ABSTRACT
Introduction: social interaction and cognitive development In his account of the development of moral judgment Piaget (1932) introduced a fundamental distinction between different types of social relationship, or more specifi cally he attributed different types of psychosocial processes to different forms of social relationship. Where there is constraint because one participant holds more power than the other the relationship is asymmetrical, and, importantly, the knowledge which can be acquired by the dominated participant takes on a fi xed and infl exible form. Piaget refers to this process as one of social transmission, and he refers to the way in which the elders of a tribe initiate younger members into the patterns of beliefs and practices of the group. Similarly where adults exercise a dominating infl uence over the growing child, it is through social transmission that children can acquire knowledge. By contrast, in cooperative relations, power is more evenly distributed between participants so that a more symmetrical relationship emerges. Under these conditions authentic forms of intellectual exchange become possible because the partners have the freedom to project their own individual thoughts, consider the positions of others, and defend their own independent points of view. In such circumstances, where children’s thinking is not limited by a dominant infl uence, the conditions exist for the emergence of constructive solutions to problems, or what Piaget refers to as the reconstruction of knowledge rather than social transmission. Here the knowledge which emerges is open, fl exible, and regulated by the logic of argument rather than being determined by an external authority. In short, cooperative relations provide the arena for the emergence of operations, which for Piaget requires the absence of any constraining infl uence, and is most often illustrated by the relations which form between peers.
