in
adult social cognition; they could ask about the development of
processes and mental representations that are already well
documented in adults, or they could ask how early developing
social cognitive representations might change or remain stable
into adulthood. There is some research on attitudes that is al-
ready beginning to make these links (Dunham, Baron, &Banaji,
2006; Olson, Banaji, Dweck, & Spelke, 2006; Rutland, Came-
ron, Milne, & McGeorge, 2005). In addition, some researchers
studying judgment and decision-making are beginning to build
theoretical and empirical connections with SCD research (e.g.,
Epley, Morewedge, & Keysar, 2004). For example, Royzman,
Cassidy, and Baron (2003) argue that common judgment and
decision-making curse of knowledge biases
2
are building on
the same types of perspective-taking problems we see in young
childrens developing theory of mind (similar arguments have
been made by Susan Birch and colleagues; e.g., Birch &
Bernstein, 2007). Other connections can readily be made with
work on representations of self that contribute to identity and
self-esteem, representations of social norms, or representations
of others that contribute to interpersonal or intergroup attitudes
and behaviors.
In addition, after documenting the mental representations and
mental processes that affect behavior, researchers can begin to
use additional techniques, such as neuroscience techniques, to
examine these representations and processes. This eld is just
beginning to bloom, as evidenced by work studying theory-of-
mind development using functional magnetic resonance imag-
ing in children and adults (Kobayashi, Glover, & Temple, 2007;
Saxe, 2006; Saxe, Carey, & Kanwisher, 2004) and by work ex-
amining emotion understanding in children with and without
autism (Dapretto et al., 2006). In the past, it would have been
difcult to connect social development work with emerging
neuroscience work because the processes involved were not
specied in a manner that is amenable to neuroscientic as-
2
The phrase the curse of knowledge refers to a set of situations in which
people have knowledge that leads them to make inaccurate evaluations. For
example, the false consensus effect refers to a bias in which people tend to
believe that their opinion on an issue is more common than it actually is, and
the hindsight bias involves situations in which people experience events and
then believe that those events were more predictable or inevitable than they
actually were (what can be thought of as the I knew it all along effect).
Volume 3Number 3 199
Kristina R. Olson and Carol S. Dweck
sessment. With advances in the measurement of mental repre-
sentations and processes, this bridge between SCD and neu-
roscience can more readily be made.
In summary, we have called attention to the promising op-
portunities awaiting us in the eld of SCD. We have proposed a
series of goals for this approach, provided examples of current
work in this eld, and suggested some areas that are prime for
the introduction of social cognitive developmental research.
Most important, we look forward to the many new research
questions that will inevitably arise fromthis eld as it grows and
matures.
AcknowledgmentsThe authors wish to thank Mahzarin
Banaji, Lauren Hay, Allison Master, Diane Ruble, Elizabeth
Spelke, Kali Trzesniewski, Davie Yoon, and members of Har-
vards Social Cognitive Development Research Workshop for
comments on earlier drafts of this article and the Beinecke
Fellowship and National Science Foundation for nancial sup-
port (Graduate Research Fellowship to Kristina R. Olson and
National Science Foundation Grant # BCS-02-1725 to Carol S.
Dweck).
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