Bridging the Areas of Social Psychology and Social Developmental Psychology

There is a long list of shared topical and theoretical concerns across the fields of social psychology and social developmental psychology. However, in describing points of overlap, I have chosen to organize my comments around the concept of social domains. Within this framework, social interaction is understood as involving mechanisms specific to the distinctive domains of social life (e.g., coalitional groups, parental care, hierarchical power), rather than as involving domain-general processes. Such mechanisms are understood as facilitating the solution of problems that humans have repeatedly faced across their evolutionary history (Cosmides & Tooby, 1992; Hirschfeld & Gelman, 1994).