Introduction

When you see the two terms “social” and “cognition” together, you can probably figure out what the topic of this chapter means. Also, since this text is oriented around a sociocultural perspective, by this time, I am sure that you may have a hard time even thinking about cognition — or thinking — outside of a social context.

So that would be correct, but the term social cognition is actually a technical term meant to signify some pretty specific ideas in children’s thinking. Instead of it being “thinking in a social context,” as we have been discussing all along, it is “the intersection between social understanding and thinking.”

It will take more than a single phrase to explain it, though, and you will come to understand social cognition better as we go through some of the major categories of thinking it involves.

As an overview, social cognition encompasses:

• The mind: we all have one and can think
• Perspective-taking: different people can have different thoughts
• Metacognitive awareness: being aware of mental processes such as those in the chapters of this book (i.e. attention, memory, problem-solving, etc.)

Social cognition relates somewhat to Piaget’s idea of egocentrism, which occurs in his sensorimotor stage. So, while we have not gone into detail about his stages, this idea of egocentrism is helpful here because, in some ways, it is the polar opposite of social cognition!

When a young child is unable to see or imagine others’ perspectives, that child is in the egocentric stage. This is not a value judgment — it does not mean the child is selfish or egotistical. Instead, it means that the child can only view the world from their own standpoint, simply because they have not yet even defined the parameters of their and others’ thoughts and intentions. They act according to their own understanding, and that understanding does not extend to others in complex ways until later in childhood.

When Piaget identified social cognition in his work, he talked about young children past the egocentric stage; typically, five-year-old  children are thought to “have developed social cognition.” But we know from other scholarly work that much younger children exhibit different types of thinking about others’ perspectives and using others as a means of development — even if they do not engage in a complex type of perspective-taking that many Western researchers have tested in laboratories.

In fact, social cognition begins when infants start to look to adults as a gauge of how to interpret the world. So, we begin our consideration of social cognition with the many ways in which thinking and understanding are related in specific ways to social understanding.

In this chapter, we will address social cognition in infancy and revisit some ideas about attention from Chapter 3. Then, we will look at other ways social cognition becomes more elaborate and internalized as children get older.

As we’ve done in previous chapters, we will draw from cognitive development textbooks but also broaden our lens to think about social cognition beyond the laboratory and Western cultural experiences.

Before we consider what types of social cognition occur in infancy and childhood, let’s take some time to reflect on our own professional experiences and observations (or personal experiences, if you are not in an education-related field).