effectively plan, monitor, and regulate personal be-
havior.
Developmental improvement in abstract and hy-
pothetical thinking enables children to begin to think
in terms of general personality traits and characteris-
tics as well as environmental factors when explaining
actions. Hypothetical reasoners are able to go beyond
concrete reality and consider how social situations
and institutions ideally should be. A decline in ego-
centrism is a fourth theme identified by Flavell. Ego-
centrism is a failure to accommodate or adjust a
cognitive structure to fit new information; the experi-
ence or information is distorted to fit an existing
structure. Assume a preschool child is facing you and
you raise your left hand. If asked which hand you
raised, the child would say, ‘‘your right.’’ Preschool
children are able to mentally internalize and repre-
sent the relevant information—assimilate it to a cog-
nitive schema—but they remain bound quite closely
to their own perceptual perspective. Correctly an-
swering the question, however, requires a child to
‘‘mentally rotate’’ the representation 180 degrees.
More to the point, the relational nature of many so-
cial concepts requires children to mentally take dif-
ferent standpoints. The number of sisters in a family
depends on whose point of view is taken: If Tommy
has two sisters, Nicole and Kelly, how many sisters
does Kelly have? Egocentric children have difficulty
shifting their thinking from the perspective of
Tommy (two) and that of Kelly (one).
David Elkind noted in a 1980 article that egocen-
trism may take different forms during development.
Adolescents, for instance, may be tied to their own
conceptual perspective. They can think about the
thoughts of others as well as their own (metacogni-
tion). They may mistakenly assume, however, that
others are thinking about the same ideas and con-
cepts as they themselves are. Technically speaking,
they are egocentric in that they assimilate the
thoughts of others to their own cognitive structures.
Imagine two teenagers preoccupied with their own
feelings and anxieties. Even though they may be talk-
ing past each other in a social exchange, each may
infer that the other has the same understanding as
her own. Elkind explains that adolescents’ egocentric
thoughts about the thinking of others constitute an
imaginary audience that adolescents strategically play
to and become self-conscious about: Being self-
constructed, it ‘‘knows’’ every blemish and shortcom-
ing the adolescent frets about.
These themes provide a general summary of the
major aspects of social-cognitive development. It
should be mentioned that late-twentieth-century neo-
Piagetian researchers, such as Robbie Case, suggested
that the process may be more continuous and com-
plex, with information-processing factors—such as
cognitive resources, memory functions, and automati-
zation of strategies—playing an influential role.Reasoning within Different Social
Domains
Social reasoning is influenced by the particular
social activity, institution, interpersonal problem, or
group being thought about. Research, however, has
demonstrated developmental consistencies in social-
cognition across various social topics and domains.
Representative examples of three lines of research
follow: perceptions of others, moral reasoning, and
thinking about political issues.Perceptions of Others
How people conceptualize and understand oth-
ers is a primary consideration in social reasoning.
William Livesley and Dennis Bromley asked children
of different ages to describe familiar people. The
youngest children offered behavioristic, egocentric
accounts, highlighting physical features (e.g., tall,
wears glasses) and stereotypical qualities (e.g., nice,
mean). Older children were more likely to go beyond
external, surface features and use more inner psycho-
logical qualities (i.e., traits, abilities, interests). By ad-
olescence, attempts to explain rather than simply
describe other people were offered. Adolescents went
beyond categorical assertions and attempted to justify
and qualify their claims about others. People were
seen not only as possessing unique blends of traits but
also as being contradictory (e.g., happy people can
have dark moods).Moral Reasoning
According to Lawrence Kohlberg, reasoning
about moral situations and dilemmas also proceeds
along the developmental progression described
above. Children of different ages were given a series
of moral dilemmas designed to determine how they
construed, understood, and attempted to resolve
moral conflicts. (For instance, after exhausting all
legal possibilities, should the husband of a dying wife
steal an excessively expensive drug that would cure
her?) The youngest children focused on external fac-
tors such as the presence or absence of punishment
and made judgments on an egocentric, self-centered
basis: How will he benefit or suffer in the here and
now? (‘‘He should steal it, it’s his wife; he needs her.’’)
Older children began to internalize and represent
moral rules, values, and standards. These children,
however, conformed to the conventions in a rigid, in-
flexible, absolutist manner: It is a question of duty or
obedience to the rules of the social order. (‘‘He has
to obey the law!’’) Kohlberg found that some adoles-
cents, by no means all, displayed a post-conventionalSOCIAL COGNITION 375