ABSTRACT
With the exception of Kohlberg’s work on moral development (Kohlberg, 1958), investigations of children’s cognition in the 1950s and 1960s tended to follow Piaget’s lead, and to focus primarily on children’s understanding of logic, mathematics, and the physical world. Beginning with Flavell’s (1968) study of children’s role-taking, however, this onesided emphasis began to change, and attention began to focus on children’s understanding of their social world as well. During the late 1970s and early 1980s, there was a virtual explosion of work on this topic. Piagetian investigators probed such diverse topics as children’s understanding of social institutions (Furth, 1980), social conventions (Turiel, 1978), friendships (Damon, 1977; Selman, 1980), and feelings (Chandler & Boyes, 1982), while other investigators explored such topics as children’s understanding of other people’s spatial perspectives (Flavell, 1977), emotional states (Borke, 1971), and referential communication (Glucksberg, Krauss, & Higgins, 1975). In the past few years, two further topics have been investigated in some detail: children’s understanding of other people’s minds (Astington, Olson, & Harris, 1989), and their understanding of their own self-processes (Higgins, 1991; Kopp & Brownell, 1991).
